I called Bug. He wasn’t good with computers-he was a freak. When 9/11 happened Bug was still in high school, amusing himself by hacking into the school board computer to give everyone he liked a 4.0 average and to put the school disciplinarian on a sex offenders watch list. A couple of years after the planes hit, Bug tried to hack Homeland, believing that if he had access to their data he could find Bin Laden. The next day Grace Courtland and Sergeant Gus Dietrich-Church’s personal bodyguard-showed up at his front door to offer him a choice: jail or a job with the DMS. Bug made the smart choice.
Since then he’d become the high priest in the church of MindReader. And back in 2011 he got his wish by helping track Bin Laden to his Pakistani compound.
He answered the call with: “Hey, whaddya know, Joe? Heard about the hikers gig. Echo Team kicks a-a-a-a-ass.”
“Thanks, Bug, but listen up. Something else is about to hit the fan. The Big Man will be calling you any minute about-”
“I know, the nukes. I’m looking at it right now. Frigging scary as shit, huh?” Bug said with the kind of excitement you hear from video gamers who have found a challenging new level. I sometimes wonder if Bug knew that he didn’t exist in a purely virtual world.
“So you’re already tied up?”
“Nah, this stuff is crap. Got to run it through a bunch of filters and a clean-up program before we can do much with it. That’s going to take a couple of-”
“Good. Then, before you get swamped with that I need you to start a database search for me. It’s part of the nuke thing; but it’s a different arm of the investigation and to tell you the truth I don’t have a clue how it relates. All I have are the names of two books. No authors, no other data.”
“Fire away.”
“The Book of Shadows and the Saladin Codex.”
“Saladin, as in the sultan who-?”
“Presumably. Rasouli dropped his name during our little chitchat, so I figure that was some kind of hint.”
“Okay. Wait-there’s something about them on the drive. No… forget it. Stuff’s corrupted as all shit. Reads like some kind of gibberish. I’ll have to see if I can translate it. What do you need?”
“Anything you got. General and specific. I had to dump my tactical computer and PDA, so send it to me via e-mail so I can read it on my phone. You ring any serious bells, call me directly. If I don’t answer, hit scramble and leave it on my voice mail.”
“You got it, Joe.”
I disconnected, and again I could feel another layer of stress crack and fall away.
Ghost came over and leaned against me. He does that. I know it’s more of a greyhound trait and the fuzzmonster is pure White Shepherd, but Ghost isn’t one to pass up a trick that might get him petted. I ran my fingers through his fur.
“I don’t suppose you know how to sniff out a nuclear bomb, do you?” I asked him. “No? Guess I’d better do it.”
He wagged his tail to show that he believed me to be Captain Invincible who could find those pesky nukes and crush them in my hands of steel. That or he thought I had more goat strips in my pocket.
I debated taking a shower and maybe drowning myself. Might be a tension breaker.
Instead I called Rudy Sanchez.
“Cowboy!” he said instead of hello. “Are you home?”
“I wish. Where are you?” I could hear wind rushing past the phone.
“On the way to the Warehouse. Mr. Church called ten minutes ago and told us to come in right away. Can you tell me what’s happening?”
We were both on scrambled phones, so I gave him the highlights.
“ Dios mio! ”
“No kidding.”
“How are you doing with all of this?”
His question, I knew, had very little to do with the mission and a lot to do with my overall mental health. Rudy and I have a lot of history. When I was a teenager my girlfriend Helen and I were jumped by a gang of older teens. The guys completely trashed me, breaking bones, rupturing some stuff inside. While I lay there coughing up blood they took turns with Helen. That image is seared onto the front of my mind. I see it every single day.
Helen and I healed from the physical trauma. I got involved in martial arts and made myself as tough and as ruthless as I could. Helen wandered down a few dark corridors inside her head and never found her way out.
We met Rudy during his psychiatric residency at Sinai in Baltimore. Helen was having one of her frequent breakdowns and Rudy did some amazing work with her, pulling her back from the brink time after time. He also helped me work on my internal wiring. Unfortunately the darkness was too much for Helen, and one day she let it take her.
I kicked in her door and found her.
Her death nearly killed me. Nearly killed Rudy, too. He’d never lost a patient to suicide before. We were already best friends, and that friendship probably saved us both. Since then we’ve become closer than brothers-certainly closer than I am to my own brother. Rudy is the only person in whom I place total trust.
He’s also the person who helped me make sense of the wreckage in my head. As I healed, I began to realize that I was not completely alone inside my mind. Over time three distinct personalities emerged. One was the Civilized Man, and Rudy says that he is my idealized self, the version of me that I wish could survive in this world. Optimistic, compassionate, nonviolent; and he’s been taking a real beating over the last couple of years as I hunt bad guys for Mr. Church. Then there is his complete opposite, the Warrior. Or, as I sometimes think of him, the Killer. He’s the part of me that was born on that day when the children that Helen and I had been were destroyed. He is ruthless, highly dangerous, and unrelenting. His bloodlust is intense and constant, and although he can be glutted, his hunger will eventually come back. I have to keep a real eye on him, especially while working for the DMS, because the more evil I see in the world the harder it is to rationalize putting him in a cage.
The third personality is the one that I believe truly defines me. The Cop. He’s not a cynic or a wide-eyed idealist. He’s rational, cool, calculating, and balanced. He emerged even before I joined the police; in a lot of ways he has a Samurai vibe. Skilled, but self-controlled.
They’re always with me, and Rudy taught me how to manage them. How to make them more fully a part of a whole rather than disparate entities. I’m not entirely convinced I’ve managed that.
I trust Rudy’s judgment, though. In that and in most things. When I got my gold shield with Baltimore PD, my father-then the commissioner-arranged a consultant’s position for Rudy, which later expanded into a full-time gig. Rudy specialized in trauma cases, which is something he really dug into after Helen’s death. He was in New York after the towers fell, working with survivors and families and with the legion of heroes who risked their lives to search through the rubble. He was in New Orleans and Mississippi following Katrina, in Thailand after the tsunami, in Haiti, and in Japan. He knows that he can’t save everyone, and every lost soul gouges a deep mark into his own soul, but he saves more of them than anyone else.
When Mr. Church hijacked me into the DMS, Rudy became part of the deal. I often think that he does a lot more good with quiet conversations and a patient ear than I do with a pistol. Which is very much as it should be.
“I’m okay,” I said. Rudy grunted, knowing that I was lying. He’d let me get away with that as long as I was in the field, but once I got back home I’d have to fess up. I’d need to by then.
“Joe-Mr. Church called me late last night and told me about the hikers.”
“Yeah.”
“That was well done,” he said. “That one will really matter.”
“All part of the job.”
“No,” he said, but left it there. Knowing Church, he would probably have Rudy sit down with the hikers.