“Effing hell.” Grace punched Bug on the shoulder. “I thought your lot were supposed to be able to crack any bloody code.”

“First… ow!” he said. “Yeah, given time we can crack it. But time’s not our friend here. I got all forty of my guys-here and at the Hangar-on this thing. Plus we’re having to scan in tens of thousands of pages, and the stuff in Costa Rica will have to be scanned. I think we might even be dealing with several different codes. I’ve seen that sort of thing before, where there are individual codes for different aspects of an operation. Whoever set this is up is good.”

“Better than you?”

Bug didn’t rise to the bait. “Maybe. But I have better toys, so I’ll crack it. Big question is whether we crack it in time to do any good. Be nice to find the code key, or-if there are multiple interrelated codes-a master code key.”

“Birds from the Ark Royal should be there soon,” Grace said. “We can prevail upon them to get that material here as fast as possible.”

“True,” Bug said, “but it’s already August 29 and the Extinction Wave is set for September 1. We not only need to break the code; we need to devise a response and then put it into place.”

“We should probably bring World Health and the CDC into it now,” said Hu. “And CERT, National Institutes for Health… a few others.”

Church nodded. “Yes, but carefully. We don’t know if any of those organizations have been compromised.”

Grace studied him. “I have a feeling that there’s more. Care to drop the other shoe?”

Church nodded. “This, perhaps more than anything, will give you a window into the souls of the people we’re up against.”

He told them about the New Men.

Chapter Ninety-One

The Hive

Sunday, August 29, 4:46 P.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 67 hours, 14 minutes E.S.T.

I found Carteret where we’d left him. He was awake and furious and had wriggled his way across the floor and had rolled onto his back so that he could kick open the door to the New Men’s barracks.

“Come on, you slope-headed fuckers!” he screamed. “Come out here and cut me loose.”

I came up quietly and saw through the small door glass that several of the New Men were indeed shambling toward his cries. Even now, even after he’d brutalized them and tried to exterminate them, they were obeying the conditioning that had removed all traces of free will. It made me furious. If I didn’t need answers, I think I might have just slit Carteret’s throat and called it a job well done.

Instead I grabbed him by the plastic band holding his ankles together and dragged him away from the door.

“Hey!” he yelled. “What the bloody ’ell do you think you’re playing at?”

“Shut the fuck up,” I said quietly. I went back to the door, opened it, and called, “Downtime!”

The single word burned like acid on my tongue, and the sight of the New Men slowing to a confused stop, then turning without question and heading back to their cots made me heartsick. Carteret was still yelling when I turned back to him, but the look on my face quieted him for a moment.

I dragged him by the heels past the dead or unconscious bodies of the other guards and into an adjoining room, then closed the door.

“Who the bloody hell are you?” he demanded.

I flicked the blade on my Rapid Response knife and knelt over him.

“Steady on, mate,” he said quickly. “Let’s not do something we both regret.”

I held one finger to my lips. “Shhhhh.”

With two quick flicks of the knife I cut his plastic bonds. As I cut the bands on his wrists I saw that he had numbers tattooed on the back of each hand: 88 on his left and 198 on his right. I recognized the code from some gang work I did while on the cops. H was the eighth letter of the alphabet, so 88 stood for “HH.” Shorthand for “Heil Hitler.” The other one broke down to “SH.” “Sieg Heil.” Our friend Carteret was a neo-Nazi. No surprise, but it made what I was going to do a little easier.

“Get up,” I said as I rose and backed away. I laid the knife on a table.

He got slowly and warily to his feet, rubbing his wrists and studying me, but I could see the effort he put into keeping his eyes from flicking toward the knife.

“You’re a Yank,” he said.

“You’re a genius,” I said.

“You working for the Twins?”

I said nothing.

“No… you look the military type. You’re Special Forces, am I right?”

I said nothing.

“I did my time in the service. Don’t suppose you’d like to look the other way while I scarper? Little professional courtesy?”

“Doesn’t seem likely. What I’d rather do,” I said, “is beat some answers out of you. How’s that sound for an afternoon’s entertainment?”

He sneered. “This is a private facility, mate, and we’re in international waters. Check the map; we’re three miles outside of Costa Rican-”

“Which means no one’s watching, Sparky.”

“You think you’re going to strong-arm me? You’d better have a lot more than a knife.”

“I have what I need.”

He tried a different tack. “I thought you Yanks didn’t do torture anymore.”

“Torture is something you do to the helpless. Like the stuff you did to those New Men.”

“Boo-fucking-hoo, mate. They ain’t even people.”

“Not all that sure you are,” I said.

“Arrest me or whatever, but I’m not saying a bloody word.”

I slapped him across the face. It was fast and hard, but I was going for shock rather than damage. He blinked in total surprise. Slaps hurt so much because the palm strikes so many square inches of face and all those facial nerve endings cry out in surprise.

He put his hands up.

I faked with my right and slapped him with my left. Carteret backed up a step. He was surprised by the speed but more so by the sting. No matter how tough you are, there is a certain primitive reaction to being slapped that brings out the essential child self. The eyes start to tear, and that sparks certain emotional reactions that are not necessarily valid but almost impossible to control.

I smiled and moved toward him, slow and steady. He threw a head cracker of a hook punch. He was pretty good. Nice pivot, good lift of the heel to put mass into the blow.

I kept my smile in place as I slipped it and slapped him right-handed.

Carteret reeled back, caught himself, and tried to rush me, but I stopped him with a nonthrusting flat loot on his upper thigh. It’s like running into one of those half doors. It stopped his lower body and made him tilt forward farther and faster than expected. I slapped him with my left, blocked a combination, and slapped him with my right.

His cheeks glowed like hot apples. All those nerve endings were screaming at him.

In other circumstances Carteret would probably be a formidable fighter and I usually don’t screw around like this, but I needed to make a point. And it’s at times like this that I’m glad I study jujutsu rather than karate or tae kwon do. No slight on those other martial arts-after all, Top’s a karate expert and he can deconstruct an opponent like nobody’s business-but I wasn’t trying to destroy Carteret. I wanted to defeat him. Break him. Jujutsu is all about controlling an opponent. Evading, destabilizing, using mass and motion against the attacker. It has roots in grappling arts of ancient China and India coupled with the Japanese dedication to economy of motion.

When Carteret rushed me again I parried his outstretched arm to one side and shifted out of the path of his incoming mass. As I did so, I lightly swept his lead leg just as he was stepping down toward me. It made him stumble into an awkward step and collapse into a clumsy sprawl. He immediately tried to right himself, but his arms were pinwheeling for balance, so I reached between them and slapped him again.

He was panting now, eyes wide and wet, chest heaving with the runaway rage of complete frustration. Once he was upright he tried to kick me with a vicious Muay Thai leg sweep that would have broken my knee had it landed. I checked with with the flat of my shoe while I reached out with both hands and swatted down his guard. I slapped him fast left-right-left.