'Yeah. Those guns made crispy critters of the servers. You did good.'
And what was better, their use of EMP had really shaken things up. All the on-air experts were wringing their hands at the 'dire implications' of this sort of attack.
'Yes,' Drexler said from the far end of the table. 'Excellent work.'
'What about me?' said Kewan, the fourth attendee around the basement table. 'I'm the guy who ran the show. I took out that transatlantic cable.'
'You surely did,' Hank said. 'But you got yourself caught on that cell phone. Not good.'
He rolled his eyes. 'Can't help that. If y'gonna be on the street, there's always that chance. Everybody got phones.' He turned to Ferron. 'Hey, can't you make a bigger EMP thing?'
Ferron shrugged. 'Of course. How big?'
'One big enough so we don't have to show our faces or risk getting nabbed. Something that can fry those circuits from a distance, or zap the whole city in one shot.'
'Not possible-at least with existing technology. That would take a nuclear explosion.'
'I didn't say blow the place up-'
Hank had heard this before but he didn't mind listening again. The subject fascinated him.
'You wouldn't have to,' Ferron said. 'You'd detonate the bomb outside the atmosphere. In fact, the higher the better. Set one off thirty miles above Lebanon, Kansas, and you-'
'Why there?' Kewan said.
'It's the belly button of the lower forty-eight. Right smack in the center. Explode a nuke thirty miles over that and you toast all the circuitry in the Midwest. Set it off three hundred miles up, and you take out all of North and most of Central America.'
Kewan's eyes lit. 'You mean the whole country would be an Internet-free zone? Let's do it!'
Hank shook his head. That had been his own reaction. Then he'd learned that more than the Internet would be affected. 'We'd also be cell phone-free and car-free, plus-'
'Wait. What you mean, car and phone free?'
'Well, cell phones use the same kind of chips as computers, and all modern cars have onboard computers.'
'Right,' Ferron said. 'If you had a vintage car with original equipment, you might keep that going, but you'd have trouble finding a working gas pump because there'd be no electricity.'
Kewan frowned. 'Why not?'
'Because the EMP would also toast the power grid.' Ferron snapped his fingers. 'Like that we'd be back in the eighteenth century.'
'Okaaaay,' Kewan said slowly. 'Let's not do that.'
Hank knew that the Change was coming soon, bringing the Others back to this world, and he'd been doing his best to prepare the way for them-hopefully guaranteeing himself better treatment when they took over. But he didn't want to go back to burning wood for heat until they showed up.
'Right,' he told Kewan. 'Let's just limit our target to the Internet.'
Kewan nodded. 'We're gonna need more of those guns, then-lots more.'
'Wrong. The data centers and exchanges aren't the real targets. We just want people thinking they are.'
He looked offended. 'You mean last night was all for show?'
'Yes. And you put on an excellent show. Too excellent, perhaps.'
'What that mean?'
Drexler spoke up. 'Your image was captured on that cell phone, Mister Lyford, and shown on national TV. You must leave the city.'
'I ain't leaving. This where I live.'
Hank leaned toward him. 'It's okay, Kewan. You're being transferred to one of the field groups.'
'What's that? I never hearda no field groups.'
'That's where the real work's going to be done. They're getting set to move. And when they do, it won't be for show.' He glanced at Drexler. 'Any word from your man on that final piece of code?'
Drexler nodded. 'He guarantees sometime today.'
'About time. And if it lives up to its press, when can we expect Jihad to be ready?'
'Jihad?' said Kewan. 'What's this Jihad talk? We dealin' with Arabs?'
Hank caught Drexler's furious look. He shouldn't have mentioned that in front of Kewan and Ferron. Until his slip just now, he'd been the only Kicker in on the virus. Top-tier Dormentalists knew, but Ferron wasn't one of those.
Drexler composed his features. 'Just a figure of speech, Mister Lyford. Jihad is a holy war, and we're leading a holy war against the Internet.'
'You mentioned 'code,' ' Ferron said. 'Are we talking virus here?'
Shit.
'Another kind of code,' Hank said quickly. 'One we need to break.'
But Ferron was right. Jihad-its official designation would be Jihad4/20-was one hell of a virus. If all went according to plan, it would be spread across the globe by the end of the week.
5
'The Internet is not their real target,' the Lady said.
Jack studied her. She looked better than she had last summer right after Rasalom and his boys in the Kickers and the Order damn near killed her. Against all odds, despite the Fhinntmanchca, the mythic killing force that had zeroed in on her, she'd survived. But just barely.
Jack first met her when he was a kid. She'd appeared then as an eccentric old woman with a three-legged dog. Over the ensuing years she'd stepped in and out of his life as females of varying ages, always with some sort of dog at her side.
The dog was gone now-it hadn't survived the assault-but she persevered. But only as an old Lady. Used to be she could change her looks, but she seemed to have lost that ability. Used to be she could shift her presence to anywhere on Earth, but no more. She never left this apartment.
'Sorry,' Weezy said as she stepped into the room, late as usual.
She'd shed some weight since popping back into Jack's life last summer. Instead of the baggy sweat suits she'd worn then, she was now dressed in fitted jeans and a long-sleeved black sweater under a ski vest. She'd let her dark hair grow and had it tied back in a simple ponytail. Her pale face was makeup free, a far cry from the heavy gothesque eyeliner she'd worn as a teen. She carried the Compendium of Srem under her arm.
The group-Jack had started calling it the Ally's Gang of Four-was now complete. They'd been meeting a couple of times a month, sometimes more often, to discuss the goings-on in the world and which of those might be related to Rasalom or those doing his bidding. And also to learn what Weezy had gleaned from her ongoing study of the Compendium.
But that was all they did: Talk. And it was driving Jack nuts.
The meeting place was always the same: the Lady's apartment in the building on Central Park West owned by Glaeken, who had adopted the identity of Gaston Veilleur and insisted on being addressed as 'Veilleur.' As usual, he sat at one end of the heavy oblong table, the Lady at the other. Jack and Weezy occupied the flanks.
Jack shook his head. The Gang of Four… a former immortal, a woman who wasn't really a woman-or even human-and a pair of thirty-something humans… all that stood between humanity and the Otherness.
Pretty pathetic. A kind of cosmic joke. But the cosmic shadow war raging behind the scenes was anything but a joke. Two nameless, unimaginable forces vying for control of the sentient realities across the multiverse. Earth was one of those. Just one of many. Not the golden prize, simply another marble in the pouch. But only the sentient marbles were valuable; the non-sentient were brushed aside.
Earth was currently the possession of a force people had come to call the Ally-not really an ally, and in no way benign; more like indifferent. The Otherness, however, was unquestionably inimical, and had been vying for millennia to make Earth its own. Rasalom led its forces here. Veilleur, as Glaeken, used to lead the Ally's, but had
