Dead of Night

“Careful not to make it too tight,” JT cautioned.

“Ought to strangle the cocksucker,” muttered Sheldon.

They ignored him. Dez tested the tension and nodded.

“If he’s going to live,” said Dez, “that should hold him.” Dez directed two officers to keep him pinned down.

The other officers stood in a ragged circle around Diviny. As Dez got to her feet, she studied their faces and saw each of them take quick, frightened looks over at what was left of Mike Schneider and Jeff Strauss.

“What the hell’s going on?” someone asked in a hollow voice.

Dez realized with a sick jolt that the voice had been hers.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

OFFICE OF OSCAR PRICE

DEPARTMENT TEN, FEDERAL BUILDING

PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

Oscar Price stared at his cell phone and considered what to do.

He was a cool, disciplined man, and he was in a climate controlled office and yet sweat was popping out along his forehead.

“Jesus Christ,” he said softly. He was alone in the office but he looked around as if he expected someone—maybe even Jesus Himself—to step up and offer a solution. A few moments later he snarled, “Shit!”

Price sat back in his chair, trying to pretend a posture of calm nonchalance in the hope that it would trick his body into relaxing. He could feel a newborn migraine wailing at the edges of his consciousness.

Price was absolutely certain that if he and Dr. Herman Volker were alone in a quiet place, he would put the doctor on his knees and park two hollow points in the back of the stupid bastard’s head.

Lucifer 113 was off the leash.

That was what Volker had called to tell him. Not exactly in those words, but close enough.

It was a protocol improbability bordering on impossibility. Everything about Project Lucifer was old news. Buried with the Cold War. Virtually forgotten, except by psychotic sons of bitches like Volker, and luckless schmucks like himself.

On the whole, Price had a fairly simple job, day in and day out. No stress, no dramatic moments. There were twenty-two low-profile “clients” in his caseload, and each of them was in some phase of career step-down. No longer integral to the research machine that was Department Ten. Most of them were years past their prime, naturalized foreigners who now lived in an age when “Cold War” was not even a phrase anymore. Old men and women, their genius spent, but still potentially useful enough as consultants—on works now long in progress—that they still merited a Level Two handler instead of a Three or Four. The Threes and Fours were also on career downslopes. Twos, like Price, were short-listed for steps up.

Except when things like this came along. That bothered Price, because he really wanted that step. Working for the Company wasn’t a hobby. He wanted a regional directorship or a chief of station in a country that mattered. Japan, for instance, now that North Korea was a constant threat.

This matter with Herman Volker, however, could reverse that upward momentum and very quickly bury Price’s career ten feet under an outhouse. Or … handled the right way, he mused, it could shine a bright, white light on him.

The question was … what was the right move?

Volker was a former CIA all-star. The information he’d taken with him when he’d defected was the political equivalent of a nuclear bomb. Reagan’s diplomatic corps had used it to beat the shit out of the Soviets. It may not have actually torn down the Wall, but it sure as hell knocked out the first brick. Price still marveled at it. Fucking zombie parasites as bioweapons. Or, as it was called in the Project Lucifer documents: metabolically minimalized ambulatory organic hosts. A dreadful weapon that contravened every global and closed-door biological warfare agreement on the books. Should have called it Project Screw the Pooch. It truly did not matter that the Lucifer research had hit a dead end and was scheduled for termination by the Soviets, documents to be sealed. Volker got out of Dodge weeks before that was implemented, and by then Reagan and the Company had the goods.

The tricky thing was, Volker was not supposed to be working on anything related to Project Lucifer. The old fart was supposed to be indulging his damaged brain by messing with death row patients who, let’s face it, thought Price, nobody gave a sloppy fuck about. Volker was not—by federal order and private agreement—supposed to be screwing around with anything even remotely related to Lucifer. Nothing. Nada.

And yet.

Price sucked his teeth as he thought about what to do.

It was not in his pay grade to know whether the US of A was doing anything with the project research. Price hoped they’d left it in a sealed box, ideally buried in a ten-foot cube of cement. But he was far from stupid, and never naïve. Somebody, somewhere had to be working on it. They’d had it for thirty years. Thirty years without outbreaks, he reminded himself, which suggested that they were at least being careful.

Volker, on the other hand …

Price drummed his fingers on the desktop hard enough to rattle the phone in its cradle. He knew that he had to call this in. Question was—who to call? Protocol demanded that he take it directly to his section chief, and though Tony Williams was no fool, he was very career minded. Would he, in turn, pass it along? Or would he use it to crush the young go-getter nipping at his heels? Price rather thought the latter. This could very easily be made into a blame game, with Price as the target.

People were dying, though, and the longer it went on, the higher the body count. Price did not lie to himself that his motivations stretched to cover the lives of a bunch of Pennsylvania redneck farmers with cow shit on their boots. But he had to be seen to care.

Which made the second option look tempting. Doing an end run around Williams and taking this directly to regional director Colleen Sykes. She was a classic ballbuster, but she was so tightly networked into D.C. and Langley that her career was virtually bulletproof. She could get something done on this ASAP, no question.

But, she was also pretty much by the book, so how would she view the end run? Would she see Price as a man on a mission who risked everything to protect the common good? Or would she seem him as a self-serving loose cannon who broke protocol?

Price didn’t really see a clear path. Either way, this could kill him in the Company.

“Fuck it and fuck you,” he said aloud. And then reached for the phone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

HARTNUP’S TRANSITION ESTATE

“What do we do now?” asked one of the greener officers in a voice tainted with panic. He wore a guilty, caged expression as if this was somehow their fault rather than something that had come out of nowhere and swept over all of them.

“We don’t do a goddamn thing,” barked Chief Goss. “This situation is way out of our control, so we’re going to sit tight and wait for the staties. They’ll be here any minute.”

“Chief,” said JT discreetly, “shouldn’t we call this in?”

Goss pulled his walkie-talkie out of its holster and keyed it. “Dispatch … we have officers down, I repeat officers down.”

“W-What?” exclaimed Flower. “Who’s hurt—”

Goss cut her off. “I need paramedics and additional units. Expand the call out another tier. Send everyone you can get … and give me an ETA on the state police.”

Flower stumbled over her words for a second before she could organize an answer. “State police are eight minutes out. Two units are—”

“I don’t want to hear that shit, Flower. Tell them to roll every available unit because we’re going to need roadblocks and a lot of feet on the ground. I want choppers, too. And get on the horn to the Zimmer boys—Carl and Luke. We need them and their dogs out here. And get me somebody to handle crowd control.”

“What’s happening?” Flower demanded, her voice rising to a screech.

“Just do it,” Goss snapped, and turned off the walkie-talkie. He was sweating badly and there were starbursts of red on his cheeks. Damp winds blew up the slope and rifled his sweaty hair.

“Rain’s coming,” said JT, still pitching his voice to keep things in neutral. “And with these winds … I don’t think we’re going to be able to use helos or spotter planes.”

“Rain and wind won’t stop the dogs,” said Sheldon. “The Zimmers have hounds that can track a weak fart in a hurricane.”

Dez looked at the chief, whose expression was that of someone a short step away from screaming. Dez could understand it. Like most of these officers, Goss was a career cop in a town where there just wasn’t any serious action. Bar fights and DUIs don’t instill the same combat awareness that big city cops and veteran soldiers have. This was way beyond Goss’s experience and he was losing control of the details. “Chief,” she said, pitching her tone to match JT’s, “we have people all over the place and we don’t know if this is the end of this. Shouldn’t we get a head count?”

Goss blinked at her for a few moments as if she had asked the question in Swahili. Then understanding flicked back into his eyes, and he nodded. “A head count. Good, good…” He looked around as if he expected everyone to be there ready to be counted.

Christ, thought Dez, he’s really losing it.

She glanced at JT, whose brown face seemed to be carved from an inflexible hunk of mahogany though his eyes were bright and almost unblinking. He was trying to keep his game face in place, but he was at the edge, too. Even Sheldon, who had been in Afghanistan, was freaked.

Dez swallowed. I guess we all are. All of us.

Then Goss grabbed his walkie-talkie again and keyed it to the team channel. “All officers report in. Name, location, and status.”

One by one the calls came back. Paul Scott, two paramedics, and another forensics collector were in the mortuary. Five officers—all from other towns—were here with Goss, JT, and Dez. That left two unaccounted for.

“Wait—who’s missing?” asked JT.

Dez said, “Wait, who was it that went up to check on Doc’s sister and her kids?”