I was watching a child die.
The virus was going to kill him in minutes. An hour tops. That was all the time this kid had left. There was no cure, no magic bullet. There was something so enormously obscene about it that I could feel the anger rising like lava inside me. The Modern Man within me—the civilized aspect of my fractured persona—was numb with the shock of this. My inner Cop wanted answers. But it was the third aspect, the Warrior, who was grinding his teeth in a murderous rage. Even that part of me, the Killer, was offended by this because this was something that transcended civilization, transcended law and order: this was the primal and visceral response to protect the young of the tribe. And here was one who was in mortal peril,
and no laws or strength of arms could do a single thing. All I could do was use the last minutes of this child’s life to further my mission.
God …
The kid led me through the outer layer of the FIRE facility—the staff quarters, supply rooms, mess hall, and other nonessential sections. The doors to each room stood ajar. No one was there. There were signs of conflict, though: coffee cups that had dropped and shattered on the floor, briefcases left standing in the middle of a hallway, discarded purses, and a number of cell phones that had been tossed to the floor and then smashed under heel. Mikey lingered by a broken BlackBerry that had a pink gel case. He looked at it for several seconds, chewing his lip and furrowing his brow.
Then he looked up at me. “Mom had a nosebleed,” he said. “She had to lie down.”
“I know, Mikey. I’m sure she’ll be okay,” I said, and the lie was like broken glass in my mouth. “Let’s go see your dad.”
Mikey suddenly smiled brightly. “Daddy’s taking us to work today!”
I started to speak, but then the moment passed and the dull, disconnected look returned. Mikey sneezed and continued along the hall.
At the end of the hallway was an air lock, the door of which was blocked by a wheeled desk chair. A sign read: CENTRAL LABORATORY COMPLEX.
“Daddy said to keep the doors open,” said Mikey as he squeezed past the chair and entered the air lock on the far side.
“Where is your dad, Mikey?”
“In the Hot Room. Though … it’s not hot. It’s pretty cold in there. Isn’t that funny, that they call it a hot room?” He sneezed. “C’mon … .”
Everything he said had a dreamy quality to it. Even when he looked at the blood on his hands from his sneeze his expression didn’t flicker. It was apparently unreal to him, and I guess that was a blessing. No tears, no screaming, no panic. Even though I was glad the kid wasn’t terrified and screaming, his calm was eerie.
I followed him through two more air locks. The front and back doors of those locks whose lock assemblies had been torn apart, the hydraulics bashed out of shape and ripped open.
“Did your dad do that?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Mikey said defensively. A fit of sneezing hit him and the kid reeled against the wall and sneezed until blood fairly poured from
between his fingers. I crossed to the closest office and found a box of tissues, tore out a fistful, and brought them back to the kid. He mumbled something and used the whole wad to clean his face.
“Mom had a bloody nose, too,” he said. Then he seemed to forget about the tissues and they fell from his small fingers.
Tears burned my eyes, but I sniffed them back. I couldn’t wipe them away while wearing the suit, and I couldn’t risk blurred vision. I bit down on my fury, grinding it between my teeth until my jaw ached.
I followed Mikey through the central labs.
“Daddy’s in there,” Mikey said, pointing a trembling finger at the far wall, into which was set a much heavier air lock. Huge, thick, solid, and probably impenetrable under any ordinary circumstances. It was the kind of air lock that would have kept even the most virulent pathogen locked in, but I knew that we were past that point. The proof stood beside me, tracing his name on a desktop in his own blood.
This one had not been disabled. But the kicker was what someone had painted on the wall in dark red paint.
The symbol of the Seven Kings.
I bent close to examine it. The HAMMER suit’s filters don’t allow smells to get in, which was fine with me, because as I looked at the dark graffiti I realized that it wasn’t paint. It was blood.
I spoke quietly into my helmet mike: “Cowboy to Deacon, are you seeing this?”
“Copy that,” said Church, then added, “I would welcome the opportunity to chat with the person who painted that.”
Casual words, but not casually meant.
“Roger that.”
I turned to Mikey. “Did your daddy put this here?”
He looked at it for a blank second and then shrugged.
We crossed the room to the door to the Hot Room. The air lock was flanked by double keycard terminals with computer keyboards. The idea was to make sure that no one could enter this kind of lab alone. They used the same thing in missile control rooms. No one can just waltz in and launch the nukes, and the odds of two complete whackos working on the same shift, in the same place, who both wanted to release the Big Bad Wolf were pretty damn slim. These systems allowed for one person to require
compliance and agreement from another, and if something was hinky the other person’s lack of compliance kept the monster in its box. The terminals were too far apart for one person to operate them both simultaneously. The computer codes had to be entered in unison, as did the key swipes.
Dr. Grey probably used a colleague to gain entry earlier. Why not? Back then nobody knew he was nuts.
Now he sent a kid. His own damn son.
“I have a card thingee,” Mikey said. He bent and picked it up from the floor near the air lock. “Daddy told me to leave it here. There’s one for you, too. He said we had to type in those numbers and then use the cards. He said to do it together. Like a game. It’ll only work if we do it together.”
He pointed to the metal door, on which a security day code had been written in what looked like lipstick. Rose pink. A nice color.
“Okay, Mikey,” I said in a voice that I barely recognized as my own. “Let’s play the game.”
The Seven Kings
Four Months Ago
Gault stood by the throne of the King of Plagues. Up close Gault could see that the chair was ornately carved with scenes from Gilles Le Muisit, Hieronymus Bosch, William Blake, and Jean Pucelle’s
Psalter of Bonne de Luxembourg.
He trailed his fingers over the carvings of the frantic and helpless doctors, the wretched infected, and the skeletal dead.
“Lovely,” he murmured.
“Take it for a test drive, Sebastian,” suggested the American, his tone of voice at odds with the grandeur of the moment.
Gault climbed into the seat. It was very comfortable, the leather seat built over padded springs.
Toys stepped up behind him and pushed the heavy chair closer to the table. “Looks good on you,” he whispered.
Gault nodded and his eyes were filled with fire. “King of Plagues,” he murmured.
Toys looked at Fear. “What now? Does Sebastian swear some kind of
oath? Or is it more secret society–ish—you know, with a blood pact and all that?”
The others laughed.
“We thought about that in the beginning,” said the Frenchman. “We concocted a dozen rituals and, yes, blood oaths were considered. But in the end we decided on a much stronger ritual.”
Gault look up sharply. “What kind of ritual?”
“We gave our word,” said the American. “One to the other.”
Both Toys and Gault started to laugh and then realized that the American wasn’t joking.
“Really?” asked Gault. “That’s it? Your
word
?”
The Saudi leaned forward, his face serious and intense. “It all depends to whom your word is given. We each agreed to give and receive our word of trust. We agreed never to lie to one another. To everyone else, to the world, to our closest friends on the other side of that door, yes. We agreed that our word would only matter to the Seven Kings and the Seven Consciences of the New World Trust.”
“It’s a covenant,” said Thieves. “A sacred one.”
Toys and Gault exchanged a look that turned into a smile.
Famine cocked an eyebrow. “You find that amusing?”
“Well,” said Gault, “it smacks of ‘honor among thieves,’ doesn’t it?”
The Frenchman shrugged. “I assure you that this is not a joke.”
“He’s right, Sebastian,” said the American. “The one thing we don’t joke about is the integrity of our word when given to the others here in this room. It’s what bonds us and defines us.”
“Very impressive, I’m sure,” said Toys. “But what does Sebastian get out of this?”
The grin that bloomed on the American’s face was broad and toothy and filled with true delight. “Why, son, you both get every goddamned thing you ever wanted. And I’m not talking about caviar and blow jobs; I’m talking about everything. You think you understand what power is? I’m here to tell you, boys, that you surely do not.”
The King of Famine nodded. “When people talk about secret societies they claim that these groups want power, but they don’t attempt to decode what the word ‘power’ truly means. But I will bet you already know.”
“Money,” answered Gault. “It’s always about money. Money buys
power—which itself is a catchall term for the ability to do things. Purchase, push, build, destroy, own … money is the only path worth walking.”
“Root of all evil,” said Toys. Several of the Kings nodded at him with approval. “So then … what
is
evil?”
“It’s how the losers describe the winners,” said the American.
Gault nodded and rubbed his palms back and forth along the armrests of the throne. “So,” he said, “you really are an ancient society?”
The American gave a dismissive laugh. “Nah. That’s the myth we’ve been constructing. It’s what we sell to the rubes. Truth is, we’ve only been in operation for twenty-five years, give or take. We studied all those conspiracy theories to design our group and build our myth. And we hijack a lot of stuff to make that myth look ancient. It’s easy, ’cause if you look hard enough you can find clues to anything, whether it’s there or not. That’s how all those kooky New Age books about Lemuria and Atlantis and the Alien Reptoids got traction. Take a glyph from some tomb that shows a guy in a weird headdress sitting in a chair, and with the right caption underneath it in a book aimed at the right audience you can convince people that it’s a spaceman who visited the Aztecs. Erich von Däniken made a frigging fortune with that, all that
Chariots of the Gods
bullshit. We spent years on that sort of thing, and we used our people to seed it into pop-culture books on ancient societies, historical mysteries, and conspiracy theories. We poured money into programming at local libraries and coffeehouses for the most vocal nut jobs, and we used dummy corporations to set up a lot of the more subversive small presses that publish books about the Illuminati and the Trilateral Commission. All of that stuff. Mind you, some of it’s true, of course, and that makes the deception that much more compelling. There’s an old carnival barker saying: ‘Use nine truths to sell one lie.’ That’s us.”
The Saudi gave a thin smile. “None of us are what the world thinks we are.”
Gault turned to him. “Even you? Why pollute your own name, then? Everyone knows your face—”
“Do they?” interrupted the Saudi. “People know what they’ve been led to believe. You see this face, this beard, these clothes … but do you see the dialysis machine that the world press insists I’m dependent upon? Do you know for sure that this beard is real? Or that under this beak of a nose
I don’t have a smaller one that has been carefully reshaped? Or … is the face beneath the makeup the real one and this exterior merely special effects? How do you know that I’m even a Muslim? I could as easily be a Christian or a Jew or a Buddhist or even an agnostic or atheist. You wonder how it is that I am here in this country when every airport security person in the world knows my face. I ask, are you sure that I have ever been out of this country since 9/11? Or that a surgically altered twin is not making videotapes for me in a cave somewhere? Is any of this true? Or real? I am, after all, the King of Lies.”
“Your people would tear you to pieces if they got so much as a whiff of this,” Gault said.
The Saudi shook his head. “My ‘people’ are all here in this room.”
Gault leaned back and folded his arms. With narrowed eyes and pursed lips he studied the Kings. “Well, well,” he said softly.
Toys gestured to the empty throne on the dais. “Who’s that for?”
“Ah,” said the King of Gold, “that is for the Goddess. It was the Goddess who gave birth to the Seven Kings. It was her idea.”
“It was a family idea,” corrected the American. “
We
cooked it up together and
we
brought in the first of the other Kings.”
The Frenchman turned and bowed. “Indeed, my friend, and I meant no insult. Everyone here honors your contributions.”
“So … what is my role?” interrupted Gault. “You say that I’m to be the new ‘King of Plagues.’ It sounds wonderful and flattering, but in practical terms, what does it mean? If your goal is to destabilize rather than destroy, then you surely don’t want a global pandemic.”
“God, no!” laughed the Frenchman. “We want a scalpel, not a sword.”
Toys looked at Gault, saw how those words cut delicately into him.
A scalpel, not a sword.
How beautifully phrased to appeal to Gault’s vanity. How sweetly it matched his hungers, his passions.
They know him too damn well.
Gault nodded slowly.
“Then let us seal this in sacred honor,” said the King of Famine.
They all stood and placed their hands over their hearts. Sebastian Gault and Toys exchanged a brief look and then did the same. The room quieted and one of the Consciences must have touched a rheostat, because the lights dimmed to a soft glow that extended no farther than the table.
“Sebastian Gault,” asked the American, the King of Fear, “do you pledge your life to the Seven Kings of the New World Trust?”
Without a second’s hesitation, Gault said, “Yes, I do.”
“Will you keep the secrets of the Seven Kings of the New World Trust?” asked the Israeli, the King of War.
“I will.”
“Will you share your truths with the Seven Kings of the New World Trust?” asked the Saudi, the King of Lies.
“I will.”
“Will you share your secrets openly with the Seven Kings of the New World Trust?” asked the Russian, the King of Famine.
“Yes, I will.”
“Will you trust your fortune to the Seven Kings of the New World Trust?” asked the Italian, the King of Gold.
“I will. Freely and completely.”
“Will you forswear all other allegiances in favor of the Seven Kings of the New World Trust?” asked the Frenchman, the King of Thieves.
“All but one,” said Gault. “I have long ago placed my life and trust in the keeping of my friend Alexander Chismer. Toys. As long as he is part of this deal, then I agree with my whole heart.”
Toys looked up at Gault’s face, surprised at his words. Surprised and more touched than he would have ever admitted.
“Toys is your Conscience,” said the Saudi. “You speak for him with this oath, and he is oath bound to us as are you.”
Everyone turned to Toys, who was shaken by everything that he was hearing, and his voice was charged with emotion: “I will always be with Sebastian.”
There were appreciative nods all around.
The King of Fear said, “Sebastian Gault, do you pledge your life to the Seven Kings of the New World Trust?”
“I do,” said Gault, and as he said it he felt tears burning in the corners of his eyes.
“Then,” said the Saudi, “welcome to our brotherhood. All hail the King of Plagues!”
In the small room the applause was thunderous.