Code Zero Read Online Free PDF Page A

You’re wearing that same suit in the author photo.”
    He said nothing. It took a great deal of effort to control the expressions that wanted to twist his face into a mask of great delight.
    “You’re the man Scientific American called ‘DARPA’s real-world mad scientist,’” Miss Bliss said. “You are Dr. William Hu.”

 
    Part Two
    Mother Night
    The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder’s lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.
    —BERTRAND RUSSELL, Sceptical Essays

 
    Chapter Six
    Gülhane Park
    Eminönü District
    Istanbul, Turkey
    Monday, May 2, 3:37 p.m.
    I skated the edge of the Mother Night thing again on a rainy afternoon in a lovely park in Istanbul. They don’t get a lot of rain in that part of the world, and if the skies above hadn’t been dark, the conversation I was having might have taken place indoors.
    My friend, you see, doesn’t appreciate bright sunlight. She can deal with it if she has to, but she doesn’t like it. Call it an allergy to the sun if that works for you.
    Even in the gentle drizzle, Violin wore a hat with a floppy brim, and sunglasses, and she kept her hands in her pockets. Ghost sat on the ground with his head in her lap, letting her pet him and play with his soggy ears. Few people ever get that close to Ghost without losing important parts. But he has a thing for Violin. For her, and for Junie.
    It’s all pretty complicated.
    For him. Not for me.
    Violin had once been my lover, and a pretty intense one at that, but things had changed. I’d changed. Maybe the world had changed. Now I had Junie in my life and Junie was my life.
    What did that make Violin?
    Certainly not a sister. That was too inbred a concept for me.
    Comrade in arms, I suppose, though that definition was far from accurate.
    We drank bitter coffee out of cardboard cups, pretending that we couldn’t still smell gun smoke and spilled blood. Three hours ago we’d cleaned out a nest of Red Knights, and our nerves were totally shot. Well, mine were. I still get a case of the shakes every time I see one of those saw-toothed freaks. They are human, of course, but they’re from a different genetic line called the Upierczy. An evolutionary spur that dead-ended, resulting in them being just enough different from normal humans to appear inhuman. Or nonhuman. However that’s supposed to be conjugated. Freaks works for me. They are the reason we have legends of vampires. Pale, immensely powerful, and they have a real taste for O positive; but they don’t sleep in coffins, they don’t turn into bats, and you don’t need a stake to kill them. A nine-millimeter bullet in the brainpan works nicely, thank you.
    Today we’d killed five of them.
    I took two out, one with bullets and one with a knife in the eye socket. Yeah, that works pretty well, too. Ghost crippled one of them, and Violin finished the job. Then she tore the remaining two to shreds. Violin was not an enemy you’d want to have. And in a lot of ways she, and the other women of the covert ops team Arklight, were much scarier than the Red Knights.
    That was a handful of hours ago and now we were pretending to be ordinary folks out for the day in a light rain, enjoying the soggy park with their waterlogged dog, drinking coffee. It was all I could do to keep my teeth from chattering.
    Funny thing was that I hadn’t come over here to hunt vampires. I was tracking a shipment of fissile materials that had been covertly purchased by a splinter cell of the Seven Kings. We’d torn the Kings down a few years ago, but it wasn’t dead. Even though at least half of the Kings were dead—Hugo Vox, Sebastian Gault, and Bin Laden for sure, and maybe one or two others—the rest had eluded us. Rumors were afloat in the seas of international terrorism that the Kings were regrouping. If they do, I think I’ll quit