Embalming fluid is highly flammable.
The Snakehead went up like a torch.
It screeched and squealed, slamming itself into walls and floors and debris before it finally stopped screaming.
It hit the floor, facedown. No movement.
Zach stood there, panting, as the sprinklers above finally kicked in. A fire alarm rattled somewhere. The water did nothing against the chemical fire. It kept burning the Snakehead down to a charred lump.
Bell stood up, cradling her hand. Zach realized they were both soaked.
“I think you got him,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said, her voice weirdly calm. “Did he get you?”
Zach shook his head. “Are you sure? No broken skin? No infection?”
Zach carefully pulled up his sleeves, then lifted the cuffs of his pants. Not even a scratch.
“Sorry,” she said. “I had to be sure. What about Candle? Do you think he might have—”
“I don’t know.” He turned to look around the morgue again, and immediately slammed his shin into an open drawer, protruding from a desk.
Zach swore and looked down. He was about to kick the desk. He stopped.
The drawer was almost sloshing, filled with sticky, drying blood. Chunks of raw meat, wrapped in roughly cut strips of cloth.
Zach could see the fabric of the cloth. Where it wasn’t stained with blood, it was marked with a pattern. He recognized it.
EAT ME, it said.
Zach swallowed bile that had climbed to the back of his throat.
Bell couldn’t see from behind him. “What? What is it?”
“I found Candle,” he told her. “Most of him.”
TWENTY-TWO
The cultist believes he can summon the very hounds of hell to his aid; the intelligence agent can overthrow a government, terminate a politician, or call in an air strike. Either way, the Gates of the Underworld are opened.
—Peter Levenda,
Sinister Forces: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft
VIRTUE
, GULF OF ADEN
I
t had been a long night. Cade had been through the ship twice, checking every hiding spot, every blind corner and dead end.
The results were laid out on the deck. Some of them still looked quite human. Others were nothing but scales and teeth.
Cade didn’t know if the virus died when its carrier did. He found a fuel hose near the helipad and began splashing it over the bodies.
He looked at the rows. It took him a nanosecond to count: six hundred ninety-seven. God alone knew how many he’d sent over the side to be ground into chum by the prop.
The black smoke rolled into the sky as the fire burned.
He was still watching when Graves arrived.
A Marine chopper dropped Graves off at the helipad but kept its rotors spinning, ready for a quick takeoff.
Graves carried Cade’s briefcase, the one Zach had packed for him, in one hand.
“We should go,” he said. “I brought your luggage.”
He tried to make it sound lighthearted, but Cade was in no mood to act human right now.
“How did they get here?” Cade asked, as much to himself as to Graves.
“Maybe they came up over the sides. From the water. Hell, maybe that Marine was infected, after all. It was my fault, Cade. I’m sorry. But we do have to leave. There’s going to be an investigation. The ship will probably have to be scuttled. And we have other places to be. This is a dead end.”
Cade said nothing.
Graves snapped his fingers. “You there? Answer me.”
Cade looked at him. Something nagged at him again, demanding his attention through the blood and pain. Something about those words, in that cadence. Years peeled away in seconds.
He turned to stand face-to-face with Graves. “You were right,” he said. “We’ve never met before. But we have spoken on the phone.”
Even behind the sunglasses, Cade could see Graves’s eyes go wide with fear.
It was about time.
Orange, Texas, Near the Louisiana Border, November 24, 1963
G
raves could not keep himself from trembling. Long after he’d commanded his rebellious body to stop, he just kept shaking.
He walked to the door of the cheap motel room, past the office. Nobody saw him. The place was still asleep in the early morning.
He checked the thermometer. It lied. No way it was only sixty degrees. Sweat dribbled down his ribs from his armpits. He felt like he was wrapped in a bag of heavy steam.
He didn’t even have to knock when he reached the room. The door opened. Graves gaped.
“You?” he blurted. He couldn’t help it. One more shock on top of all the others. The director of counterintelligence himself. CODE NAME: LORD. It was a play on his actual name, which every politician in Washington knew and feared. But he was supposed to be in Europe.
The old man laughed, a wheeze like gas escaping a corpse. “Good to know I can still inspire terror. Come in, son.”
Graves was dead. He knew it. He’d failed. He’d clearly punctured some veil of secrecy, because there was no way the old man would be here, not after Dallas, and certainly not if there was any chance Graves could tell anyone about it later.
Graves considered taking off into the night beyond the parking lot, running until he got lost.
“Don’t just stand there,” the old man said. “You’re letting the bugs in.”
The urge to run faded. It was useless. They would find him. But more than that, Graves could not do it. He was trained and conditioned to follow orders. From table manners to Boy Scouts to this. There was no breaking free from what he was.
He entered the room.
Lord sat in the room’s one chair, a bucket of ice and a bottle of whiskey on the table beside him. Two glasses were already poured, beaded with condensation.
The old man picked up his drink. He nodded, and Graves did the same.
The old man sipped. Graves guzzled despite his best efforts.
“You look better already,” the old man said. “Have a seat. We need to talk.”
Graves sat on the bed. The whiskey burned, but didn’t take much of his anxiety away.
Graves couldn’t contain himself any longer. “Sir, the men—all of them, Jesus, all of them, they’re all dead, sir.”
“Of course they are.”
What? Was that part of the plan? Was he expendable? Did they intend for this to happen?
No, it couldn’t be. Graves had done everything right.
The old man offered the bottle again. The glass shook in Graves’s hand, causing fat drops of liquor to spill on the carpet.
Graves’s ears burned with shame. Even after all he’d seen recently, he felt the duty to maintain a stiff upper lip. Chin out, stand up straight, Yale down the spine all the way.
But he gulped the drink anyway. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said.
“Sorry for what?”
Graves opened his mouth, then closed it. “For all of this,” he said. “For the failure of MORDRED.”
AT FIRST, it had been a textbook operation. They’d set it up perfectly. The symbolic King of America, brought down while surveying his people. Their convenient suspect picked up at his rendezvous point by the police.
Graves thought his shooters were safe and clear. Friendly Dallas PD officers escorted them away after the hit, told the press they were “drifters” and let them disappear.
Then things began to go wrong.
While the nation reeled, Air Force One was supposed to be blown out of the sky. Johnson and the grieving widow, taken out in one move. The wreckage would show evidence of a Cuban-made bomb. The Cubans would deny it, of course—because they were innocent—and the Soviets would come to their rescue after the invasion. With a few touches here and there, they were looking at a limited nuclear exchange and troops on the other side of the Iron Curtain within a month.
The Agency would have what it wanted—war with Russia, a war Russia could not possibly win. A great sacrifice, yes, but all for the greater good.
Nothing happened. Air Force One landed safely. LBJ sworn in. An orderly transfer of power.
He went to the warehouse outside Dallas where his fake Cubans were supposed to be waiting.
They were there. In pieces. Something had torn them apart and painted the walls with their remains.
He ran back to his car and drove all night.
He stopped only at pay phones, trying to find the gunmen. They were supposed to be at a series of safe houses, always reachable by phone.
No one picked up until Graves was almost to Orange, the sun beginning to breach the sky at the horizon.
Someone answered, but there was no sound. Not even the sound of breathing.
“Mordred,” Graves said.
Nothing.
“Mordred. This is Morgan. I need your authentication.”
Silence.
“Hello?” In impatience, he’d snapped his fingers, a nervous habit he thought extinguished in training. “Anyone there?”
“I’m coming for you,” the voice on the other end said. It wasn’t overtly threatening. It didn’t even sound angry. But Graves had never heard a voice quite like that. It was perfectly cold, perfectly calm and utterly inhuman.
“Who is this?” Graves asked.
“You’ll see,” the voice said, and in it, Graves heard dead leaves scraping on a gravestone.
The call ended with a click. Graves had been shaking uncontrollably ever since.
LORD GAVE HIM a kind smile.
“You didn’t fail.”
“Sir. With all due respect. The terminal phase of the operation. And my men . . .”
Graves gagged, and nearly brought up the whiskey in his stomach. He managed to swallow. His throat burned. “Sorry,” he said again.
“It’s understandable,” Lord said. “You’re still trying to comprehend what’s happened. I remember the first time I saw him.” A shudder, involuntary and quickly suppressed, shook the old man under his suit.
“Him? You know who did this?”
“Oh, yes. I know him.”
“Sir, what I saw—what happened to the men—there’s no way anything human did that. It looked like some kind of animal.”
“Not an animal, no,” he said. “A predator, but not an animal.”
“I don’t understand.”
The old man sighed. “Before tonight, you thought you knew secrets. One of the few pressed into service, to carry the burdens of what it takes to keep this country safe. The elite.
Don’t
argue with me. Don’t look at me with that false humility. Admit it. You loved the idea of power. Of being privy to the real action in the world while everyone else swallowed lies.”
Graves nodded.
Lord grinned and moved closer. “Well, boy, let me tell you, you have no fucking idea.”
Suddenly Graves was looking into the barrel of a .45, a WWII-vintage Colt Peacemaker.
“Are you sure you want to know the truth?” Lord asked.
Before Graves could say anything, the old man pushed the gun a little closer.
“Think carefully. Do you want to know the real answers? I’m about to bring you inside the knowledge, son. But there is always a choice. Just say the word. I will set you free.”
For a moment, Graves considered it. As if it was a real choice. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to live in a world where the things he’d seen over the past forty-eight hours could happen. Oddly, he thought of his mother. He hadn’t spoken to her since he had taken on his new name and identity. He barely even thought about her anymore, except perhaps at Christmas. But now he wondered, what would she think of what he’d become? Was this what she wanted for him?
For a moment, he thought it might be better to take the bullet.
But that was crazy. He blinked, and the moment was gone.
“I have to know,” he said.
Lord nodded and lowered the gun to the table. “Yes, you do. That’s our gift and our curse. We have to know the secrets. And we have to carry them, ever after. It’s why we chose you, after all.”
“What does this have to do with anything? Who killed my men?”
“A vampire,” the old man said.
Despite everything, Graves almost laughed. But the old man’s face was devoid of humor.
“What do you mean?”
“Every presidential assassination attempt since Lincoln has been carried out in broad daylight. Now you know why.”