THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
N
obody goes into the Oval Office expecting to get a lot of sleep on the job. Samuel Curtis’s aides woke him in the middle of the night two or three times a week, minimum.
A year into his presidency, Curtis had gotten used to it. He could switch off like a light now. Order an air strike, back to sleep. No problem.
Except when Cade was involved.
The last time Cade asked for a meeting, a little girl in Nevada was saying terrible things in a dead language. Less than a week later, Curtis had to order an entire town sterilized—burning every house and building to the ground, along with anyone and anything inside.
That still kept him up some nights.
Curtis had been in politics his whole adult life before he ran for president. He’d seen every variety of human need, greed and weakness. He thought he was beyond surprise.
Then, on his inauguration day, he met with his predecessor, an overgrown frat boy with a mile-wide mean streak.
“I’ve got something to give you,” the former president had said. Privately, Curtis thought two wars in the Middle East and an economy that resembled a bounced check were enough. There was no affection between the two men. It had been an ugly campaign. Curtis had been compared to the Antichrist. More than once.
But he kept his mouth shut as his predecessor passed him a folded piece of paper: the daily launch codes for America’s nuclear missiles. A seemingly random set of numbers that could end all life on Earth if spoken, like magic words. Curtis put them in his suit jacket pocket. He could have sworn he felt them there after he took his hand away.
Curtis watched as the former president opened a small safe behind a portrait of Kennedy on the wall. Inside was a wooden box. He took a key from a lanyard around his neck and opened it.
Inside the box was a small, leather satchel, worn and shiny with age. He showed it to Curtis, then handed him the key.
“You don’t want to lose either of those,” his predecessor said. He seemed more relieved to be rid of the key than the nuclear codes.
Curtis met Cade in person later that night, and realized why.
President Curtis thought of that moment now, as he checked the clock. 3:17 a.m.
Nuclear war, the president could comprehend. As awful as it was, it fit within the horrors he could accept. He could rationalize it.
What Cade brought him from out of the dark ... there was nothing there to bargain with, nothing to negotiate. It was, for the most part, entirely out of his control.
That frightened him, every time.
You wanted the job, the president told himself. So get to work.
EACH PRESIDENT DEALT with Cade differently—brought a different group inside the knowledge of his existence. FDR didn’t bother telling Truman, but Harry Hopkins, the head of the WPA, sat in on every meeting. JFK had Cade communicate through his brother, and a few other trusted aides. LBJ met with him alone, but he was the exception. More and more, it was an entire committee who sat with the president when he met with Cade. Curtis’s group was called the Special Security Council.
They met in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center under the East Wing of the White House. Most people knew it by the name made famous in spy movies and on TV: the Bunker. But that was the movies. In the White House, everyone called it by its acronym: PEOC, or P-OCK.
After 9/11, P-OCK was retrofitted—dug deeper into the earth, made more spacious and wired with high-capacity communications lines.
But one thing didn’t change: a hidden door that led to a tunnel called a “disused gas main” on the White House’s Environmental Impact Statement. The tunnel led all the way back to the Reliquary. It had been Cade’s pathway to the White House since 1960.
Only the president, his liaison and Cade knew about that tunnel. To the Secret Service, it always looked like Cade and his handlers were simply there when the president arrived. Privately, it drove them nuts.
Inside, P-OCK didn’t look too dramatic. The main chamber was a regular-sized conference room, just like you’d find in a better hotel.
Still, Zach was in awe as soon as he emerged from the tunnel.
Griff noticed. “You might want to close your mouth before you start catching flies,” he said as he sat down heavily in a chair.
Zach shrugged, trying to recapture a little cool. “I’ve never been in here before,” he said.
Griff only grunted in response. Zach thought he looked a bit grayer than usual. Probably past his bedtime.
The double doors opened, and a man wearing a black suit and an earpiece came in. He scowled at the three of them, but waved an all-clear.
President Curtis entered. He was tall and slim. Despite the hour, he was fully dressed and shaved. Zach knew the protection detail had code-named him “Sinatra,” because he always seemed to be wearing a tux, no matter what his actual outfit, no matter what the time of day. It was one reason Zach always insisted on wearing a suit.
Curtis was followed by another agent, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and, finally, by Vice President Lester Wyman—a small, pale Smurf of a man. Wyman was already scowling. This didn’t surprise Zach. Wyman was always pissed off about something.
The veep was selected as a concession to the values voters. He’d been in the Senate for years before Sam Curtis—most of that time railing about profanity in movies and violent video games—and was the freshman senator’s mentor. Then his protégé shot out of nowhere and became the most powerful man in the world.
Still, nobody took Wyman too seriously, even when he got the VP spot, mainly because no one could imagine an American president named Les.
But the president listened to him. Wyman was a true, down-and-dirty political type—smiling for the crowds, then carving up his friends and enemies in the back room. Every president needed a hatchet man like that.
The president sat. Everyone else in the room followed. Zach felt oddly excited. He had no idea what was going on—neither Cade nor Griff had explained anything to him—but it had to be important.
“Well, gentlemen, you’ve got us here,” the president said. “What’s the latest nightmare?”
Griff stood and went to the laptop and projector at the head of the room. Zach tried not to grin. Some things never changed. In a government meeting, even a vampire’s handler had to use PowerPoint.
Griff clicked on the laptop, and Zach’s photos lit up a screen at the back of the room.
“ICE intercepted this container earlier tonight,” Griff said. “What you’re seeing are modified human limbs.”
He stopped on the photo of the soldier’s tattoo on the severed arm.
“They’re from U.S. servicemen.”
“God above,” someone whispered.
“What does it mean?” the president asked.
Griff pressed another button, and more corpses appeared on the screen. Zach drew in a sharp breath.
The images were from Dachau. He’d seen them in history class, but those were the least offensive, the ones let out for public consumption. Nothing this graphic. Dead bodies in row after row after row. Bulldozers pushing them into mass graves already filled to the brim.
Griff looked at Cade. Cade uncoiled from his position, as if finally interested.
“Unmenschsoldaten,
”Cade said.
“What?” Curtis asked.
“Nineteen forty-three. The Nazis had a number of occult projects within the concentration camps,” Cade said.
He talks about it like he was there, Zach thought. Then he realized, he probably was.
“At that time, we discovered a scientist who was trying to create what he called
Unmenschsoldaten
—soldiers built from the parts of corpses.”
Cade looked directly at the president. “Someone has started that process again. These limbs were modified to be assembled into
Unmenschsoldaten.”
He paused, as if to let it sink in. Everyone looked grim. Zach, on the other hand, sensed a chance to reset the agenda. He knew it was a risk, but hey, he didn’t get ahead without taking a few chances, and getting noticed....
So he raised his hand.
The president noticed. “You don’t have to wait to be called on, Zach. Go ahead.”
“I know I’m new to this,” Zach said, “but ... so what?”
Everyone in the room stared at Zach like his mother dropped him on his head. A lot.
“ ‘ So what?”’ Griff repeated.
“Well ... yeah,” Zach said. “Maybe this is just thinking outside the box, but who cares if someone digs up some corpses and puts them back together? I mean, sure, that’s insane, and even kind of impressive, but we’re talking about a corpse here.”
Cade looked at him. Zach’s mouth went dry, but he managed to look back.
“Living humans can walk away from car wrecks, falls, even gunshots,” Cade said to him. “Now imagine a human body with all the human weakness removed. A corpse doesn’t feel pain. Doesn’t get hungry. Doesn’t suffer shock, or exhaustion, or remorse.”
“But it’s still just a dead body—” Zach insisted.
“All they remember how to do is kill,” Cade said. “Shoot them, they keep going. Burn them, they keep going. They do not stop. They do not rest. Given a day, an
Unmenschsoldat
can murder a thousand people with its bare hands. A dozen
Unmenschsoldaten
could quadruple that body count. A platoon—or an entire battalion—could increase that number exponentially.”
The smirk faded from Zach’s face. But Cade wasn’t about to let him off the hook.
“Do you understand? This is a weapon that literally
kills cities
—one person at a time.”
Silence.
“Is that far enough ‘outside the box’ for you, Zach?” Griff asked.
Zach looked down at the table.
“That will do,” the president said.
“How do we even know there’s more of these things?” Wyman piped up. “You only found the one container, right? Did you hit the panic button for nothing, Cade?”
The contempt in Wyman’s voice almost made Zach’s jaw drop. Didn’t he know what he was dealing with? He had to, if he was here—but he still talked to Cade as if he were any other subordinate, when the sane response would be to run screaming for the door.
Maybe that’s how vampires had lived so long, Zach thought, despite all the warnings in legends and folklore: the endless inability of humans to see past their own noses, to face what was right in front of them.
Griff spoke up. “Actually, sir, the same billing code was used for shipments that have already been in the U.S. for a while. A couple came through Baltimore, one through Long Beach, and then another one came to Los Angeles just last week. It looks like the one ICE intercepted was almost the last.”
“Which was the last?”
“That would be the one headed for Los Angeles right now. On another container ship. Due to arrive at the port in two days,” Griff said.
“That doesn’t prove anything,” Wyman said. “Could be a coincidence. Could be nothing.”
Griff looked at Wyman with disbelief.
“I think what the vice president is asking is, do we have any idea who’s behind this?” the president asked. “Or are we just guessing at the intent here?”
“We don’t know. The container was shipped out of Kuwait City,” Griff said. “We’re assuming an Islamic Jihad splinter group or sleeper cell.”
“Still seems pretty far-fetched to me,” Wyman said.
“Who did it is irrelevant,” Cade said. “There’s only one person who actually knows the secrets necessary to create the
Unmenschsoldat,”
Cade said. “Dr. Johann Konrad. I would like to bring him in.”
“Wait,” Zach said. “This guy is still alive?”
The president looked at Griff. “Didn’t you give him the briefing book?”
“He says he skimmed it,” Griff said.
“Do you have any direct evidence Konrad is involved?”
Cade shrugged. “No.”
“He’s the only man who could be doing this,” Griff said.
The president looked at his file. “According to this, that’s not strictly true, is it? Other people have used Konrad’s discoveries, haven’t they?” The president read from the page. “Evans City, Pennsylvania, 1967. Camden, New Jersey, 1957 ...”
“We couldn’t prove Konrad was involved in those, but we suspected him,” Griff said.
“We made him a deal,” the president said, still looking at the folder. “Full pardon. Full citizenship. We may not like it, but I am bound to honor my predecessor’s wishes, based on that favor he did for us in 1981.”
“That was no favor,” Griff said.
“You might feel differently if it was your life on the line, Agent Griffin,” the president said sharply.
“He’s still our best lead,” Griff insisted.
The president thought for a moment. Wyman used the pause as a chance to jump in again.
“I have a question,” he said. “Why didn’t we know about this before?”
“We only made this discovery a few hours ago,” Griff said.
“That’s not what I meant,” Wyman snapped. “Soldiers who don’t need to eat, don’t need body armor and can’t be stopped. Why aren’t we using this technology ourselves?”
Zach was pretty sure Wyman didn’t see the president’s look of annoyance.
“CEO Number Thirty-Seven,” Cade said, his voice flat. “Signed by President Eisenhower in 1958. Expressly forbids the use of any of Konrad’s discoveries by any agency of the U.S. government.”
Zach finally recognized something Cade was talking about; he’d gotten that far in the briefing book. The CEOs—Classified Executive Orders—were how the presidents left instructions for their successors after they had been introduced to the big secrets, including the existence of Cade. The formal numbering only began with Roosevelt, during World War II. Before then, the presidents had merely written things down in a leather-bound journal that stayed in a safe in the Oval Office.