The King of Plagues

fully involved. That last blast was probably the heating oil in the subbasement. But those others …”

“What’s with the black smoke?”

He shook his head. “Mystery to me, mate. Smells like a rubber fire, don’t it? The fire investigators are going to have to sort that out, because that’s definitely oil smoke. Makes no sense.”

“How many people got out?” I demanded, looking around for someone who had been in there, someone I could ask questions of. If this was a terrorist attack, someone had to have seen something, and the sooner we could get a jump on it the better.

“Out?” The young firefighter’s bleak eyes shifted away to the fire, and then down. “No one got out that I heard of. Place went up too fast.” He spit saliva that was clouded with black grit onto the debris-littered pavement. “At least it was quick.”

I hoped he was right about the last part … but he didn’t sound all that convincing.

A line of police officers worked their way between the apparatuses, pushing spectators back across the street. The rain slackened to a drizzle and news crews crept from their vans to do stand-ups. I recognized the young woman nearest to me. Kimiko Kajikawa, from the BBC. I’d seen her read the news every night at six. This was the first time I’d ever seen her without her legendary unflappable cool. She looked like she’d been crying, and I imagine that it was the numbers that were hitting her. If the firefighter was right and the bombs had caught everyone unawares, then we could be looking at something like thirty-two hundred dead in a single moment. Maybe more. Nearly as many as had died in the fall of the Towers. If all those beds were full, then it could be even worse.

I felt tears burning in the corners of my own eyes.

All those lives. All those people.

And all of those families. How many of them were watching Kajikawa right now? Jesus Christ.

Since signing on with the Department of Military Sciences I’ve seen far more than my fair share of death, but nothing on this scale. And even though the flames and smoke hid all of the bodies, I could feel the death. It was like a huge dark hand had reached inside me and was squeezing my heart. I turned to the people around me and saw expressions on their faces ranging from confusion, to disbelief, to shocked awareness. Each was processing the enormity of this at the speed their mind would allow. I could almost see how this was gouging wounds into the collective psyche of everyone here, and anyone who was watching a news feed. Each of them—each of us—would be marked by this forever. The moment had that kind of grotesque grandeur.

I edged closer to hear Kajikawa.

“ … we’ll be following this story as it unfolds,” she said. Her voice was steady, but the hand holding the mike trembled. “So far no one has stepped forward to take responsibility for the bombing at this landmark teaching hospital. Established in 1740, the facility provides district general hospital services for the City and Tower Hamlets and is also the base for the HEMS helicopter ambulance service. Hospital authorities say that nearly all of the twelve hundred beds were occupied as of yesterday.”

There was a commotion to my right and I turned to see a tall, harried-looking man in a black uniform fighting his way through a sea of TV and news service microphones.

“Fire Commissioner Allen Dexter is on the scene,” said Kajikawa as she hustled over to join the throng around the man.

“Commissioner Dexter,” shouted a Reuters reporter, “do we know how many casualties yet?”

Dexter’s lip curled in irritation at the typical callousness of the question. It was clear from the different shapes his mouth took before he answered that the words he said were not the first ones on his tongue: “Not at this time.”

“Can you speculate for us?” the reporter persisted.

The commissioner slowly faced the hospital, which was an inferno from foundation to rooftops. When he turned back, his pale eyes were bleak. “We have not yet identified anyone who was in the building at the time of the blasts and who since escaped.”

The reporters were too jaded to be stunned by this. They screamed questions at him, but Dexter turned away as a wave of police officers surged forward and cut him out of the pack.

“There you have it,” Kajikawa said, turning back to face the camera. “This is quickly becoming the worst hospital disaster in British history. And if this is a terrorist attack, then it could well be the worst ever.” She said it with what almost sounded like pride. Somewhere between her earlier tears and now she’d made a huge internal shift from “human being” to “reporter.” Maybe the cameraman had said something to her, or maybe she did a mental review of reporters whose careers had been made by great human suffering. Like Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite breaking the story of JFK’s assassination, Wolf Blitzer with the first Gulf War in Kuwait, and Anderson Cooper during Hurricane Katrina. Or maybe being in the thick of the throng of reporters reminded her of the most sacred rule of journalism: “If it bleeds, it leads.”

I thought it was vulgar.

Kajikawa was still working it. “We do not yet have word about how many of the hospital’s eight thousand staff members were on duty today, but as the building continues to burn out of control, hopes for a happy outcome are likewise going up in smoke.”

Jesus.

Chapter Three

The Royal London Hospital

Whitechapel, London

December 17, 10:46 A.M. GMT

I found a relatively quiet spot in a vee formed by two fire trucks parked at right angles and called Church. I told him what it was like at the scene, and remarked on the dense oil smoke that was turning the entire sky black.

“Odd,” he said. “Perhaps it is intended as a symbolic touch. A statement.”

“On what? The Mideast oil wars?”

“Let’s add that to our list of questions.”

“What do we know about this attack?” I asked.

“Too little. Benson Childe, my opposite number in Barrier, called to ask if we’d heard anything from our networks. We haven’t. Nothing credible, anyway. Half a dozen fringe groups have issued statements claiming responsibility, but they are the ones who do that for everything. I’ve had our people trolling through FBI, CIA, and Senate subcommittee records, reports to the President, speculation from our own analysts. So far we have a lot of enemies and there is no shortage of threats against us and our allies, but nothing that specifically targets this location or date. No one has identified a specific political or religious motivation for this, so the Brits are holding off on calling this a terrorist attack.”

“From where I’m standing it doesn’t look like anything else. I worked a lot of fires when I was a cop, Boss, and this isn’t bad wiring or someone smoking in bed. There’s going to be more collateral damage than we had at Ground Zero. Maybe a higher body count, God help us.”

“Yes. Which means that the whole world is going to be looking at this, and that’s why the Brits are taking their time in putting a label on it. They don’t want to kick off a rash of hate crimes. For the moment the verbiage is ‘national tragedy.’”

“Anything from Al-Qaeda?”

“Not so far, but expect something. If this isn’t their play, then they’ll reach out to praise whoever did it.”

“What about our other sparring partners? The Cabal? The Kings?”

“There’s not enough of the Cabal left to orchestrate this. As for the Seven Kings … that may be more