“Stop!”
Benson Childe came running out of the building with a phalanx of armed Barrier personnel at his heels. I saw Deirdre MacDonal and Detective Chief Inspector Martin Aylrod following behind. Because they wore uniforms the street cops looked at them in confusion. The crowd was even more confused because guns were being pointed at cops and no one was pointing a gun at the crazy Yank with the dog.
Childe’s men pushed the cops against the wall and frisked them. I didn’t think they were involved—and was pretty sure they weren’t—but I was in no mood to take stupid risks. I lowered my weapon and eased the hammer down. Childe didn’t ask me to surrender it.
“Sit and watch,” I said to Ghost, and he did just that. The wolf was still there behind his eyes. I could feel the killer behind my own.
Childe leaned close to me. “For God’s sake, Ledger, I know these men. What the bloody hell happened here?”
“Seven Kings,” I said.
Chapter Fourteen
Over the Atlantic, Flight 7988
December 17, 2:42 P.M. GMT
Dr. Rudy Sanchez sat in his first-class seat and fumed. He disliked air travel at the best of times and definitely didn’t want to be in the air when terrorist bombs were going off anywhere in the world. In the days following the attack on the World Trade Center, Sanchez had been one of a team of doctors who had descended on Ground Zero to help in any way they could. As a psychiatrist, Rudy saw firsthand the initial waves of post-event trauma that were the result of the attack. He saw the wound inflicted on the hearts, minds, and souls of the people working the site. The haunted eyes of police and firefighters who spent hours picking through the rubble to locate pieces of people who had been their friends or colleagues. The dreadful loss of confidence in the world in the eyes of the thousands of people who stood constant vigil at the fringes of the disaster. The strange blend of relief and guilt in the eyes of the survivors.
During the flight he’d listened to the constant buzz of frantic discussion aboard the United Airlines jet. Since 9/11, terrorism was part of everyday language. It had become so commonplace that jokes were made about terrorists. Books and movies had been made about it. And the thought that it was already that deeply enmeshed with ordinary life chilled Rudy to the bone.
And now he had the Nicodemus file and everything about this matter was unnerving. The file was strangely incomplete. There should have been hundreds of pages of it. Evaluations, transcripts, after-session notes, and a detailed record of the man’s arrest, trial, and incarceration. Instead there were a few dozen pages of very general notes that might apply to any prisoner. Commonplace stuff. Worthless except for the very last set of handwritten notes taken a few hours ago by the prison psychiatrist, Dr. Stankevi
ius, and even they were cryptic. References to a “goddess” but without context to identify which goddess.
The overall thrust of Nicodemus’s words had tended toward Judeo-Christian references, particularly with his reference to Dumas and Gesmas. They were variations on the spellings of Dismas and Gestas, the names of the two criminals crucified on either side of Jesus. But since those names were not in the standard Bible but in the highly apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, it seemed likely they were simply part of the overall religious delusion the prisoner had built up around himself. None of it tied back to either 9/11 or the London, at least as far as Rudy could determine. There was nothing else of substance in Stankeviius’s notes.
Rudy was alone in first class. Since the bomb went off there had been a flood of seat cancellations. He used his secure access to open a video Web chat with Bug via satellite. A small box opened up, showing the face of the head of the DMS computer lab. Although his name was Jerome Taylor, even his own family called him Bug. He had been a computer hacker as a kid and came onto Mr. Church’s radar when he tried to hack Homeland, believing that if he had the right access he could locate Osama bin Laden. Maj. Grace Courtland and Sgt. Gus Dietrich showed up at Taylor’s door the following morning. He was offered a deaclass="underline" work for the DMS or go to jail. When he accepted and was told about MindReader, he fell deeply and irrevocably in love.
“Hey, Doc!” he said brightly. The world could be in flames and Bug would still be jovial. Rudy wondered how Bug’s mood would change if the Internet crashed.
“Bug,” he said, “are you sure you sent me all of Nicodemus’s records?”
“Yeah.”
“Could you have missed something?”
“Could Oprah fit into Beyoncé’s bikini?” He snorted and said, “Either they have a lot of his stuff stored on paper records or …”
“Or what?”
“Or someone’s removed it.”
“Can’t MindReader tell if someone has been into the computer files? Doesn’t it leave a handprint?”
“Footprint, and yes. Except there’s no footprint here. From a computer standpoint nothing appears to be missing, and I’ve gone into the Willow Grove and Philadelphia PD databases, too. There’s just nothing else there. We can’t even verify his first name. If he has one.”
“Hijo de puta.”
“The fact that all of this is missing is deep magic. I’m getting a Woodrow just thinking about how sexy this is, ’cause we’re not talking about some pissant tapeworm. Someone’s punked the system just like MindReader. And they’ve absconded with the treeware and—”
“‘Treeware’?”
“Paper. Actual we’re-so-last-century printed documents. Somone in meatspace actually swiped the physical records as well. That’s stuff we can do when we bring our A-game. No one else has anything like MindReader, so I can’t grok how they did this. Whoever he is, this guy’s a freaking ghost.”
Rudy disconnected and then called Mr. Church.
“Problem?” asked Church.
Rudy explained about the records. “Is it possible Bug missed something?”
“Bug doesn’t make those kinds of mistakes.”
“Then, that begs the uncomfortable question as to the possibility of a more sophisticated computer system than MindReader.”
“Unlikely. It would have to have been designed and built entirely without a connection to the Internet or we’d have gotten a whiff of it. Or built with an operating system so different as to be unrecognizable as a computer to all other computers. It’s doubtful something that exotic would be able to interface with the existing systems and networks.”
“Deep Throat has a phone system that we can’t understand or crack.”
Church didn’t comment.
“Coming at a time like this,” said Rudy, “with terrorist activity ongoing, a mystery of this kind is more than a bit unsettling.”
“Yes,” Church agreed. From his tone of voice he might have been agreeing to a comment on the weather, but Rudy knew him as well as anyone at the Warehouse. There was an edge of strain in Church’s calm voice.
Church disconnected and Rudy tapped keys to bring up the booking photos of Nicodemus. From the side he was unremarkable. Thin, slightly stooped, with a receding chin and thinning hair. An ordinary man. From the front, however, he was something … else. His eyes were a little too far apart, and the left was set higher and at a slight angle. His nose was thin and his mouth was a wet smile. Rudy enlarged the photo and stared into the man’s eyes. They were cold and bottomless. Those eyes, and that smiling mouth, suggested a warped sensuality that Rudy found immensely distasteful, and a deep understanding of things that had no natural place in the human mind.