The King of Plagues

were there? Would the police even be able to make arrests? Based on what evidence?

You and those you love are only safe as long as we allow it.

Amber Taylor feared her own cell phone. She feared his call. Any call. If she dared, she would have thrown the phone into a culvert, let it sink into the muck and filth where it belonged. But she knew that she could never do that. He would never allow it, and the punishments for any infraction of his rules had been clearly outlined to her. The memory of those terrible photographs was always right there behind her eyelids, cued up on her mind’s internal audiovisual projector.

Her cell rang just as she closed the door to her three-year-old BMW and Amber jumped so badly she missed the ignition keyhole and dropped her keys. Amber dug frantically into her purse and found the phone on the third ring. She checked the screen display. Wolpert. She sighed in relief and sagged back against the seat. Cathy Wolpert was her best friend and neighbor.

Smiling in anticipation of a manageable crisis—probably something else about the wedding plans for Cathy’s daughter—Amber flipped open the phone.

“Hi, Cathy—”

“Hello, Mrs. Taylor,” said the man with the Spanish accent.

His voice was quiet, polite, but it grabbed her by the throat and throttled the air out of her world.

“Oh, God!”

“Not quite,” said the man. “But close.”

“Are my children all right? God … you didn’t touch them—?”

“Shhh,” he soothed. “Shhh now. Emily and Mark are fine. I can see Emily right now. Such a pretty little face in that tiny school bus. Her new braces are quite nice. She wears them well.”

“Don’t—”

“Isn’t it nice that she doesn’t try to hide them behind her hand when she talks? Not even when she smiles. She’s very self-possessed for her age, don’t you think?”

“Please,” Amber begged. Her voice was already raw, as if she’d been screaming. “Please don’t hurt my babies.”

“Why would I? You haven’t done anything that requires that they be hurt, have you?”

“No!”

“So why would I let anything happen to them? Unless you demand that I act, then none of us will touch a hair on her head. Or Mark’s head. That is our agreement, yes?”

“Yes.” Tears boiled from the corners of Amber’s eyes and fell like acid down her cheeks. “Why are you doing this?”

The man laughed. It was the first time she had heard him laugh, and the sound of it made her cringe. The laugh was unspeakably ugly. Deep and filled with a knowledge and delight so dark that it threatened to burn the light out of the clear morning sky.

“Mrs. Taylor,” he said, “do you know why I am calling you today?”

“Y-yes.”

“You knew that this day would come. I told you that I would make this call.”

“Yes,” she whispered hoarsely. “When?”

“Today,” he said. “Right now.”

“But … my children … I have to—”

“No, Mrs. Taylor, you only have one thing to do. We are watching your children. We are waiting for you to do what you have promised to do.”

“I need to know that my babies are safe!”

“That’s up to you. If you do this, then I swear to the Goddess and by all of her works that I will not harm them. When this is over for you, it will be over for them. They will live to grow up and grow old and put flowers on your grave.”

“Please don’t make me do this … .”

“Or,” he said softly, “you could spend your remaining years putting flowers on their graves. That is … if you could ever find where they were buried.”

Amber tried to shout at him, but her voice broke into splinters of fear and grief and tears.

He hung up, but Amber heard him whisper something as the connection was broken. A single word.

“Delicious …”

Chapter Forty

The Warehouse / DMS Tactical Field Office

Baltimore, Maryland

December 19, 9:02 A.M. EST

Top Sims found his team waiting for him clustered around a big black Tactical Vehicle in the main garage. The TacV looked like an oversized SUV, with a bulked-up back bay filled with weapons and equipment. Each of the team—DeeDee, Khalid, and John Smith—affected a posture of cool disinterest. A passerby would have thought they were waiting for a train. Only Bunny stood apart, hands in his pockets, head down, staring at the concrete between his feet.

The team nodded to Top, who returned the nod and headed over to talk with Mike Harnick, the chief mechanic at the Warehouse. Harnick was leaning on the hood writing on a clipboard and he looked up and smiled as Top approached.

“How we doing, Mike?”

“Black Bess is good to go. The extra armor adds weight, so I put a sixty-gallon tank on it.”

“What’s that extra weight do to the speed?”

Harnick shrugged and patted the hood. “She’ll get to about eighty and that’s it, but she’ll drive straight through a wall, and nothing short of an RPG is going to dent her.”

Top clapped him on the shoulder and then walked over to where Bunny stood.

“How you doing, Farmboy?” Top asked.

Bunny shrugged.

Top stepped closer. “We lost people before.”

“In fights, Top. Not like this.” Bunny shook his head. “When I was incountry in Afghanistan and Iraq we lost a lot of guys. During the surge, hunting the Taliban in the hills. I collected a lot of dog tags and folded a lot of flags. But this … it’s like someone just swatted them off the planet. They never saw it coming, never even had the chance to go down swinging.”

“It’s the way cowards fight, kid,” said Top. “They don’t have the numbers and they don’t have the balls to come at us in a straight fight, so they plant bombs. They don’t care who dies. It ain’t war. There are no rules, no ethics, no mercy, no honor. That’s who we’re fighting these days.”

Bunny turned to him, and Top could see that the young man’s eyes were puffed and red. Top would never mock him for those tears, and neither would anyone in the Warehouse. But Top knew those tears burned.

“That’s the point,” Bunny said harshly. “They’re blowing up buildings all over the world and they won’t stand up and fight. Fuck, man, I don’t know who to hate.”

Top nodded. He felt it, too. The anger, the rage, was there in his chest, a self-perpetuating and self- consuming ball of heat that had nowhere to go.

“I need to get into this fight, Top,” Bunny said. “I need to get into it or I’m going to have to walk away from it.”

“Well, guess what, Farmboy? We just got orders to drive up to Philly and rendezvous with Cap’n