The men were dressed in dark suits. On the bed were four microwave pulse pistols.
Closers.
“Ah, shit,” I muttered. I squatted down beside one of them and tore open his shirt, then repeated that on the others. As I suspected, this guy and his chums weren’t wearing the super-skivvies. If they had been, Toys would probably be dead. Without touching anything else I withdrew and closed the door behind me. I took a moment to breathe the fragrant night air.
“I told you,” said Toys quietly.
“Tell me what happened,” I said, and he went through all of it, speaking quickly and in low tones. When he got to the part where he questioned the last of the four assassins, he paused and looked down at his hands. They appeared to be very clean, the way flesh looks when it’s been scrubbed with furious vigor. My own skin has had that glow a few times over the years. When Grace Courtland died in my arms it took weeks before my hands felt clean of her blood.
“They’re Closers,” I said.
Toys nodded. “New to it, though. They hired on a few months ago.”
“Hired by who?” I asked, but then my cell rang. It was Bug.
“Kind of busy at the moment,” I told him.
“Unless you’re taking fire, Joe,” he said, “this is more important. I’ve been searching through all those papers for more on that book inventory. The Unlearnable Truths. And I think I hit gold.”
“I am definitely listening,” I said, holding my hand out to Junie and Toys to be quiet. “Hit me.”
Bug hit me. “This kid Prospero Bell believed that there is a mathematical code hidden in the unlearnable books, right? Well, he wasn’t joking. That code is there, and it tells you how to program the power flow so that the God Machine works the way it’s supposed to.”
“To open a dimensional gateway,” I supplied, and Toys stared at me, eyebrows raised so far they nearly vanished into his hairline. Junie put a finger to her lips.
“Right,” said Bug, “but it does more than that. With the sequencing code you can regulate any of the Kill Switch devices on the same network. I ran this by Bill Hu and he says that what this means is that if you made a bunch of the Kill Switches, you could position them around an area, switch it on, and everything inside is switched off. Hu thinks that they’ve been doing this already. Houston and the debate and like that. But Dr. San Pedro’s records indicate that these smaller devices are single use. They melt down completely after a few seconds. Now, if you have the master control sequence code, those devices won’t overheat. You can place them around, say, New York City, switch them on so that everything goes dark, switch them off again, and keep doing that as much as you like. No one has to even be there to run them. And you can keep doing it when the emergency responders get there. You can make this go from bad to worse with the flip of a switch, but only if you have the sequence code.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said. Sweat had begun to pop out all over my body. The implications were… well, staggering. I actually felt the floor tilting under me. And I immediately knew — absolutely 100 percent knew — that we hadn’t seen how bad this could get. Not even close.
“You okay, Joe?” asked Bug.
“Not even a little.”
“Well, it gets crazier,” he said, his excitement raising his voice to a mouse squeak. “We’re eighty percent sure that Gateway had a spy in Oscar Bell’s organization. A guy who Bell hired to obtain the Unlearnable Truths for Prospero but was actually on the payroll for Erskine and company. He used ‘Mr. Priest’ as his cover name, but we were able to lift prints from reports he filed, and even though the prints were degraded we ran them through—”
“I don’t need the science,” I said. “Give me the damn name.”
“Esteban Santoro. Joe, he’s Rafael Santoro’s brother.”
Rafael Santoro was the chief assistant — the Conscience — to the King of Fear, Hugo Vox. Santoro was one of the most brutal, sadistic men I’ve ever encountered. A man who raised coercion to a dark art form. He was also the man who formed and personally trained the Kingsmen, the elite special ops fighters who worked for the Seven Kings. I’d fought the man and he’d nearly killed me. Church made the guy disappear. Not sure if he was alive or dead.
Now we had to deal with his brother.
I said, “You’re going to hurt me, aren’t you, Bug?”
He cleared his throat. “Esteban Santoro, or Mr. Priest, used to be one of the field operators for the Ordo Fratrum Claustrorum. And when he left them he went to work for Howard Shelton. He was a Closer.”
“Shit.”
“And this guy Priest apparently acquired all of the books on Prospero’s list.”
“Right, but they were destroyed along with Gateway.”
“The books maybe,” said Bug, “but not the scans.”
I stiffened. “What scans?”
“That’s what we found. Priest oversaw a complete scan of the Unlearnable Truths. It was part of their search for the sequencing code.”
“Where are those scans?”
“I’m working on that now. It was outsourced to one of the contractors who worked with Erskine, but we don’t know which one. Nikki thinks she’ll have that figured out by this morning. Noon at the latest.”
“That’s incredible, Bug. You’re amazing.”
“No, I’m not. I’m slow. I should have figured this out before now.”
“No, you’re amazing. I could kiss you.”
“Please don’t.” He paused. “But that lady who works for you…? The one with all the stuffed pandas on her desk? Lydia-Rose? Maybe you could put in a good word for me…?”
I laughed. “Done.”
“Just so you know,” said Bug, “I called this in to the Pier. Mr. Church was busy so I told Mr. Bolton. He’s already working on it, too.”
“Nice. Thanks!”
I disconnected the call and turned to Toys. “You were the Conscience to the King of Plagues. You knew Rafael Santoro.”
He flinched and went pale. “Yes.”
“The name you were about to give me when Bug called… was it Esteban Santoro?”
Instead of being surprised he merely looked old and sad. “Yes.”
“What I don’t get,” said Junie, touching his arm, “is why they went after you.”
“They wanted my laptop.”
“Right, but why?”
Toys said, “The Closers were supposed to look for any files related to Majestic.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE
I ordered a team to come and clean up for Toys. The bodies were taken away in discreet laundry hampers and everything was smoothed over with the night manager. Then I called Church to bring him up to speed.
“First Junie’s office was robbed, and now they came after Toys’s laptop, looking for anything connected to Majestic,” I said. “Our bad guys know a lot of stuff they shouldn’t know and it’s pissing me off. I mean, how do they know?”
“That is perhaps the most important question we need to answer,” said Church.
“Boss,” I said, “that Project Stargate stuff. I’m beginning to think we need to take a closer look at that.”
“To make a bad joke, Captain, you’re reading my mind.”
He hung up. My next call was to Harcourt Bolton and I woke him from a sound sleep. He was drowsy and grumpy, but he perked up when I explained why I was calling. Like Church, Bolton said that he needed to make some calls.