The King of Plagues

useful to try and never take anything personal. You’re above that shit now; you live in a Big Picture world now, Sebastian. It takes some adjustment to think of yourself in those terms.”

“As a king?”

The American nodded.

“It may take some getting used to,” Gault murmured, “but I expect I’m going to like it.”

“Oh, you will.”

They walked on, pausing as a fat peacock strutted across their path, taking his time and pretending not to notice the two tall men.

“Faggot bird,” the American muttered. “Eris loves them. I’d like to turn my dogs on ’em. That’d be wicked fun.”

“Hedge funds,” Gault prompted.

“Well, yeah, hedge funds. When a lot of businesses tanked, we cleaned up buying properties for pennies on the dollar, and did better buying billions in beaten-down commercial mortgage-backed securities. For a while the fluctuations in the bond market pretty much gave us a license to print money.”

“What if the market doesn’t recover?”

“We won’t be aboard any ship that’s actually sinking, and if we have to take a loss here and there to maintain respectable credibility, then we’re taking a chunk of the back end. The stuff our accounting department does is science fiction.”

“How do you keep yourself safe from the IRS and the FBI?”

The King of Fear chuckled. “Most people run from the feds because they know you can’t fight ’em and you can’t beat ’em in court. We don’t have that problem.”

“Why not?”

“This is what I mean by ‘Big Picture,’ Sebastian. Small minds try to figure out how to dodge the bullet the system shoots at them. Big minds try to fight the system by wrapping themselves in layers of legality.”

“And that’s what you do?”

“No. We’re Big Picture, but we’re Big Picture as viewed by Kings. What we do is plan ahead. Years and years ahead. Anyone involved in the actual crisis is going to get looked at very closely, right? What we do is plan far in advance and then we seed people into the system. We’re everywhere, Sebastian. We’re in all levels of government, all corners of Wall Street and other national financial districts. We’re in Congress and the White House. We’re deeply positioned in the IRS, FBI, SEC, EPA, FTC, … and everywhere else. We have significant players in the Republican and Democratic parties. And we have people peppered through the press. We’re on both sides of every argument, every congressional bill, every peace accord, every global summit. Chaos isn’t about taking sides. Kingship is about ruling all of it.”

They stopped by the cliff and looked out over the wind-troubled waters of the St. Lawrence River.

“Who does your dirty work? Hits and bombings and such?”

“We recruit from existing extremist cells. We fund them and protect them, and then we tap them to be our street troops. We call them the Chosen, and they’re sold different versions of a bill of goods about rewards in heaven. Or whatever else they’d sell their souls for. Money, pussy, whatever works. You’d be surprised how many of these soldiers of God will sell their own mothers for a few hundred K and a California blonde with plastic tits. Kind of ruins your faith in suicidal fundamentalism.”

Gault laughed and the American blew smoke rings at the moon.

“Couple, three years ago,” continued the American, “my man Santoro came up with an idea to build a more elite combat team. The Kingsmen.”

“Catchy.”

“It inspires a sense of pride and entitlement. I put Santoro in touch with some ex-Delta and SEAL guys and they built a training program that is world-class and wicked hard. Couple of guys out of every group die or get crippled. We let the other cadets shoot the cripples. Sounds harsh, I know, but it also makes them hard as fucking nails. Real fire eaters.”

“How are these Kingsmen used?”

“Black ops, wet works. That sort of thing. We had one tussle with the DMS. Our team lost, but it was an overwhelming-odds situation, and the DMS thought they were facing some rogue cell of ultrajihadists.”

“The DMS teams are the toughest I’ve ever seen,” Gault warned.

“Yeah, well … we’ll get a chance to test that.”

“These Kingsmen … what’s their incentive?”

“Numbered accounts in the low seven figures. Plus they watchdog each other, and that keeps them all straight. Lots of trust between them. Real pride. No way they’d screw each other over. They have a real sense of pride, and they are totally devoted to Mom. Eris has built her mystique to the point that some of these guys really think she is a goddess. She’s convinced them that she is a direct descendant of Sargon the Great of Akkad, so the Kingsmen believe they can trace their warrior lineage to the first emperor in human history. That’s quite a legacy. Santoro is their general, role model, and chief badass.”

“He seems like a capable chap.”

“He’s a fucking nut bag. Don’t get me wrong, I love the guy like a son, but he is eight beers short of a six- pack. Santoro absolutely believes Mom’s a goddess. That’s not a joke. Guy gets a spiritual boner every time her name is mentioned, and once—just once—one of the Kingsmen saw Eris walk by and didn’t yet know who she was, so he made a crack about wanting to tap that, and Santoro was right there. Jesus fucking Christ, you never saw anything so fast and nasty. Santoro told the guy to pull his knife, and mind you, this guy was ex–Force Recon and he was a badass mamba-jamba and twice Santoro’s size. But my boy cut him four kinds of bad: long, deep, wide, and often. He humiliated him and carved pieces off the guy and then did things to him while he was down and dying that I don’t like to think about. Had the guy begging for forgiveness from the Goddess with half a tongue and his guts in his lap. Talk about an object lesson. There had to be forty, fifty of the Kingsmen—full team members and cadets— watching that. By the time he was done, Santoro was painted red from head to toe and he looked like some kind of demon. The other Kingsmen knelt—actually fucking knelt—in front of him, and then Santoro led them in a prayer to the Goddess. That, my friend, is how legends are made.”

Gault stared at the American. “Bloody hell.”

The King of Fear chuckled. “Life’s weird for us, but you get used to it.”

They began walking again.

A little while later Gault said, “If you disapprove of Eris’s plan are you outside of it? Or do all the Kings work together on everything?”

The American puffed his cigar before answering, “It’s one for all and all for one. For the most part. I have a couple of my own gigs running, but this thing—what we’re calling the Ten Plagues Initiative—is what everyone else wants to do, so I’m doing my part. But there are threads that could lead back to me. Granted, it would take some pretty damn creative logic jumps to connect the dots, but even so that’s more of a trail than I like to leave. The DMS are not as stupid as my darling mother thinks.” He cut Gault a look. “You know that firsthand.”

Gault touched the bandages. “Yes. But … tell me, is this the first time the other Kings voted against you?”

The American smiled. “Yeah. Kind of caught me off-guard, too.”

“Is this going to be a problem?”

“Nah,” said the American. “I got it handled.”

TOYS TOOK MICROSIPS from a glass of wine as he trailed along behind Gault and the American. Neither man had so far bothered to direct a single comment to him. Nor did they lower their voices to prevent him from hearing the conversation. He supposed that it was all meant to be a sign of trust, an unspoken acknowledgment that he was privy to all of their secrets.

But it didn’t feel that way to Toys.

He sipped his wine and digested everything he heard, and kept his thoughts to himself. In the darkened woods the peacocks screamed like damned souls.