“Back and down!”
He looked down at the dying man and growled low and evil … and then moved three steps away and sat.
There were shouts around us and I turned, sweeping the Beretta’s barrel around. Another pair of cops and people in ordinary clothes. Whistles and yells.
I bellowed, “
I didn’t know what else to say. Were these constables also assassins for the Kings? If so, the risk to innocent bystanders was about to jump off the scale.
The two cops drew their batons and closed on me in a nice flanking approach, yelling at me, ordering me to lay down my weapon. One of them was shouting into his shoulder mike.
Balls.
I pointed my gun at the closest of them.
“Freeze!” I barked. The sharp tone of voice and the implacable presence of the gun slowed them from a run to a walk and then to frozen immobility.
To Ghost I snapped, “Set!” The command to get ready for a nonlethal takedown. Nonlethal as long as the guy didn’t injure the dog, and then all bets were off.
“Freeze!” I yelled again. “These men are
“That’s Danny French!” snapped one of the cops, pointing to the man whose throat I’d crushed. “You murdering bastard!”
Crap. Okay, they
The man I scalded moaned and sagged back. Dead or unconscious, I couldn’t tell.
Ghost edged toward me to protect my flank. I could tell that the officers were going to try it. Gun and dog notwithstanding. For all they knew I was a mad cop killer.
Benson Childe came running out of the building with a phalanx of armed Barrier personnel at his heels. I saw Deirdre MacDonal and Detective Chief Inspector Martin Aylrod following behind. Because they wore uniforms the street cops looked at them in confusion. The crowd was even more confused because guns were being pointed at cops and no one was pointing a gun at the crazy Yank with the dog.
Childe’s men pushed the cops against the wall and frisked them. I didn’t think they were involved—and was pretty sure they weren’t—but I was in no mood to take stupid risks. I lowered my weapon and eased the hammer down. Childe didn’t ask me to surrender it.
“Sit and watch,” I said to Ghost, and he did just that. The wolf was still there behind his eyes. I could feel the killer behind my own.
Childe leaned close to me. “For God’s sake, Ledger, I
“Seven Kings,” I said.
Chapter Fourteen
Over the Atlantic, Flight 7988
December 17, 2:42 P.M. GMT
Dr. Rudy Sanchez sat in his first-class seat and fumed. He disliked air travel at the best of times and definitely didn’t want to be in the air when terrorist bombs were going off anywhere in the world. In the days following the attack on the World Trade Center, Sanchez had been one of a team of doctors who had descended on Ground Zero to help in any way they could. As a psychiatrist, Rudy saw firsthand the initial waves of post-event trauma that were the result of the attack. He saw the wound inflicted on the hearts, minds, and souls of the people working the site. The haunted eyes of police and firefighters who spent hours picking through the rubble to locate pieces of people who had been their friends or colleagues. The dreadful loss of confidence in the world in the eyes of the thousands of people who stood constant vigil at the fringes of the disaster. The strange blend of relief and guilt in the eyes of the survivors.
During the flight he’d listened to the constant buzz of frantic discussion aboard the United Airlines jet. Since 9/11, terrorism was part of everyday language. It had become so commonplace that jokes were made about terrorists. Books and movies had been made about it. And the thought that it was already that deeply enmeshed with ordinary life chilled Rudy to the bone.
And now he had the Nicodemus file and everything about this matter was unnerving. The file was strangely incomplete. There should have been hundreds of pages of it. Evaluations, transcripts, after-session notes, and a detailed record of the man’s arrest, trial, and incarceration. Instead there were a few dozen pages of very general notes that might apply to any prisoner. Commonplace stuff. Worthless except for the very last set of handwritten notes taken a few hours ago by the prison psychiatrist, Dr. Stankevi
ius, and even they were cryptic. References to a “goddess” but without context to identify which goddess.
The overall thrust of Nicodemus’s words had tended toward Judeo-Christian references, particularly with his reference to Dumas and Gesmas. They were variations on the spellings of Dismas and Gestas, the names of the two criminals crucified on either side of Jesus. But since those names were not in the standard Bible but in the highly apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, it seemed likely they were simply part of the overall religious delusion the prisoner had built up around himself. None of it tied back to either 9/11 or the London, at least as far as Rudy could determine. There was nothing else of substance in Stankevi
ius’s notes.
Rudy was alone in first class. Since the bomb went off there had been a flood of seat cancellations. He used his secure access to open a video Web chat with Bug via satellite. A small box opened up, showing the face of the head of the DMS computer lab. Although his name was Jerome Taylor, even his own family called him Bug. He had been a computer hacker as a kid and came onto Mr. Church’s radar when he tried to hack Homeland, believing that if he had the right access he could locate Osama bin Laden. Maj. Grace Courtland and Sgt. Gus Dietrich showed up at Taylor’s door the following morning. He was offered a deal: work for the DMS or go to jail. When he accepted and was told about MindReader, he fell deeply and irrevocably in love.
“Hey, Doc!” he said brightly. The world could be in flames and Bug would still be jovial. Rudy wondered how Bug’s mood would change if the Internet crashed.
“Bug,” he said, “are you sure you sent me all of Nicodemus’s records?”
“Yeah.”
“Could you have missed something?”
“Could Oprah fit into Beyonce’s bikini?” He snorted and said, “Either they have a lot of his stuff stored on paper records or …”
“Or what?”
“Or someone’s removed it.”
“Can’t MindReader tell if someone has been into the computer files? Doesn’t it leave a handprint?”
“Footprint, and yes. Except there’s no footprint here. From a computer standpoint nothing appears to be missing, and I’ve gone into the Willow Grove and Philadelphia PD databases, too. There’s just nothing else there. We can’t even verify his first name. If he has one.”
“Hijo de puta.”
“The fact that all of this is missing is deep magic. I’m getting a Woodrow just thinking about how sexy this is, ’cause we’re not talking about some pissant tapeworm. Someone’s punked the system just like MindReader. And they’ve absconded with the treeware and—”
“‘Treeware’?”
“Paper. Actual we’re-so-last-century printed documents. Somone in meatspace actually swiped the physical records as well. That’s stuff
