The
Sea of Hope
December 21, 5:26 A.M. EST
The chopper touched down on a helipad that extended out from the foredeck on massive hydraulics. As soon as the door was open, deck crew ran to escort us down a ramp and into a protected receiving alcove. Our gear was loaded onto railed carts that whisked them away. Then the rope was unclipped and the bird rose and headed back across the black water toward Rio, on the mainland of Brazil.
The alcove doors closed and a tall man who had a smile that could burn your retinas and a hairpiece that had no origin in nature entered and shook Circe’s hand.
“Dr. O’Tree, so
wonderful
to have you join us,” he said in a thick Italian accent. “I thought you had decided not to participate.”
“Miss this?” Circe said with a good affectation of genuine surprise. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world!”
His smile never wavered. He was of the kind who would roll with anything short of having Ghost hump his leg without allowing his professional demeanor to falter.
“Mr. Alesso, I’d like you to meet my aide, Mr. Kent.”
Alesso shook hands with Church, who managed a convincing smile. I wish I had a photo of it. I could win bets with it.
“It is very much my pleasure to meet you,” said Alesso. He was probably the real deal, but he sounded like a bad actor in a pizza commercial.
She turned to Gus, who was in a crisp white naval uniform. Ghost sat primly by his side, playing his role. “And this is Chief Petty Officer Wayne. The Navy thought we could use him.” She lowered her voice to a confidential tone. “His dog’s a bomb sniffer.”
“Ah!” said Alesso, arching his eyebrows as if we were all part of a wonderful bit of intrigue. “And these other gentlemen are here for Ms. Lavigne?” He pronounced it “La-vig-ne.”
Circe began to introduce me, but I alpha-maled myself into the moment.
“Je m’appelle Jean-François Fieuzal.”
Alesso blinked at me. “Perdono?”
I rattled off my full credentials in French, watching to see if he got any of it, but after a sentence or two it was clear I’d left him stranded on the beach.
“I’m sorry. I don’t speak—”
“Mr. Fieuzal is with the Canadian Cultural Liaison’s office. They arranged for the additional security.”
My apparent inability to speak English cut short any need for polite chitchat.
Alesso looked at the “security team.” They were really working it. All five of them wore identical sunglasses despite the early hour, none of them had a flicker of expression on their stone faces, and they stood as tall as possible. Even DeeDee looked ten feet tall.
“They’re in the security database,” said Circe, and handed over a thick folder. “Here are their papers.”
“Welcome aboard the
Sea of Hope,
” Alesso said with a bright smile. The only reaction he got was a microscopic twitch of Top’s upper lip. Alesso’s smile looked like it had become fragile, so I covertly gestured for Circe to wrap this up before the poor guy fainted.
Alesso showed us to staterooms—Echo Team’s was a suite directly across the hall from Lavigne’s. We carried our stuff inside and closed the door. Circe’s stateroom was on another deck, but as soon as she dropped her suitcases she came back. Church and Dietrich, too.
“Welcome to the
Sea of Hope,
” Top said, echoing Alesso. “Now what?”
Dietrich opened one of the cases and handed me a pair of glasses. “First things first.”
I put them on. The prescription was fake, and the heavy frames contained an ultrathin receiver that allowed me to get the same lens display intel feed. The lenses worked like one-way glass, so I could see the display, but no one looking at me could. Dietrich tossed me the small pocket mouse that would allow me to scroll the intel. I adjusted glasses, studied the floor plan for this part of the ship, then flicked through some other data to make sure the uplink was working fast.
The shades Echo Team wore had the same technology built in.
Circe and Church were already on their laptops. I was about to kick off a new version of the same discussion we’d been having about what the hell to do now that we were onboard when Circe said, “Oh my
God
!”
“Now what?” Bunny muttered, but we all gathered around her.
Circe said, “This just came in from Dr. Cmar; he’s an infectious disease doctor at Johns Hopkins.” “He sent these images. Look!”
The first image that filled one lens of the glasses showed Charles Osgood Harrington IV, the rich kid everyone called C-Four. “This was the first victim. Look at the lesions here and here.” Little dots appeared on the display and moved to indicate pustules that covered the corpse’s face. The lesions were pale, of course, without blood pressure to give them shape and color, but it was clear enough what they would have looked like when the kid was still alive.
“Attractive,” I said. “What’s it tell us?”
“The symptoms reported by the various first-responder EMTs and police were a rapid onset of pustules that covered the bodies of the victims. Remember in the news, the stories about mycotoxins from the tomb of the firstborn son of the Pharaoh? We’re seeing a kind of anaphylactic reaction, like hives. Only the whole thing is amped up. Super-hives.”
“So?”
“This isn’t nature, Joe, and it’s not pure mycotoxins. I’ll bet you this is some kind of designer pathogen. Something created to kill very quickly but not spread. Zero communicability.”
“Targeted for specific victims,” I said.
“Exactly,” said Circe. “Now, think about the Seven Kings. What is their defining characteristic?”
“Misdirection.” It had become an automatic response by now.
“Right! They want us to think that this was their endgame … but it’s not. These victims may be firstborn, but that’s not what we’re seeing. This is the Plague of
Boils
!”
“Okay. But we know their endgame is mass murder on the
Sea of Hope
. What’s your point?”
Church cut in. “We’re going under the premise that the ship is going to be destroyed by a bomb or something equally large scale. Probably during one of the key speeches. However, remember what Toys told you. Gault is running this show. Gault isn’t just a member of the Kings … .”
“He’s the King of
Plagues,
” I said. “Shit.”
Bunny said, “Please do
not
say that this is worse than we thought. Do not say that.”
Circe looked terrified. The same look was probably on my face.
“Gault is planning something even bigger than the deaths of all these celebrities,” she said softly. “He’s planning something
huge.
”
Church said, “Something the world will never forget.”
The Chamber of the Kings
December 21, 5:27 A.M. EST
“You can’t be here!” cried Toys. “You’re—”
“Not as stupid as you seem to think.”
Gault pointed his gun at Toys’ face. “Toss that phone over here. No, put it on the floor and slide it. None of your sodding tricks.” His voice was as cold as his eyes were hot.
Toys lowered the phone, weighing his chances of throwing and hitting Sebastian without getting shot. Gault was not a great shot and Toys had a knife, clipped to the back of his belt … but at this distance Toys didn’t like his chances. He bent slowly, placed the phone on the floor, and shoved it away from him.
“Now back away. Keep your hands where I can see them.”
Toys raised his hands and straightened. He took two small backward steps. Gault advanced and crouched, holding the gun steady and looking right at Toys as he fished on the floor for the phone.
Toys whirled and dove for the nearest throne, hitting it with his outstretched palms and knocking it over. The backrest of the heavy seat chopped downward, missing Gault by inches as he spun away and snapped off two quick shots. The first missed. Both shots punched into screens on the wall, killing the FOX and MSNBC news feeds. Toys threw his weight against a second throne and it immediately canted over. Gault pivoted and fired again. The bullet punched red fire through Toys’ thigh at the same instant the canting throne of the King of Fear struck the King of Plagues on the shoulder. Both men screamed in agony. The gun went spinning across the floor as Gault collapsed under six hundred pounds of teak and ebony and carved ivory.
Toys flopped to the floor and rolled over onto his stomach as blood poured from both sides of a through-and-through wound. Secondary pain exploded within him as the jagged ends of his shattered femur ground together, pinching torn muscle. Toys screamed and screamed as he clawed his way across the floor toward the fallen pistol. A dozen feet away Sebastian bellowed in rage and pain as he struggled to fight his way out from under the massive throne. The gun was almost in reach, Toys’ scrabbling fingers clawed at the wooden grips, and then the world exploded in white-hot agony as Sebastian Gault, free and standing erect, stamped down with all his force on the gushing wound in Toys’ leg.
The
Sea of Hope
December 21, 6:01 A.M. EST
“Something bigger than slaughtering all the people on this boat?” asked Top. “Shee-ee-it.”
Khalid raised a hand. “Permission to leave the boat.”
“These guys keep twisting it, don’t they?” asked DeeDee.
John Smith simply grunted, which constituted a long-winded speech for him.
Something occurred to me and I snapped my fingers. “I think the Kings may have thrown us another curveball and I think they did it through their own men.”
“How?” asked Church.
“It’s more of the twisted logic that they use. Sarducci, the shooter I interrogated. He made a real point of saying how much the Kings wanted me dead. And you, Circe, and Auntie.”
“So?”
“What if they didn’t? Or what if our deaths are beside the point? What if Hanler was the real target all along?”
“What’s the value of that target?” Top asked.
“Silence,” I said. “I keep coming back to the disinformation thing. It’s
everything
to these guys. Now factor in the fact that we now know Sebastian Gault and Hugo Vox are involved. We know that Vox used his position as a screener and all that, but he wore a lot of hats. He ran Terror Town, and he also had his think tanks. One of those think tanks was made up of—”
“Thriller authors. Like Martin Hanler,” Church finished.
“Right. Hanler told me that he talked about his Hospital bombing plot in front of a bunch of other writers. Maybe he mentioned it again—or one of
them
mentioned it during a brainstorming session at T-Town. I mean, think about it. A member of one of the most dangerous terrorist organizations on earth has an entire think tank of novelists cooking up elaborate plots for him. Then he brings in counterterrorism teams from all over the world to run the plots and work out all the details. Sure, they’re supposed to be coming up with protocols for stopping them, but if you flip that around, they’re also creating worst-case scenarios.”
“Like the London.”
“And probably Fair Isle and Area 51.”
“And the
Sea of Hope,”
Church concluded. “I think we can safely assume that Hugo did not share all of the scenarios cooked up by the think tanks.”
Church opened his cell and called Bug to order him to hack all of T-Town’s think-tank records.
Under my breath I said, “Thanks, Joe … damn fine work. Couldn’t save the world without you.”
Dietrich snorted. “Really? You joined the DMS for all the pats on the back?”
Khalid sat down on the end of the couch. “That think-tank thing is pretty scary. All of those devious brains—authors, CT experts—working
hundreds of hours to create the worst possible scenarios. And we’re supposed to figure it out by the time the concert starts tonight?”
DeeDee looked at her watch. “Thirteen hours.”
“Thank you,” he said. “A countdown is very comforting.”
“Okay,” I said, cutting in, “let’s get to work.”
That fast they were all business.
One of the suitcases was filled with canvas bags filled with devices the size of shirt buttons. These are one of Hu’s very best gadgets: sensors with a microchip inside and a tiny burst transmitter. Peel off the tape on one side and you expose a chameleon chemical. Press it to a wood grain door for five seconds and turn it over and the wood grain is imitated perfectly. Peel off the tape on the other side and press it to the door, and unless you know it’s there, you won’t see it. Especially if it’s set low, below the ordinary fall of the eye. The sensors were designed specifically for bomb detection, and when they finally hit the market it will be possible to position them just about anywhere and maybe give some warning before things go boom!
We each had a dozen multipurpose processor units as well. Those were the size of a pack of Juicy Fruit and had the same chameleon coating. Affix one to a wall or stairway or anywhere in the path of human traffic or airflow and the device collects and analyzes the air for radiation, nitrites, and dense concentrations of viral material. It wasn’t as sensitive as the BAMS unit I had at Fair Isle, but it wasn’t far behind. And the devices were networked for greater effect.
There were also a bunch of Minicams, and some booster units to collect the signals from the tiny sensors and uplink them to the DMS satellite.
“You each have assigned sections of the ship,” I said. They nodded and put their glasses back on, using the pocket mouses to pull up floor plans. “We have time, so place the sensors unobtrusively, but keep your eyes open, too. Report
anything
that looks hinky.”
“Hooah,” they said, and left one at a time.
I took my batch and followed my map. I headed over to the central main-deck area, which was where the concert would be. It was roped off and there were scores of workers laboring under a hot morning sun. Finishing the bandstand, doing sound checks on the massive speakers, hanging bunting, setting up tapes for line control.
The best angle to see the whole area was by the team working together to inflate several thousand red and white balloons. There were six men, all of them Mexican, seated on folding stools surrounded by big tanks of helium. Huge nets had been erected to catch any stray balloons as the men filled, tied, filled, tied, over and over again. Four other men took netfuls of the balloons aft, where, according to Circe, they would be released as the
Sea of Hope
sailed into Rio. The balloons were all biodegradable and would eventually burst harmlessly in the stratosphere, themselves acting as a symbol of green choices for a polluted planet.
I listened to the Mexicans chatter among themselves in Spanish. Nothing more sinister than speculation on next year’s World Cup. One of them noticed me looking and met my eyes. He looked from me to the thousands of red and white balloons and back to me; then he rolled his eyes. I gave him a sympathetic smile and turned away. A few seconds later I heard one of the men speaking in a strangely squeaky voice and turned to see that he had sucked some of the helium out of a balloon and was speaking like Donald Duck. Everyone cracked up.
Then a fussy-looking white man in a cruise line blazer yelled at him and the Mexican pasted a contrite look on his face and tied off the balloon. As I passed, I made a quiet remark about the fussy man’s personal hygiene, only loud enough for the six Mexicans to hear. They all cracked up again.
I moved on.
My credentials got me into the VIP area. Behind gates and decorative shrubbery was an entirely separate set of pools and waterside bars. I slouched around trying to look like I wasn’t looking. Everywhere I looked, though, was a paparazzo’s dream. Movie stars in thongs or Speedos that left nothing to the imagination. I saw Pink, wearing a bikini that could fit comfortably into a shot glass, lounging by the pool reading a Kelly Simmons novel. Two chairs away, John Legend was playing chess with that short guy from
American Idol
. Legend was kicking his ass. There were rock stars and R&B stars and rappers and celebrities from the movies and TV. Some of the Generation Hope kids—daughters and sons of the global power players—were peppered among them, either gawking in starstruck awe or pretending the kind of indolence that only teenagers can pull off.
I moved among them, placing the chameleon sensors here and there, taking my time so that I didn’t attract any attention.
I didn’t see anyone looking particularly sinister. It’s not like on the old
Batman
TV show, where bad guys wore shirts with HENCHMAN, THUG, and EVIL ASSISTANT stenciled on the chest. Would be pretty damn useful, though.
I drifted out of the VIP area and placed the last of my sensors on the major stairways, then headed back to the suite. The others were already there. All of the sensors had been placed, but no one had seen anything.
The Chamber of the Kings
December 21, 5:22 A.M. EST
“You traitorous bastard!” Gault screamed as he stamped down over and over again. “You Judas!”
Toys felt his broken thighbone shatter. The pain was so intense, so enormous, that he could no longer scream. His mouth was open, his lungs pushed air out, but the only sound he could make was a thin and nearly ultrasonic shriek that tore itself from each tortured nerve ending.
The world swam in and out of focus as clouds of black and red swirled behind his eyes.
Then abruptly the pain stopped.
The moment was suspended inside a crystal teardrop of time. Toys wondered if this was what it felt like to die. Had the jagged ends of broken bone severed an artery? Was he bleeding out and drifting into the big darkness? Or had he reached the end of pain? Was pain a finite thing, a line drawn in the mind that, once crossed, became an irrelevant concept?
He did not know and did not know how to think about it.
He lay in a cocoon of unfeeling silence for—how long? A second? Hours?
Then feeling returned to him, one unkind bit at a time.
The first thing he felt was a tear breaking from the corner of his eye and falling down toward his ear. It felt cold instead of warm.
“G-God … ,” Toys whispered. A whisper was all that he was capable of.
Darkness obscured his vision and he blinked. No. Not darkness.
Sebastian Gault stood above him, impossibly tall. Pale and blue-white in the glow of the wall of screens. Not the face Toys had loved for so long. This was Gault’s new face. Blond and angular and handsome. The work of surgeons. Nothing that was part of nature. He looked like Apollo. Like the god of the sun.
“God … ,” Toys whispered again. The pain was an unrelenting fire in his leg. “Please …”
Gault stood and looked down at Toys. With his head bent his eyes were in shadows. It gave his face a weird appearance, like a beautiful skull.
“We’ve had our suspicions, you know. The Goddess and me. She didn’t trust her son, and I’ve lost my trust in you.”
“ … God … please …”
Gault ran both sets of fingers through his hair. He removed a handkerchief and mopped sweat from his face. He folded the handkerchief and returned it to his pocket.
“Last week we planted bugs in Hugo’s office. We heard him make a call to someone at the DMS. I wanted to kill him right then and there. We decided that we would let Santoro do it. Goddesses always need new angels.”
“ … Sebastian, please …”
“And then we heard you in Hugo’s office. You, on the phone. Not just with the DMS … no, you had to go and call sodding Joe Ledger!”
Gault darted in and kicked Toys in the stomach like a placekicker going for a thirty-yard punt. Toys screamed and writhed. Bloody spittle flew from his mouth and patterned the tile floor.
“I won’t ask you why,” said Gault, his mild tone completely at odds with what he had just done. “I know why.”
“L-love … ,” Toys croaked in a voice that was barely human.
“Yes. Love. You pathetic little faggot. Do you think I would ever lower myself to love a creature like you? All you’ve ever been to me is a convenience. Someone to get things. Someone to make sure the dry cleaning is picked up and the wet bar fully stocked.” Gault shook his head. “Love? It’s not love, Toys … it’s jealousy. You can’t stand the fact that I can love and you’re too damaged and twisted to be capable of it.”
Toys’ lips formed the word again: “Love.”
He braced his elbows and tried to heave his head and shoulders off the
floor. Instantly there was a burst of unbearable agony from his shattered leg that tore a ragged scream from him. He tried to twist away from the pain, but as he did something hard dug into his opposite hip.
“Don’t dare use the word ‘love’ for what
you
feel,” sneered Gault. “I
know
love. Eris
is
love. I know the love of a goddess incarnate.”
Breathing through the pain took all of his strength, but Toys fought to get words past his gritted teeth. “You … don’t understand … you fucking idiot … .”
The words materialized as a snarl of unfiltered rage.
Gault smiled. “I understand everything.”
“No, Sebastian,” Toys snarled. “ … you
never
understood me.”
Toys dug his hand under his body, under his hip, to the hard thing that gouged into him. He wrapped his fingers around the pistol, and with a savage growl that was more animal than human he tore it out, pointed, and fired.