But now …
He licked his lips again and reached for the phone to call the warden. He told him the bare facts, allowing the warden to draw his own inferences. When he replaced the receiver he continued to stare at the empty chair.
He believed—wholly and without a shred of uncertainty—that he had just encountered a phenomenon he had always considered to be a cultural myth, a label given to something by minds too unschooled to grasp the overall science of the human condition. Stankevi
ius had no religious beliefs, not even a whisper of agnosticism.
And yet … He was sure, beyond any doubt, that he had just met true evil.
Chapter Twelve
Barrier Headquarters
London, England
December 17, 2:22 P.M. GMT
This was turning into one bitch of a day. The images of the burning Hospital were now overlaid with an image of the mocking logo of the Seven Kings and the film loops of the towers crumbling into dust on a sunny New York day. I felt enormously out of place and thoroughly impotent. The bad guys were killing people and I was taking meetings.
Jesus.
I cut out of the conference as soon as I could. They let me use an empty office so I could make some calls.
Church answered on the third ring. He doesn’t say anything when he answers a phone. You made the call, so it’s on you to run with it.
“Seven Kings,” I said. He made a soft sound. It might have been a sigh, but it sounded more like a growl.
“How sure are you?” he asked quietly.
“Very.” I told him about the video. “Deep Throat let us down on this one.”
“Yes,” he said. “By the way, did you note the time of the explosion?”
“Yep. No way it’s a coincidence.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences. Expect the newspapers to catch on soon.”
“That’s going to be a shitstorm, Boss. Is this a Kings/Al-Qaeda operation? Are the Kings showing support for Uncle Osama? Or is this some attempt to hijack the 9/11 vibe to make this one even worse?”
“All good questions in need of answers. We’ve been in a holding pattern with the Kings for months.”
“Balls,” I growled. “This is how the military must feel after more than a decade trying to find bin Laden.”
“Not all problems have quick solutions. The longer you’re in this business, the more you’ll come to know that.”
He was right. Even though my first few missions with the DMS were insanely difficult and dangerous, they had ended quickly. A few days or a week tops. I guess it’s because something has to be in motion and have gained traction before it comes onto the DMS radar, which means we usually have to fight the clock to keep the Big Bad from doing whatever it has cooked up. The Kings thing was different. It was huge but vague. It was like trying to guess the size and shape of the Empire State Building by standing four inches away from the wall at ground level. Perspective was all skewed.
“In the short term,” Church said, “the authorities are going to have to work some spin on the 9/11 connection.”
“Hate crimes,” I said.
“If you’ve been reading the reports I’ve been sending you, then you’ll be aware that there has been a marked increase in hate crimes here in the States for a couple of months now. Someone has been waging a very dangerous propaganda war on the Net.”
“Yes, teacher. That’s connected to the Internet thing. The Goddess and all that.”
“All that, yes.”
“Tied to the Seven Kings?”
“Unknown but likely. Recent posts have called her the Goddess of the Chosen.”
“The Chosen, huh? Uh-oh. I must have missed that.”
“Skimming your reports isn’t the same thing as studying them.”
I declined to share the comment that occurred to me. Instead, I said, “Have the Net postings mentioned the Kings? Or Kingsmen? Or the Spaniard?”
“Not so far. MindReader will flag any that do.”
“I wish we knew more about the frigging Kings. I mean, kings of what? Did anything ever come out of my suggestion that it might be an alliance of the states that sponsor terrorism?”
“There are too many ways to build a list of only seven who want to harm the United States.”
“It’s always tough being the popular kid in school. What about something biblical? Wasn’t there something about the Book of Revelations?”
“I think that’s more likely, but there also are too many ways to interpret the religious significance of the number seven, including something from the Book of Revelation,” he corrected. “And yes, I think that’s likely. Most scholars agree that the seven kings in Revelation are allegorical references to seven nations. The prophecy says that five of the kings are known, so the scholars contend that they are Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, Pagan Rome, and Papal Rome, or possibly Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Medo-Persia, and Greece.”
“Are you reading this off the Net?”
“No.”
“So you just happen to have that memorized?”
“What’s your point, Captain?”
“Nothing, Boss. But you’re intensely weird.”
“So I’ve been told. The fiery destruction we saw today certainly had an apocalyptic quality.”
“You have any friends in the prophecy industry?”
“Funny,” he said without humor. “I have some contacts who are experts in symbology, particularly as it applies to terrorism.”
“MindReader come up with anything yet?” I asked.
“Nothing immediately useful.”
“I thought that doohickey could find anything.”
“One of these days I’ll have Bug explain to you how computers work. You can’t program it to look for ‘bad guy’ and expect it to cough out a name. MindReader looks for patterns, but you need the right search argument. It’s all about choosing the right key words.”
I grunted. “Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m just frustrated.”
“That’s a club with a large membership. What else have you got?”
I told him about the Sea of Hope discussion.
“I agree that it would be high profile,” he said, “but enormously difficult. However, I’ll pass along your concerns to the team overseeing security. In the meantime, we got something unusual from the warden of Graterford Prison. Homeland took his call and rerouted it to me.”
“Graterford in Pennsylvania?”
“Yes. He told me about a dead prisoner with the numbers twelve/seventeen carved nine times into his skin, and a current inmate who seems to have unusual personal knowledge of the incident. A very strange character named Nicodemus.”
“Nine times?”
“Yes.”
“Any traces of an eleven?”
“Add the digits.”
“Oh,” I said. “Crap.”
“I put a request into the Department of Corrections for Nicodemus’s records, but that will take too long, so I directed Bug to hack the system. We should have everything within the hour. You can access the material from your laptop, but I’ll have the highlights sent to your BlackBerry.”
“Who is this fruitcake? He have any ties to terrorist groups?”
“None of record. But then again, not much is known about him prior to his arrest, which occurred in 1996. He was arrested at the scene of a multiple homicide in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania.”