Read The King of Plagues Online

Authors: Jonathan Maberry

The King of Plagues (6 page)

Four Months Ago
Nouveau Visage Center for Cosmetic Surgery
Beverly Hills, California
The Burned Man had a hundred names in a hundred places around the world. His own name had been left behind when he had been forced into hiding, and over the last eight weeks he’d changed names weekly, often daily, relying on identities that had been carefully put in place over fifteen years. He had millions of dollars in numbered accounts, and safe-deposit boxes in forty countries filled with cash, jewels, and bearer bonds. As long as he was never identified he could remain free and live well for the rest of his life, and he was still a relatively young man. He had been forced to leave behind a fortune worth many billions, and a name that had been on short lists for the Nobel Prize and a knighthood.
Now … ? His downfall had come through no fault of his own but through betrayal, and since then he had become infinitely careful. And infinitely bitter. When his name was mentioned these days, it was always accompanied by words like “terrorist,” “mass murderer,” and “most wanted.”
Escaping with his life had been immensely difficult, and even his injuries were mild compared to what they might have been. He knew that he should be grateful to be alive and free and rich.
He was also a very careful man. Before his accident, it would have amused him to know that the authorities were looking for him in all the wrong places. Now it was a simple fact of life, the result of the careful planning that would have to be routine forever.
He felt no guilt for what he had done. When the pain from the surgeries flared, or the memories of his flesh melting as he struggled to escape the explosion, the Burned Man vented his anger by wishing he had done
more harm. When he unwrapped his bandages and stared into a mirror at the ruin of a face that had once been on the covers of over five hundred magazines worldwide, from
Forbes
to
National Geographic,
his anger became an almost physical force—a burning ball of hatred that he wished he could spit out at the world.
The pills and the booze and the plastic surgeries helped, but only in the way that morphine helps to hide the pain of a cancer but does not remove the tumor. They did not take away the deep loss and sense of betrayal that hung burning in his mind every minute of every day.
He lay on a chaise lounge by the pool in the recovery pavilion of Nouveau Visage, the most exclusive, confidential, and expensive center for cosmetic and reconstructive surgery in the United States. Even after weeks, much of his face was still wrapped in surgical dressings, as were the tips of his fingers. A tall glass of sparkling water garnished with cherries and mint leaves sat sweating on a nearby table, and movie stars in robes and bikinis lounged around him. Guests almost never spoke to one another. It was part of the mystique of “we were never here” that made the place so exclusive. Even the invoices sent by the billing department were in code so no secretary or IRS agent could sell secrets to the tabloids. The items on the Burned Man’s bills were for personal training, spiritual counseling, and financial advising. There was no trail to follow.
He sipped his drink, wincing only a little at the effort.
The Burned Man wondered if he was becoming addicted to surgery, a phenomenon he knew inspired many of his fellow inmates to return here at least twice a year without really needing to. Since he had checked in, the doctors from this facility—and specialists he’d paid exorbitant amounts to have flown in—had repaired the burns, done skin grafts, reshaped his ears, performed a complete rhinoplasty, augmented his chin, reassigned fat to give his body a new shape, and even transplanted a new eye to replace the one that had been boiled in his head during a geothermal explosion. When the bandages came off and the surgical bruises healed he would be a totally new man. A Swiss surgeon even had replotted the whorls and loops of his fingerprints using a radical new procedure that cost $1 million per finger. The downside was that it would have to be repeated every two years, but that was a small price to pay for his freedom. As long as he was careful not to
leave DNA where it would come to the attention of the authorities it was likely he would never be identified and never be caught.
The tissue grafts and the new eye had been provided by his friend and former lover Hecate Jakoby, and they were a perfect match to his own. They should be—Hecate was one of the world’s leading genetic designers and she had grown them especially for him in case of just such an emergency. Hecate had done the same for the Burned Man’s companion, who sprawled on the adjoining lounger reading an L. A. Banks novel and sipping a Bloody Mary.
“May I freshen your drink, sir?” asked the pretty nurse, and when the Burned Man nodded she bent and retrieved his glass, giving him a generous and deliberate view of her cleavage. The nurses had a private bet that the Burned Man was one of the British royals and all wanted to bag a duke or a lord.
The Burned Man admired the view and gave the nurse as much of a smile as his bruises and bandages would allow. His good eye twinkled and his lips and teeth were perfect.
“Lovely girl,” said the Burned Man once she was gone.
“She’s a cow with fake tits,” murmured the other without looking up from the page.
“I’d like to shag her, not marry her—,” the Burned Man began, but a cell chirped softly on the table between the loungers. His companion picked it up, flipped it open, and said, “Hello?” with complete disinterest and maximum boredom.
“I want to play a game,” said the voice at the other end.
The companion stiffened, which the Burned Man caught. They bent their heads together to listen.
“Who is calling?” said the companion in a banal secretary’s voice that was entirely unlike his own.
“That isn’t the response we agreed upon. I’ll hang up in five seconds.”
The Burned Man and his companion shared a look that was equal parts wariness, surprise, and intrigue. There was no one else within earshot, and the noise from the artificial waterfall was an excellent sound blocker. The Burned Man nodded.
“Very well. What game would you like to play?”
“Horse racing.”
Horse racing. The Sport of
Kings
. Sweet Jesus.
Toys looked like he wanted to run, but the Burned Man smiled and took the phone. “Assure me that this is a secure line.”
“It’s secure, Sebastian.” The man had a lot of Boston in his vowels.
“I don’t know that name,” the Burned Man lied. “Why are you calling me?”
“First, tell me how you are. I’ve heard some alarming reports. Sebastian Gault—third most wanted man on eighteen international police lists.”
“Fourth,” Sebastian corrected.
“Third. Janos Smitrovitch had a heart attack in his hot tub last night.”
“Third then. Thanks for sharing. Now please bugger off—”
“Ah, c’mon … be civil for Christ’s sake. Can’t you squeeze out enough enthusiasm to shoot the breeze with an old friend? At least tell me how you are.”
Sebastian Gault—the Burned Man—sighed. “Oh, I’m just peachy. I feel like a new man,” he said dryly. Speaking hurt less this week than it did last and the physical therapy had gone a long way to restoring the mobility of his jaw and neck muscles, but the discomfort was always there. The doctors said that some pain might linger forever. Gault was learning the skill of eating his pain. Each bite made him more bitter and less forgiving.
“And Toys?”
Gault turned an inch toward his companion. Toys smiled.
“The same.”
“He still listen in on all your calls?”
“Yes,” said Toys. “Someone has to weed out the cranks and bill collectors.”
The American laughed. “Thank god you haven’t changed. The world would be a much dimmer place.”
Gault cut in irritably, “What’s this about?”
“Ah … it’s about destiny, my friend.”
“Whose?”
“Why, yours, of course. This is a big day for you guys.”
“No, it isn’t. Today we plan to have seaweed wraps and then I think we’ll each get a massage. That’s as much destiny as I want, thank you very much.”
“I doubt that’s true. What happened to your dreams of empire? I remember you telling me how you planned to make a king’s fortune, how
you were going to reshape the world by forcing the U.S. out of the Middle East in a way that would put tens of billions in your pocket.”
“It was hundreds of billions,” Gault said with a touch of frost, “and if you read the papers you’ll know that things didn’t quite work out as planned.”
“Yes, but we are so impressed by the scope and subtlety of your plan. It should have worked. It would have, had you placed less stock in true believers and more in practical cynics like Toys.”
Toys leaned back and gave his friend a charming eyelid-fluttering smile.
Gault covered the phone and hissed at Toys, “Tell me, ‘I told you so,’ again and I’ll smother you in your sleep.”
Toys mimed zipping his mouth shut, but his smile persisted.
Into the phone Gault said, “Tell me again why we’re having this conversation? And try for once not to be so sodding cryptic. And … who is this ‘we’ you’re referring to? Or has the Dragon Lady gotten back into the game?”
“Ha! I’ll tell her you called her that. She’s killed for less. We’ve both seen her do it.”
“The only excuse your mother needs for killing someone is that the day ends in a
y.
She’s the most lethal bitch I ever met.”
“But you love her.”
“Of course,” conceded Gault, which was true enough. Right around the time Gault first made the cover of
The Lancet,
Eris had begun summoning him to wherever she was staying for long weekends filled with every kind of sybaritic excess. Although Eris was twenty years older than Gault, her sexual appetites were more ferocious than his, and that was saying quite a lot. Even Gault’s late, lamented Amirah—that treacherous witch who was the reason he was swathed in surgical wraps—was less of a bedroom predator than the American’s mother. More than once Gault had thought about marrying Eris. If she’d been younger or, perhaps, saner, he might have. Even so, the memories of being the fly in her erotic webs were so potent that he felt a serious stirring in his loins.
He said, “How could I not?”
The American laughed again. He had a bray of a laugh that came from deep in his chest.
“Tell me what this is about,” Gault prompted.
“I’ll do better than that, Sebastian. We’ll show you. Get dressed and pack your stuff. I’ll have a car outside in twenty minutes.”
“You don’t even know where I am.”
“Of course I do,” said the man. “Nouveau Visage … in the pool area. You’re on the fifth chaise lounge; Toys is on the sixth. Oh … and don’t bother with the fresh glass of sparkling water the nurse is bringing. They’re charging you for Bling H20, but it’s only Perrier.”
He disconnected.
Gault sat there, letting his body pretend a posture of relaxation while his good eye cut right and left around the pool area. Beside him, Toys clicked his tongue.
“Well, well,” Toys said softly. “That’s unnerving.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Trite as it sounds to say it—especially coming from me—I feel violated.”
“Everyone who meets that son of a bitch feels violated,” Gault said. “And for good reason.”
They looked around, making it casual, faking some conversation and genial laughter, but neither of them could spot the spy or spy camera. It made Gault itch all over.
Still …
“Why did he call? How did he know where we were?”
“‘We,’” Toys echoed.
“We,” Gault agreed. He stood up. “Let’s go back to our suite,” he suggested.
“To search it?” asked Toys.
“No,” said Sebastian Gault. “To pack.”
Barrier Headquarters
London, England
December 17, 1:50 P.M. GMT
“Who the bloody hell are the Seven Kings?” Detective Chief Inspector Martin Aylrod looked at the screen and then at me as if this was somehow my fault.
However, Deirdre MacDonal turned to him in surprise. “Good God, Marty, don’t you read
any
of the reports I send you? They’re that terrorist
organization the DMS and Barrier have been crossing swords with since—”
“Well,” Childe interjected, “it’s really just the DMS. We’ve only provided support, but this is the first evidence of them being here in the U.K.”
“Which doesn’t answer the questions of who they are,” insisted Aylrod. “Christ, Benson, you look like you’re about to pass a kidney stone.”
I said, “We don’t actually know
who
they are. In general terms they’re a secret society supposedly modeled along the lines of the Illuminati.”
“More like SPECTRE,” muttered MacDonal. “A lot of James Bond supervillain nonsense.”
“They’re a bit more than that,” Childe said dryly.
“What do you mean,” demanded Welles.
I told them all about Deep Throat and the cryptic info he’d fed us. “Hard to tell if they’re a genuine secret society or a criminal group using that as a PR campaign to make themselves appear ancient and powerful.”
“They blew up a sodding hospital,” snarled Aylrod. “That seems pretty effing powerful to me.”
“Sure,” I agreed neutrally, “but that’s today’s news. Until now they’ve been like Professor Moriarty—behind-the-scenes and supposedly tied to a lot of stuff, but really frigging hard to connect with any certainty. And they like using pop culture to build their mystique, so it’s really hard to pin down anything clear-cut about them. There’s a ton of stuff about them on the Net, and a lot of conspiracy theorists have tied the Seven Kings to a zillion ancient groups and prophecies.”
“What are their politics?” Welles asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine, sir. Deep Throat said that they’re dedicated to chaos.”
“‘Chaos’?” Welles said dryly. “Could you be a bit more vague?”
I smiled and spread my hands.
Aylrod said, “And your lads have had run-ins with them?”
“Quite a few.” I gave them the highlights. “Their street-level soldiers are called the Chosen. The odd thing is that the Kings have so far worked with extremist groups among the Shiites, Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and a Sunni group. Yes, I did say Sunni.”
“So, they’re opportunists,” suggested Welles. “Working with whoever will work with them?”
“Or manipulating any group they can to further their own aims,” I said.
“Clever,” said Aylrod. “Have you managed to interview any of these ‘Chosen’?”
“Sure, but these street-level guys are just that. They’re members of isolated cells so far removed from the policy level that they genuinely don’t know anything beyond a couple of words and names. Nothing that connects us to anything useful. So far we’ve been able to determine that the Chosen are the ground troops. There’s a group that’s a big step up from them called the Kingsmen. The DMS had one tussle with them, and they are very, very tough hombres.”
“How tough?” asked Aylrod.
“Man for man they could hold their own against the SEALs or the SAS. Smart, resourceful, superb level of training, and they’re equipped with the latest and the best gear.”
“Who’s training them?”
“Unknown.”
“Any of them in custody?”
“So far none have been taken alive.”
“Pity,” said Welles.
“Yeah,” I said. “We’re anxious to have a meaningful chat with one of them.”
“What else have you learned?”
“Not much. There’s someone called the Spaniard who acts as a liaison between the street teams and the Kings. He’s known to be utterly ruthless and to have a special love of torture with knives and edged weapons. But that’s all we have on him. Everyone we’ve heard of who has run afoul of him is dead. I saw one of his victims. Not a pretty sight.”
Aylrod said, “Any leads through the equipment they use?”
“No. It’s either Russian or Chinese made or stolen American stuff. The street teams are more likely to have AKs; the Kingsmen came at us with M4A1 carbines and a couple of HK416s. Those HKs are state-of-the-art-Delta Force weapons.”
Aylrod nodded gravely, then pointed to the screen. “What happened after the logo was painted?”
“He walked away,” said MacDonal. “The camera at the corner caught
him, but then he vanished. Looks like he either entered the hospital or somehow slipped away out of sight of the other cameras. We have someone searching the camera feeds in an expanding grid to see if he shows up anywhere else.”
The Home Secretary nodded. “Assessment?”
MacDonal pursed her lips. It made her look like an evil librarian. “The person in the video may or may not have been part of this Seven Kings group. He could have been a gangbanger given a few quid to paint that on the wall.”
“That was a grown man,” Childe observed. “Not a teenager.”
“How can you tell?” asked Welles.
“General build and the way he walked. He was confident and careful, but not furtive.”
I nodded. “And he’s painted that logo before. He wasn’t tentative about it. He wasn’t trying to figure out what to write or how to write it. He did it as quickly and smoothly as if he’s done it plenty of times before.”
“A gangbanger would be just as quick and smooth,” MacDonal said.
“Sure,” I agreed, “but as Mr. Childe pointed out, this was no kid.”
Welles said, “Any clue as to why this group calls itself the ‘Seven Kings’?”
Benson Childe shook his head. “We helped the DMS with the research on that, but so far we haven’t struck gold. There are over three hundred thousand hits on that name on the Internet. A boat storage facility and a real estate developer of that name, both in Florida; the Seven Kings Relais hotel in Rome; a mystery novel called
The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings
published in 1899; a tomb of the Seven Kings in Andhra Pradesh, India; a punk rock band of that name; and even a town here in London.”
“Where in London?” asked Welles.
“It is a suburban development in the borough of Redbridge, part of the Ilford post town. We have people out there, but so far that image has not been found on any walls.”
“We’ll send this out to all stations and departments,” concluded Welles. “And I believe that we’ll be using Captain Ledger as an advisor. He’s asked to be part of the hospital investigation and I think that would be a wise choice. Moving on. What do we know about the actual fire?”
“The fire is still too hot for a proper analysis,” said a frail-looking man with watery brown eyes who sat next to Childe. Unlike the others, he
hadn’t given me his card. “But from gasses collected at the site the fire investigators have verified the presence of nitrates, and in great quantities. This was definitely a bomb. Or, more precisely, several.”
“How many, Darius?” asked Welles, and that fast I knew who the frail man was. Darius Oswalt, Director General of MI5. I knew him by name and reputation, but the mousy physique didn’t match the legends I’d heard. I expected a Daniel Craig type, not someone who looked like a low-level chartered accountant.
Oswalt spread his hands. “We’ve looked at the CCTV feeds from the moments leading up to the explosion. Witness reports vary between four and nine blasts. However, we estimate that there were fourteen.”
“Fourteen?” gasped Welles.
“No one reported that,” said Aylrod.
“Not surprising,” said Oswalt. “But the CCTV images of Whitechapel Road show fire erupting from multiple points when the ‘first’ blast happened. We believe that all of the bombs had been set to detonate at the same time and were positioned to do the greatest possible structural damage. Considering how much of the complex has already collapsed, I think it’s a safe bet that many of the charges did, in fact, simultaneously detonate. As for the mistiming? There are always some x-factors when it comes to the wiring and setting of the digital timers. The blasts all happened within four seconds of each other, though, so it’s as close as may be. How the terrorists managed to smuggle fourteen bombs, give or take, into a building with moderately good security—well, that’s the real question, isn’t it?” He paused and from the look on his face it was clear that he had a bomb of his own to drop. “Based on the CCTV footage, we can make a pretty good guess as to the time the perpetrators intended all of the bombs to go off.”
“What time?” I asked, and everyone leaned forward, caught by Oswalt’s grave tone.
The MI5 man sucked his teeth for a moment, eyes introspective.
“According to CCTV,” he said slowly, “the bombs detonated at precisely eleven minutes after nine this morning.”
“Bloody hell,” murmured Aylrod.
I closed my eyes for a moment and felt an old ache in my chest.
The bombs had gone off at 9:11.
The State Correctional Institution at Graterford
Graterford, Pennsylvania
December 17, 1:51 P.M. EST
He sat in his cell and smiled at the shadows. The cockroaches were his friends. The spiders, too, and he read great mathematical truths in the subtle intricacies of their webs.
The guards feared him. The gangbangers never messed with him. They’d tried during his first week, but never again. Longtime inmates gave him space in the mess hall and would walk out of their way so as not to step on his shadow during afternoon exercise. The multitude of the Aryan Brotherhood mythologized him, ascribing biblical powers to him and endlessly arguing over hidden meanings in his most casual comments. Men had been shanked over such disputes. The Jamaican and Haitian convicts thought that he was some kind of white
bokor
. The Muslims thought that he was a demon. The madmen among the prison population thought he was a god. Or an angel. Men had been killed for speaking ill of him.
In truth, Nicodemus took no sides among the thirty-five hundred prisoners within the walls of Pennsylvania’s largest maximum-security correctional facility. He would not allow himself to be tattooed with gang markings or colors. He did not deliberately sit with any one group or another. When asked why by a wide-eyed and fatuous young Latino fish, Nicodemus had closed his eyes and said, “Because I belong to all of His people.”
“Whose people? God’s? People say that you think you talk to God. Or maybe the Devil. But that’s just bullshit, isn’t it?”
Nicodemus merely smiled and did not answer. A week later Jesus Santiago was found dead in the laundry room. His tongue had been cut out and the numbers 12/17 were carved nine times into his flesh on his chest and back. The medical examiner concluded that Santiago had died from a heart attack. He was twenty-one years old and had no history of heart trouble.
Nicodemus told the prison psychiatrist that he knew nothing of the young man named Jesus Santiago. “No such person dwells within my
mind,” he said. “I cannot see him with my left eye, nor do I see him with my right.”
“You were seen speaking with the boy,” prodded the psychiatrist, Dr. Stankevi
ius.
“No,” said Nicodemus. “I was not.”
“A guard saw you.”
“If he says so, then he is mistaken. Ask him again.”
When the doctor asked Nicodemus if he knew the significance of the numbers 12/17, the little prisoner smiled. “Why ask a question to which you already know the answer?”
“I don’t know the answer, Nicodemus. Why don’t you tell me?”
“Time is not like a ribbon stretched from now until then. It is a pool in which we all float.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Search your mind. Dive into that pool.”
That was all that Nicodemus would say. His eyes lost their focus and he appeared to go into his own thoughts.
After the session was over, Dr. Stankevi
ius searched through the folder for the eyewitness report by the guard who had been walking the yard that day. The report was gone. The psychiatrist requested that the guard be brought into his office, but the officer in question had not reported for work that day. When Dr. Stankevi
ius pressed the matter, he learned that the guard had been transferred to a facility in Albion, at the extreme northwest corner of the state. No attempt to contact him either through the system or via personal telephone or e-mail was successful. Two weeks later the guard was fired for being drunk on duty and went home, put the barrel of his great-grandfather’s old U.S. Cavalry revolver into his mouth, and blew off the top of his head. He left a suicide note written in tomato sauce on his bedroom wall. It read:
For sins known and unknown.
That same week the file on the death of Jesus Santiago, the young Latino, vanished from Dr. Stankevi
ius’s locked office. When the doctor attempted to locate the boy’s record on the prison server, it was gone.
A month later, on the day of the devastation at the Royal London Hospital, Dr. Stankevi
ius had the guards bring Nicodemus into his office. The psychiatrist was sweating badly when he made that call.
Neither guard touched Nicodemus as they ushered him into the doctor’s office, and though they both towered over the stick-thin little man, he exuded much more power than they did. Dr. Stankevi
ius noted that the guards kept their hands on their belts near their weapons.
Nicodemus stood in front of the desk, his hands loose at his sides, head slightly bowed so that he looked up under bony brows at the doctor. Nicodemus had eyes the color of toad skin—a complexity of dark greens and browns. His skin was sallow, his lips full, his teeth white and wet.
“Have a seat,” offered Dr. Stankevi
ius. He could hear the tremble in his own voice.
“I thank you,” Nicodemus said in the oddly formal way he had. A guard pushed a chair in front of the desk and the prisoner sat. He leaned back, folded his long-fingered hands in his lap, and waited. His eyes never left the doctor’s face, and Nicodemus’s lips constantly writhed in a small smile that came and went, came and went.
“Do you know why I asked you to visit me today?” began the doctor.
“Do you?”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means what it wants to mean, sir. We each derive our own meaning from life as we fly through the moments.”
“Are you aware of what has happened today?”
“I am aware of many things that have happened today, Doctor. Saints and sinners whisper to me in my sleep. Dumas speaks truth to me in my right ear and Gesmas tells only lies to my left ear. Please be specific.”
Stankevi
ius did not recognize the two names Nicodemus had mentioned, but he wrote them down. Then he leaned forward. “Jesus Santiago, the boy who was killed … the numbers twelve/seventeen were cut into his skin.”

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