“Why have you come here, then?” asked Grigor. “What do you want?”
“I’m here because you need me.”
Grigor smiled, revealing his unnatural teeth. “What I need from you I could take.”
Vox shivered despite himself. “Christ, don’t do that, you big freak. I’m trying to talk business here.”
The candlelight glimmered on the wicked points of Grigor’s fangs. Vox licked his lips. It felt like the cavern floor was tilting under him. The moment was as terrifying as it was surreal, but he stood his ground even as sweat poured down his face and stung his eyes.
Finally, Grigor allowed his smile to fade and the fangs slowly vanished. He sat back in his chair. “Then talk business.”
Vox let out a tremendous sigh. “Jesus H. Christ,” he growled. “You really groove on your own mystique, don’t you? Shit.” He used his free hand to mop his forehead with a handkerchief, and despite the fact that every nerve he possessed screamed at him to run, he took a step closer to the foot of the dais. Grigor arched an eyebrow in surprise, or perhaps in appreciation for the nerve that such an action displayed. Vox said, “Since you know about the Kings, then it’s only fair that I tell you that I know everything about the Red Order, and I do mean everything.”
He watched Grigor’s eyes, saw them jump in surprise, and saw how Grigor looked quickly away to hide his reaction.
“That is between you and the Scriptor,” said the pale man.
“No it isn’t,” replied Vox, and Grigor’s eyes settled once more on him. “When I say that I know everything about the Order, that means everything. That means I know about the Upierczi.”
Grigor leaned forward. “And what is it that you think you know?”
“I know why you really want the names of all the arms dealers… and it’s not to buy guns, no matter what LaRoque says.”
“No.”
“What’s a gun to someone like you? Maybe twenty years ago, maybe before you guys got your ‘upgrade.’ Yeah, don’t look so surprised, Grigor. I told you I know all about you. I know how strong you’ve become. I don’t think Charles LaRoque has a fucking clue.”
Grigor did not correct him this time.
Vox took another step. “I know that despite being called a ‘knight,’ the Red Order thinks of you as a slave. They treat you like slaves. You are slaves.”
In a pale and dangerous whisper Grigor said, “What else do you know?”
“I know that your slavery is about to come to an end. You want to break the chains. You want to stage a slave revolt that will make Spartacus and the gladiator rebellion look like a frat party.” Vox smiled. “Don’t you?”
Grigor’s eyes burned with red flame. “Yes.”
“And,” said Hugo Vox, “I want to make sure that happens. That… and so much more.”
Chapter Eighteen
Tactical Operations Center (TOC)
The Hangar
Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn
June 15, 12:49 a.m. EST
Jerome Williams-“Bug” to everyone-sat amid a web of computer terminals, screens, coaxial cables, encoding buffers, and other equipment, and all of it inside a big glass box. Two inches of reinforced glass and a sophisticated multiform entry scanner separated him from the fifty other people in the sprawling Tactical Operations Center. The TOC was a monument to computer-driven sophistication, and rising like an obelisk was the primary processing tower of MindReader. That, too, was safe behind the bulletproof glass and guarded by two unsmiling soldiers with M4s.
Bug glanced up from his keyboard at the flow of people in the TOC. Some were hunched over workstations connected through monitored sockets to MindReader’s servers; others spoke on phones or milled like frenzied insects, going about the thousand crucial tasks related to the current crisis.
Despite the constant flow of cool air into his fishbowl, Bug was sweating heavily. Six rogue nukes. Just the thought of those weapons hidden out there terrified him. Violence was such an alien concept to him, despite where and for whom he worked. Most of the time it was an abstraction, a crazy concept no more real than the aliens, monsters, orcs, and zombies he battled in video games. He knew that the problems the DMS faced were real, but they weren’t real to him. He had never heard a shot fired in anger, never saw the enemy anywhere but on a computer screen. It was easy to stay detached if you lived like that.
Bug was a small man. Thin, spare, slightly hunched from a life spent at the keyboard. His work for the DMS was usually pure support. Crack a code, break through an anti-intrusion firewall, steal some guarded information. Fun stuff. Even when providing real-time intel for the field teams there wasn’t much actual pressure on him. After all, MindReader was the fastest computer on the planet. The basement of the hangar had a cold room lined wall to wall with a supercomputer cluster. The primary computer block was made up of three thousand premarket upgrades of the Tianhe-1A system which flew at a speed of 2.507 petaflops. That was more than thirty percent faster than the Cray XT5 Jaguar. Sometimes Bug would sit with his palms flat on the MindReader obelisk and feel the power surging through him. That was real to him.
But today… the real world seemed to have found a way past all of his personal anti-intrusion systems. Fear was like an unbearably shrill sound in his ears.
“Find those other devices.” That’s what Mr. Church had said to him before the Big Man went in for his conference with the president. Not “try” to find them. Find them.
It was on him.
Him.
He closed his eyes and breathed in long and deep through his nose. The air in the fishbowl was ripe with the hot-wire smell of ozone. A beautiful smell.
“Come on, baby,” he said aloud as his fingers hovered above the keyboard. “Come on, my baby. Don’t make me do this alone. Talk to me…”
Almost as if in answer to his plea, a bell softly pinged.
Chapter Nineteen
Park Avenue and McMechen Street
Bolton Hill
Baltimore, Maryland
June 15, 12:53 a.m. EST
The bedside phone began ringing at precisely the wrong moment. Circe O’Tree was naked, covered in sweat, painted by candlelight, and on the verge of screaming as she moved in a frenzied pace up and down. Her black curls danced above her bouncing breasts as the rhythm drove her up and up and up toward the crest of climax. Beneath her, drenched and straining and grimacing with the beginnings of his own orgasm, Rudy Sanchez growled out her name over and over again.
The phone kept ringing.
They ignored it. They were only aware of it on some distant level, their immediate need transforming the intrusive sound into a mere component in the symphony of sounds and sensations. The music from the speakers, the sounds from the street outside of Circe’s window, the creak of the bedsprings, the urgent slap of flesh against flesh, and their marathon panting breathing were all parts of something much greater.
“Oh, God!” cried Circe as the orgasm reared above her like a dark wave of velvet beauty, and she screamed incoherently as he came too. Together they spun to the edge of the precipice and plunged over, crying out each
