Read on for an excerpt from
Code Zero
the sequel to Patient Zero
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Copyright © 2014 by Jonathan Maberry
The philosopher Nietzsche didn’t get it right. He said, “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster.”
That’s not exactly true.
Or, at least, not all the time.
If you battle monsters you don’t always become a monster.
But, you aren’t entirely human anymore, either.
1100 Block of North Stuart Street
Arlington, Virginia
Thursday, April 14, 1:22 pm
Some cases start big. Something blows up, someone unleashes a nasty bug and Echo Team hits the ground running. Most of the time, even if we don’t know what the endgame is going to look like, we have some idea of what kind of fight we’re in. And we can usually hear that big clock ticking down to boom time.
Some cases are a running fight and you know it’ll end when one side runs out of bullets and the other doesn’t.
I’ve had a lot of both.
This one started weird and stayed weird and for most of it felt like we were swinging punches at shadows and mist. We didn’t even know what we were fighting until we were struggling with it right there at the edge of the abyss. And even then, it wasn’t what we thought it might be or even could be.
Yeah, it was like that.
The whole thing started four months ago.
It started on a sunny day in April, one of those days that T.S. Elliot wrote about when he said this was the cruelest month. When spring rains wake the dead bulbs buried in the cold dirt and coax flowers into first blooms. We look at the flowers and we forget so many important things. We forget that all flowers die. We forget that winter will come again. We forget that nothing really endures and that, like the flowers that die at the end of the growing seasons, we’ll join them in the cold ground.
I spent years mourning the dead. Helen. Grace. My friends and colleagues at the Warehouse. Members of my team who fell in battle.
All of them in the cold, cold ground.
Now it was April and there were flowers.
In my life there was Junie Flynn. She was the flower of my spring.
Her cancer was in remission, and had been for months. Like the winter of another year, we tend to forget that winter will come again. We forget that no one here gets out alive.
Not even the lucky ones.
But for right now … the sun was shining through yellow curtains and there were birds singing in the trees.
I sat at a kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the remains of a big slice of apple pecan pie.
The rest of the pie was gone. There was evidence of it in crumbs and beige glob smeared on the floor, on the aluminum pie plate, and on the muzzle of my dog. Ghost. Big white shepherd.
He loves pie.
The mess was considerable.
I had no intentions of cleaning it up.
It wasn’t my pie.
It wasn’t my house.
When the actual owner of the house –a Mr. Reginald Boyd—came storming into the kitchen he told me, very loudly and with lots of cursing that it wasn’t my house, my kitchen or my goddamn pie.
I agreed with those observations.
Less so about the speculations that I fornicate with livestock and am a few of the other allegations he hurled.
Reginald Boy was a big man. Big hands and shoulders, but soft in the middle, like an athlete who has gone to seed. Close to the mark. He’d played two kinds of college ball –base and foot—but didn’t have the talent to go pro. Stayed in shape most of his adult life by hitting the gym and playing pick-up ball with some other aging jocks. Started going soft probably around the same time that he started getting paid for stealing some real important shit from work.
‘Work’ was the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA. The agency was part of the Department of Defense and was responsible for the development of new technologies for use by the military. Basically a collection of the most dangerous geeks on earth. Except for idiots like Reggie, they were working for us, trying to keep America safe.
“Get the fuck out of my house,” yelled Reginald Boyd.
Ghost, his face covered in apple pie and pecan bits, stood up and showed Boyd how big he was. And how many teeth he had.
I smiled at Boyd and said, “Lower your voice.”
Boyd eyed Ghost and backed a step away. “You broke into my house.”
“Only technically. I loided the lock with my library card. Loided,” I repeated. “It’s a word, look it up. It means to bypass a lock. You have a two hundred dollar deadbolt on your front door and a Mickey Mouse spring lock on the back door. A moron could get in here. So … whereas I got in, I did no actual breaking.”
He didn’t know how to respond to that, so he glared at what was on the table. “You made coffee? And you ate my pie?”
I felt like I was in a Goldilocks and the Three Bears reboot.
“First off, the coffee is Sanka. How the hell can you call yourself an American and all you have in your pantry is powdered decaf? I ought to sic Ghost on you just for that.”
“What—?”
“The pie’s good though,” I continued. “Could use more pecans. Store-bought, am I right? Take a tip and switch to Whole Foods, they have a killer deep dish apple that’ll make you cry.”
“You’re fucking crazy.”
“Very likely,” I admitted.
His hand touched the cell phone clipped to his belt. “Get the hell out before I call—.”
I reached into my jacket, slid the Beretta 92F from its clamshell holster and laid it on the table. “Seriously, Mr. Boyd –actually, may I call you Reggie?”
“Fuck you.”
“Seriously, Reggie, do you really want to reach for that cell phone? I mean –who are you gonna call?”
“I’ll call the fucking cops is who I’ll call.”
“No you won’t.”
“The hell I won’t.”
“I’m a cop, Einstein,” I said. Which was kind of true. I used to be a cop in Baltimore before I was Shanghaied into the Department of Military Sciences. One cool side effect of that is that I have access, per an Executive Order, to credentials from every law enforcement agency from the FBI to local law to the housing police. I need to flash a badge; they give me the right badge. The DMS, though, doesn’t have badges.
Boyd eyed me. “You’re no cop.”
“I could be.”
“Bullshit. I’m going to call the cops.”
“No you’re not.”
“You can’t stop me, this is my house.”
I drummed my fingers on the table next to my gun. “Honestly, Reggie, they said you weren’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but come on … Big guy. King Kong. Big gun? You’re armed with a cell phone and a beer gut. How do you think this is going to play out?”
“I’m not afraid of any stupid dog.”
I held up a finger. “Whoa now, Reggie. There are all kinds of lines we can step over. Insulting my dog, however, is a line you do not want to cross. I get weird about that, and you do not want me to get weird on you. I bite worse than the dog.”
He stared blankly at me, trying hard to make sense of our encounter. His eyes flicked from me to Ghost –who noisily licked his muzzle—and back to me.
“What the hell do you want?” he asked, his voice heavy with uncertainty.
“What do you think I want?”
“I don’t know.”
I shook my head. “Of course you do.”
“No, I don’t know.”
I sighed. “Okay, I’ll give you a hint because you may actually be that stupid.”
He started to open his mouth.
I said, “VaultBreaker.”
His mouth snapped shut.
“Specifically, VaultBreaker 7.1,” I elaborated. “Am I ringing any bells here? Anything? Anything? Bueller?”
That’s when Reggie Boyd tried to run.
He spun around and bolted down the hallway toward the front door.
I took a sip of the coffee. Sighed. Said, “Go ahead.”
Ghost shot after him like a bullet, nails tearing at the hallway floorboards, one long continuous growl trailing behind him.
Reggie didn’t even make it to the front door.
Later, after we were past the screams and first-aid phases, Reggie lay on the couch and I sat on the edge of a La-Z-Boy recliner, my pistol back in its shoulder rig, another cup of the pisswater Sanka cradled between my palms. Ghost was sprawled on the rug pretending to be asleep. The living room was a wreck. Tables overturned, a lamp broken. Bloodstains on the floors and the walls, and one drop on the ceiling and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how that got there.
My chest ached, though not because of anything Reggie had done. It was scar tissue from bullet wounds I’d received last year during the Majestic Black Book affair. The bullets had gone in through the arm-hole opening of my Kevlar and busted up a whole lot of important stuff. I was theoretically back to perfect health, though there had been some dicey moments, but bullet wounds were not paper cuts. I had to keep working the area to keep the scar tissue from building up in the wrong places. Wrestling a big oak like Reggie onto the couch helped neither my chest nor my mood.
“We could have done all this in the kitchen,” I said irritably. “We could have had some pizzas delivered and talked this through like adults.”
Reggie said nothing.
“Instead you had to do something stupid.”
Nothing.
“That alone should tell you something, man,” I said. “That and the fact that I’m here. Didn’t your Spider sense start to tingle when you found me sitting at your kitchen table? No? You’re not very smart, Reggie. Maybe you’re good at your job, but beyond that you are as dumb as a box of rubber hammers. You assumed you were being slick and careful, but since I’m here, we can agree that assumptions about your overall slickness are for shit. Ass out of you and me, you know what I’m talking about.”
Nothing.
“The question is, Reggie, what do we do now?”
He turned his face away and buried it in the couch cushions.
Back in Baltimore, my girl friend, Junie Flynn, was shopping for a dress to go with the killer shoes she bought last week. We were going to see Joe Bonamassa playing stinging blues at the Hippodrome. Tomorrow was the first day of a rare three-day weekend for me, and we had an invitation to go sailing with Rudy Sanchez and his wife, Circe. Nice stuff to do. Nice people to do it with.
Thinking about that, and about how I was pretty sure I was falling in love with Junie –real love, not the unstructured lust into which I usually fell with the women who pass through my life. I don’t want to get all sappy here, but I was beginning to get the feeling that Junie was the one. The actual one. The one they write cards and movies and love songs about. The kind of ‘one’ I used to make jokes about, as all male outsiders make jokes when they don’t think they’ll ever meet, or perhaps don’t deserve to meet, their one.
All of that was waiting for me once I cleared up a few details with Reggie Boyd.
I leaned over and jabbed him with my finger.
“Reggie? Listen to me now,” I said quietly. “You know that you’re in trouble. I wouldn’t be here if you weren’t in trouble. You know that you’re going to be arrested. We both know that. What we don’t know, what you and I have to decide, is where you go once you’re charged. There are people who want me to take you to a private airstrip so we can send you to Gitmo where you will never be seen again and from where –I guarantee you—you’ll never return. Personally, I don’t dig that option. I’m not a huge fan of enhanced interrogation. Not unless I’m up against a wall. There’s a wall pretty close, though, and I don’t think it’s in either of our best interests if you push me against it. You dig?”
He didn’t answer, but he lay so stiff that I could tell he was listening.
“Second option is I bust you through main channels with the NSA. That means you get charged with treason and you’ll spend the next forty years in a supermax prison learning what it means to be a ‘fish’. It’s not a lesson you want to learn, trust me. If we go that way, I lose control of the situation and less friendly people run your life henceforth.”
Reggie shook his head, still silent.
“Third option is the one I like. Yes, it still ends with you in prison—that’s going to stay on the table, no way around it—but in that option it’s a federal country club prison and you don’t spend every Friday night giving blowjobs to tattooed members of the Aryan Brotherhood. I think you’ll admit that it’s a better option.”
“You’re lying to me,” he mumbled. “You’re going to kill me.”
I smiled. “If I’d wanted to kill you, Reggie, I wouldn’t have pulled Ghost off of you.”
Ghost opened one eye, looked around, closed it. Made a soft whuff sound.
“We don’t want you dead, Reggie. What we want is for you to become a cooperative person. Totally open, totally willing to share everything you know. That kind of thing opens hearts, Reggie. It earns you Brownie points.”
Reggie said nothing.
“Now, I need to make a phone call, Reggie,” I said. “I need to make that call in the next five minutes. I need to tell my boss that you’re going to cooperate with us. I need to tell my boss that you are going to help us plug the leak in the Department of Defense. I need to tell him that you’re going to name names and make connections so that we can make a whole bunch of arrests. And, yes, some of them will go to Gitmo and those that don’t will be doing the shower-room boogie-woogie in supermax. You, however, won’t. You’ll be watching American Idol on cable, eating food nobody’s spit in, and sleeping soundly at night with all of your various orifices unviolated. Not sure if that’s a word, but you get my gist.”
He turned and looked at me, uncertainly and conflict blooming like crabgrass in his eyes.
“I can make that deal,” I said.
“How do I know I can trust you?” he said in a near-whisper.
I smiled, then reached behind the chair and dragged out a heavy leather valise, opened it and spilled the contents onto the rug. Reggie stared at what spilled out and his color, already bad, went from pale to green. The light from the one unbroken lamp glinted from the curves and edges of pliers, bone saws, wood rasps, electrical clamps, scalpels and rolls of duct tape. “Because I didn’t use these.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“I know, right?”
“But you fucking brought them! You were going to use those … things on me.”
“Actually,” I said, “I didn’t bring this shit.”
Before he could reply I got up and walked over to the small coat closet beside the door. I opened it. Two bodies tumbled out. A third lay twisted inside.
“They did.”
Ghost made his whuffing sound again. It sounded like laughter of a very bad kind.
Reggie gagged. Even from where he lay he could see bullet holes and bite marks.
“Two of those guys are North Korean,” I said. “Other guy’s an American working for Iran. They’re working together. They came here and began unpacking their party favors. Can you imagine what fun you would have had with them? They’d have had to bury you in separate boxes. Ghost and I dissuaded them.”
I sat down again and gave him my very best smile. The one that crinkles the corners of my eyes and shows a lot of teeth. The one I never show to Junie.
“Now,” I said, “how about we have that talk?”
He licked his lips. “What … what do you want to know?”
1100 Block of North Stuart Street
Arlington, Virginia
Thursday, April 14, 2:09 pm
Once he got started I couldn’t shut Reggie Boyd up.
Seriously.
At one point I considered clubbing him unconscious long enough to make a Starbucks run, but I think that would be hard to justify in my after-action report.
He talked and talked and talked. He was Mr. Helpful for the rest of the afternoon.
Part of it was that tool bag. There was some nasty shit there, and Reggie had enough imagination to guess how his afternoon might have gone if I hadn’t showed up.
Part of it was the presence of a big man and his nasty dog. More so, probably, than my gun.
Part of it was the fact that he believed me when I said I could cut him a deal that he could, in real point of fact, live with. That much was true because the DMS had been given a lot of latitude to strike such a deal. That came courtesy of Vice President William Collins, who was the nominal head of the federal Cybercrimes Task Force. Collins was a major dick in many important ways, but he had so many friends and old cronies in Congress, the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense that he was nearly as powerful as he wanted to be. Collins had provided me with papers detailing what I was allowed to offer Reggie in return for actionable information.
Also, I think that part of the reason Reggie cracked was that once he was talking, I think on some level he felt relieved. He was out of it now. Maybe he was of that type who wasn’t suited to be a criminal. Maybe by the time he was fully invested in taking money to sell secrets from DARPA, he realized that this wasn’t a criminal thing, it was a terrorist thing.
It happens.
Greed or idealism kicks you in the direction of bad choices because at first it’s all about the money or the politics. None of it’s quite real. It’s about data that can be handed off on flash drives. No fuss, no muss. But then something makes you step back and look at the bigger picture, at the actual intended use of the stuff you’re selling, and the abstract becomes so crystal clear that its edges can draw blood. That’s when you realize that you, as a part of a larger conspiracy, will be complicit in acts that could kill people. That almost certainly would kill people. Acts that could lead to war.
What was it he sold?
A software packaged called VaultBreaker 7.1.
That is the absolute bleeding edge of cybersecurity technology. It was designed by a geek squad made up of people from DARPA, the DMS and whiz-kids from Vice President Collin’s Cybercrimes Task Force. Its purpose was varied depending on which component was used. On the surface it was ad advanced counter-espionage program to keep China, Iran and North Korea from hacking into our energy grids and shutting them down. That’s been a real threat for the last few years thanks to super-hacker groups like Comment Crew, which sounds like a rap band but isn’t. They’re a group of Chinese operators also known as Advanced Personal Threat 1, or APT1, headquartered in a nondescript 12-story building inside a military compound in a crowded suburb of China’s financial hub of Shanghai. They’ve intruded into banking, credit card companies, power companies, internet providers and other places and our cyber warfare people have no doubts that these pricks could do us serious harm. It’s a little scary that they’re not even trying to hide, though the Chinese government officially denies their existence.
VaultBreaker is designed to both predict attacks and respond to them, and it has some intrusion capabilities that allow it to fight back in creative ways, either by planting viruses or sneaking into attacking systems to rewrite its operating software.
The DMS people were asked to help design it so that it would work somewhat like MindReader. I think Church agreed to have his best people participate to insure that VaultBreaker resemble MindReader too much.
The other thing VaultBreaker was designed to do was attack our own security systems. Sounds nuts I know, but there’s a logic. Once a new facility was designed VaultBreaker would be used to try and crack its security. Each time it found a hole, the designers of the facility would then be able to address that vulnerability. Reset and replay until there were no holes left to find. Smart stuff.
And from what Bug told me, VaultBreaker was designer to play like a video game. They even hired some top game nerds to play versions of it –in very controlled situations, of course—to see how good it was. What alarmed everyone was that these games, most of whom were teenage kids, were better at using VaultBreaker against our best security than most of our security people were. In fact, only two of our geeks were better than the geeks-for-hire. Bug –which surprised no one—and Dr. Artemisia Bliss, a stunningly brilliant computer engineer who’d helped design the system. Bliss was gone now, of course, and VaultBreaker had been revised and upgraded many times since.
That was what Reggie Boyd wanted to sell.
He’d managed to bypass the protections in the system and burned a complete copy. He didn’t have the codes to enable it, but once it was in the hands of hackers like the Comment Crew, VaultBreaker itself would be broken. Then it could be used for all sorts of and games. And by fun and games I mean it could be used to orchestrate a coordinated shut down of over forty percent of the power grids in the U.S., and –and here’s the kicker—neutralize more than half of our missile defense systems. Viruses would be introduced to screw up the rest of the systems, including our satellite early warning systems and all military and civilian air traffic control.
We would be blind, naked and bent over a barrel.
Nice.
It would also give anyone with enough computer savvy a real chance at cracking the defense systems for ultra-high security facilities like the Locker –the world’s most dangerous bioweapons lab—and every bank in the world.
The disk Boyd copied had been on loan to him from his good buddy –wait for it—Vice President William Collins. Yup. Collins had let Boyd have the copy –against all agreed protocols—because he thought he was grooming Boyd for a place in the CTF. I think the word ‘oy’ applies here. Naturally Collins was very anxious to have VaultBreaker returned or destroyed. His entire career was riding on it and I know him well enough to believe that he cared far more about his own ass than he does about his fellow Americans. The upside of that is that he called off his long-standing holy war against the DMS and actually gave us total support, enormous resources and great freedom of action to pursue the case. Felt almost weird to have Collins on our side. Kind of like having Satan ride shotgun with you while you’re driving a Meals on Wheels truck.
Reggie told me that he was scouted by an Asian woman who called herself Mother Night. The woman was the point-person for a covert cell of cyber-geeks that included hackers from China along with day-players from North Korea and Iran. Axis of Evil, nerd division. Reggie never spoke with the other members –he thought that there were nine men and a woman who went under the name of Mother Night. He was paid five million dollars for VaultBreaker and some other information, which Reggie dutifully detailed for me. The money was deposited into an offshore account set up for him in the Caymans.
Five mil is the price of a man’s soul.
It doesn’t seem like a lot, but better men than Reggie have sold their souls for less.
So, once Reggie got going he tried to buy back his soul by telling me everything he knew.
He knew a lot.
More than he was supposed to know. He may have been stupid in some areas, but not when it came to computers because Reggie hacked his way into the systems of his new employers.
He was, however, too stupid to realize that they’d figure that out. Hence the closet full of dead guys.
Now here’s the clincher. We found out about all this because our computer geeks at the DMS –Bug and his brain trust—had been using MindReader to silently hack the Iranians. This kind of popped up because it’s the kind of nastiness MindReader is programmed to look for.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave.
I called it in to the Warehouse and ordered a pick-up. I also put Echo Team on high alert because of something Reggie told me that earned him some serious Brownie points.
He told me the location where Mother Night and her boy band of hackers had set up their computer lab.
It was right here in Arlington.
I cuffed Reggie and juiced him with enough horse tranquilizer to send him off to la-la land. I didn’t want him to get chatty with anyone until he was in a secure location. Then I opened my cell, took a breath, and called Junie to tell her that I wouldn’t be able to go to the theater with her tonight.
“Are you all right?” she asked immediately.
“Right as rain,” I said. Only a little white lie. I had a couple of bruises from my tussle with the hit team. Nothing that would show until tomorrow. Junie would see it, though, but by then I’d be able to take her in my arms and prove to her that I was alive and hurt in no way that mattered.
She knew what I did. It gave us a strange relationship, though, truthfully, it wasn’t the strangest thing about us. What we have is complicated.
“I have to work tonight,” I told her.
Her response was what she always said, and it said it all. “Come home to me when you can.”
Not just come home.
Come home to her.
“Always,” I promised, and that was no lie.