The King of Plagues

Part One

Seven Kings

Lycurgus, Numa, Moses, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, all these great rogues, all these great thought-tyrants, knew how to associate the divinities they fabricated with their own boundless ambition.

—DONATIEN-ALPHONSE-FRANCOIS, MARQUIS DE SADE

Chapter One

Park Place Riverbank Hotel

London, England

December 17, 9:28 A.M. GMT

“Are you ready to come back to work?” asked Mr. Church.

He didn’t say hello, didn’t ask how I’d been. He got right to it.

“Haven’t decided yet,” I said.

“Decide now,” said Mr. Church.

“That bad?”

“Worse. Turn on the TV.”

I picked up the remote, hit the button. I didn’t need to ask which channel. It was on every channel.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m in.”

Chapter Two

The Royal London Hospital

Whitechapel, London

December 17, 10:09 A.M. GMT

I stood in the cold December rain and watched thousands of people die.

The Hospital was fully involved by the time I got there, flames reaching out of each window to claw at the sky. Great columns of smoke towered above the masses of people who stood shoulder to shoulder with me as dozens of hoses hammered the walls. The smoke was strangely dense, like fumes from a refinery fire or burning tires, and there was a petroleum stink in the air.

“Back! Back!” cried a firefighter, and I turned to see that there were too many people and too few police … and we were all too close. I could feel the heat on my face even though I was in the middle of the street. “Get the hell back!”

I looked at the firefighter. He was running toward us, waving us back with both hands. Then I looked up at the building and knew at once that he wasn’t doing crowd control. He was shouting a warning. The building was starting to collapse. I turned to run, but behind me was a tight-packed sea of people. They were staring in numb shock as the wall slowly leaned out toward them. Maybe they didn’t see it, or didn’t understand what was happening. Maybe the very fact of a spectacle this vast had hypnotized them, but they stood their ground, eyes and mouths open. I grabbed a man in a business suit and shook him and then slammed him backward.

“Move!” I screamed.

The crowd snarled at me. Ah, people. No sense of self-preservation in the face of disaster, but give them a chance and they’ll bark like cross dogs.

Fuck it.

The firefighter was getting closer, louder, but the roar of the fire was louder still. Then something deep inside the building exploded. A heavy whuf! made the whole front of the building bulge outward in our direction.

That did it.

Suddenly the whole crowd was backpedaling and stumbling and finally turning to run as the entire facade of the Royal London Hospital bowed slowly outward and fell, the ancient timbers and brick defeated by the inferno heat. Hundreds of tons of burning brick slammed onto the pavement. A gigantic fireball flew at us across Whitechapel Road, chasing us as we dove behind the fire trucks and ambulances and police cars. People screamed as cinders landed on their skin. Splinters and chips of broken brick battered the crowd like grapeshot. The firefighter was struck between the shoulder blades by a burning chunk of stone the size of a football. He pitched forward and slid all the way to the curb, his helmet flying off and his hair immediately beginning to smoke. The falling rain hissed as it struck his back and head, but it wasn’t strong enough to douse the fire.

I leaped the small wrought-iron fence and pelted in his direction as embers fell like meteorites all around me. I whipped off my anorak and slapped it down over him, swatting out the fire. The smoke was thick and oily and filled with dust despite the rain. I yanked my sweater up over my nose and mouth, grabbed the fallen fireman under the armpits, hauled him to his feet, and then staggered out of the smoke with him. A second firefighter saw us and ran to help.

“He’s alive,” I said as I lowered the first fireman to the ground.

I backed off as a team of paramedics appeared out of the crowd. The second firefighter followed me.

“Is that everyone?” he yelled.

“I don’t know!” I bellowed, and turned to head back into the smoke, but he caught my arm.

“Don’t do it, mate. The rest of the wall’s about to come down. Nothing you can do.” He pulled me backward and I stumbled along with him.

He was right. There was a low rumbling sound and more of the wall fell, chasing the onlookers even farther back. The firefighter—a young man with a cockney voice and a Jamaican face—shook his head. “Whole bleeding thing’s going to go. Can’t believe I’m watching the London die.”

The London.

A familiar nickname for the hospital. Not the Royal London, not the Hospital. The London, as if that name, that place, stood for the old City itself.

We stood there, watching helplessly as the oldest hospital in England died. There was nothing anyone could do. After I’d gotten Church’s call and turned on the TV, I’d rushed out immediately, caught the first cab, and screamed at the man to get over to Whitechapel. The traffic was so thick that I had run the last six blocks. The press was already calling it a terrorist bombing. If that was true, then it was the worst in British history.

The firefighter shook his head. “Look at it. Survived the Blitz, survived everything, and now this. Poof. Gone.” He looked at me, his eyes glazed with the enormity of it. “They put a billion pounds into expanding it. Over twelve hundred beds since the renovation, and with this round of flu you know they’d all be filled. More than two thousand staff on-shift. Doctors, nurses, orderlies … I know a lot of them … .”

“What happened?” I asked sharply, hoping to snap him back to the moment.

He wiped soot from his face. “Dunno for sure. They’re saying it was bombs.”

“‘Bombs’? More than one?”

“That’s the report we got. Five or six explosions. Big ones, and almost at once. Then the whole place was