CHAPTER ONEThe Anointing of the Sick
1.
London sits atop a dark labyrinth. The true nature and extent of the tunnels, tube stations, nineteenth-century sewers, and connective conduits between key points of egress are closely guarded secrets known only to the supervisory staff at the Greater London Authority, Scotland Yard, and MI5. In fact, to call London’s subterranean architecture otherworldly is to traffic in major understatement. The atmosphere of the tunnels is that of a fever dream. Dark, dank, desolate, rat infested, airless, and fairly close to impassable, the lower tunnels that link the catacombs beneath the Palace Gardens and the streets of Greater Kensington have seen very few humans traverse the fetid passageways in their three centuries of existence.
All of which is why the five operatives who materialize at the west end of Tunnel PG1—striding purposefully, two abreast, down the claustrophobic channel of corroded stone toward Palace Green—are hyperalert, each feeling like a stranger in a strange land. They wear matching black body armor, Kevlar, and bulletproof helmets. Each cradles a lightweight assault rifle across their chest. They navigate the gloom courtesy of night-vision goggles, and communicate via closed-circuit radio mikes attached to their collars. There are three men and two women.
At the present moment, only one of the men speaks—in a low, dour voice, a faint Texas twang marinating his words: “According to satellite imagery and on-the-ground intel, the Israeli embassy was breached at precisely 4:37 P.M. BST, on the afternoon of 10 August 2022. That’s yesterday for those of you checking your calendars. So far, the bloodhounds at The Sunday Times and Channel Four have not smelled anything. Looks like we’re getting in just under the wire. Captors haven’t squawked any demands yet.”
The others listen as they march along, their green-tinted visual fields latching on to the far end of the tunnel, their destination the landing beneath the service entrance of 4 Palace Green.
The one called Spur continues his rundown: “Benefiting from a week of surveillance, the hijacking of a delivery van, a series of forged documents, and a few phony workmen’s uniforms, the intruders gained entry to the Israeli embassy via the loading dock on the north side of the property.” Spur cocks his helmet toward the darkness twenty meters ahead of them. “That’s about ten meters up yonder there, above the tunnel intersect.”
Spur stops, and the rest of them halt behind him. He clicks his halogen light and points it up at the tunnel ceiling. They all see the underside of an ancient manhole cover.
“We’ll join the party through here,” he says. “Through the boiler room.”
A bowlegged, muscle-bound former athlete moving into middle age, Spur serves as the de facto leader of this very special unit. He has the command position not because he is the most gifted, or the smartest, or the strongest, or the most skilled—far from it. All five operatives carry the burden of being endowed with special powers that are both preternatural and highly classified. But Spur is the natural-born leader, with a knack for psychological warfare.
“Okay, let’s switch over,” he says, shrugging off his Kevlar vest, revealing a medieval military coat, chain mail, and broadsword under the innocuous SWAT team attire. The imposing costume underneath the black Kevlar is the “psy-ops” element of the operation, the regalia designed not only to disguise their identities but also to intimidate—to frighten and rattle their adversaries. Spur and his supervisor at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency have been carefully crafting the five personas over the last year.
The helmets and vests come off one by one. The smallest of the group, the petite Asian assassin, code name Boo, now sheds her black military garb and reveals the formfitting robe of a Shaolin monk. The other woman in the group, a dark, exotic-looking Latina code-named Pin-Up, peels off her SWAT gear to reveal the gilded breastplate and black widow corset of a warrior priestess. She grips her machete and slices the air with it. “Come on, slowpokes,” she taunts the two other men as they hurriedly transform into dreamlike ronin.
The tall, rangy African American sheds his Kevlar and reveals a multicolored shamanic robe of feathers draping his lean body, complete with beaded gauntlets and a bejeweled scabbard, an hourglass engraving across the gilded breastplate. His code name is Ticker, and he does not appreciate Pin-Up’s wisecracks. “Hardy-har-har,” he says as he takes the safety off his Glock and holsters it. “Pin-Up, I’ll be done with the mission before you get your skinny ass up to the first floor.”
“That’s enough tongue waggin’, now cork your goddamn pistols,” Spur says in his Texas drawl. “I want safeties off, and silencers on, all mikes live now.” He glances at a small index card taped to his gauntlet. “According to CENTCOM we got three hostiles currently in the building, a half dozen friendlies, mostly staff, and one member of the Israeli diplomatic corps. Hack? Can you tap into the line from here? Give us the geography?”
The fifth member of the unit—a younger man, his dark hair and handsome face shaded by the hood of a leather duster—climbs a series of steps embedded in the tunnel wall. Known for his acumen with all things digital, Hack yanks a cable loose from decades of congealed calcium deposits and grit in the ceiling.
He pinches the end of the cable, and the others watch his body begin to glitter with the blue-metal phosphorus of live current. “Two of the hostiles are on the second floor,” he says in a strange droning voice, his eyes swimming with flickering signal from the building’s security system. “Looks like they got all the friendlies up there, holding them at gunpoint. Third hostile on the ground floor checking windows and door locks. Each hostile has what looks like a MAC-10 machine pistol, extended clip, .45 ACP rounds, one in each chamber. At least that’s what it looks like to me, but what do I know?”
“All right, y’all,” Spur says, climbing the steps, drawing his sword, and prying open the manhole cover with its tip. He pauses and looks over his shoulder at the others. “We’ll take down the yahoo on the ground floor first. I want this quick and decisive, in and out.”
They all nod as Pin-Up mutters to herself, “That’s what she said.”
2.
According to official government records, Spur and his operatives no longer exist. They are deceased, killed in the line of duty, each of them buried at Arlington Cemetery. Their mere existence is known only to a handful of people in the global intelligence community. In fact, only one human being on earth knows the full extent of their uncanny powers: Colonel Sean McDermott—code name Silverback—a section chief at the DIA.
It took quite a bit of convincing for a military mind like McDermott’s to grasp and process what had happened to the five members of the Quintet back in Karakistan a little over a year ago. The cover story that they all had subsequently agreed upon was pure comic book: Supposedly, while hunting down the warlord Abu Osamir, the five were exposed to radiation, which somehow, through some genetic mash-up, had enhanced their natural skills. But what had really happened to them was far more Théâtre du Grand-Guignol. After being ambushed and thrown into a dungeon straight out of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, they were about to be tortured and killed when an unlikely savior came to the rescue, a gruesome revenant with a changing face, dripping with ancient evil.
“A transaction is what I propose … a proposition, if you prefer,” the Devil had said to them in the fetid shadows of that torture chamber. And the deal was as simple as it was sinister: Satan would grant them incredible powers beyond their wildest dreams, powers that would enable them to easily escape the dungeon. And all he asked in return was for them to occasionally, on a freelance basis, hunt down and kill individuals who are in breach of contract. These individuals have, to put it coarsely, skipped town on the Devil.
Once they are terminated, Satan explained with a wink of his yellow reptilian eye, “I will take it from there, and damn them for eternity.”
“Why don’t you just hunt down these rascals yourself?” Spur had asked the Beast.
“Alas,” the Devil explained, “the laws of the universe prevent me from directly killing a soul.”
But the Quintet would soon be in breach itself, the members choosing to double-cross the creature with the horns and the tail by using these powers in service of mankind. And Colonel Sean McDermott was prescient enough to realize that the five could be transformed into urban folktales through a few well-placed leaks in the intelligence community, ghost stories that would live on in the hearts and imaginations of the bad guys.
Which is, as far as the upper echelon back in the States has been led to believe, the reason Spur chose the moniker the Devil’s Quintet for his special unit. The idea is to scare enemy combatants, to put the fear of God in them. This is the single aspect of the five and their unearthly skills about which everyone other than McDermott has been misled.
“All right, hush up now, everybody,” Spur whispers into his neck mike as they approach the door to the ground-floor lobby. “I want to go in quiet as a tumbleweed in a tornado. Hack, you get the door lock. Boo, you got the point position. Go in first, disarm, and then, Hack, follow up with the wipe. Let’s boogie, chillun. Three, two, one … go.”
Hack brushes his fingertips across the biometric lock, and the door latch disengages with a faint spark like a match tip striking flint. Hack carefully pulls the door back far enough for Boo to slip through the gap.
On the other side of the door she silently scales the wall.
Out of the corner of her eye she can see the trespasser strolling back and forth behind the front entrance a hundred feet away, a wiry-thin zealot with his back turned, a machine pistol clutched like a metal baby against his skinny solar plexus. Boo uses the ceiling joists as handholds, lifting herself up, and then crawls spiderlike, faceup, twelve feet above the floor toward the target.
The gunman looks down at the floor as she approaches. He notices her shadow passing between him and the recessed lighting, and with a start he looks up just as Boo pounces on him.
She lands on the man’s shoulders before he has a chance to pull the trigger, her slender legs vise-gripping down on his neck and carotid artery and windpipe as they both fall to the floor with a muffled thump. The trespasser can’t breathe, can’t yell for help, cannot even move. His tendons seize up, his hands freezing on the gun. Boo squeezes and squeezes until the man passes out, sagging beneath her, going still and silent.
The sound of footsteps softly pads toward her. She looks up and sees Hack approaching with a shit-eating grin and a wink, offering her a hand. He helps her up and she backs off.
Hack kneels by the unconscious gunman. As though anointing the sick with the laying on of hands, he lightly touches the temple on each side of the gunman’s cranium.
The electrical waves from the man’s brain spark a connection, flowing into Hack, shooting up his tendons into his brain. Emotions of anger and vengefulness and homicidal righteousness flicker across Hack’s mind’s eye, the luminescent proteins tracing through Hack’s visual field like comet tails. Hack’s neuropeptides wash away the invading flames, putting out the fire, erasing, obliterating the man’s memory and hatred. The streaks of light fade out and vanish, leaving behind no trace of themselves. On the floor the man’s head lolls, empty now, episodic amnesia setting in.
“He won’t remember a thing,” Hack murmurs, lifting his hands from the man’s temples. Hack rises and steps back. “Like a newborn baby terrorist.”
Boo moves in with zip ties and shackles the man’s wrists behind his back.
Looking on, Hack says with a nod, “Next stop, second floor, ladies’ lingerie.”
3.
The code name Hack was bestowed upon Aaron Boorstein early in his career. Born in Flatbush, New York, and raised in Crown Heights, New York, he grew up a smart-ass street kid who ultimately rebelled against joining his father’s button-down accounting firm and instead enlisted in the Navy. He rose up the ranks quickly as a genius-level tech sergeant on nuclear submarines and eventually became a Navy SEAL. All of which was how he ultimately caught the eye of Paul “Spur” Candell. But who would have ever guessed that Hack would see his natural propensities for hacking into the most complex virtual ecosystems turned into a superpower by the Devil himself?
Maybe it was fate. Hack had always felt more at home in cyberspace, slipping through back doors and accessing fortresses of protected data. “Sometimes I think you’d rather have a girlfriend made out of ones and zeroes instead of flesh and blood,” one of his many disgruntled exes once told him, and there was truth in it. Hack had left more than his share of disastrous breakups along the side of the road over the years. It had left a hole in his heart, a longing for love that he couldn’t quite seem to fulfill. Maybe that’s why, for the last twelve months, he has immersed himself in the mastery of his superpower, which is something he innately understands: altering himself on a cellular level, becoming pure digital signal, moving through circuitry as fluidly as water moves through an aqueduct.
That day, Hack and his fellow members of the Quintet gain access to the embassy through the service-elevator shaft on the far east side of the building, one by one, climbing up through the trapdoor at the top of the enclosure, then silently scaling the twenty feet or so of cables to the second-floor landing. They perch themselves on the ledge inside the shaft in a neat little row, shoulder to shoulder, capes and scabbards dangling off the edge—vultures waiting patiently for the roadkill.
Hack taps into the wiring, and gets an eyeball on the situation through the security cam. “Looking at all six friendlies scrunched against the wall, west end of the main corridor.” He announces this in a low, soft whisper into his mike. “One hostile patrolling the hallway, the other one, big guy, looks like the muscle, keeping his short barrel trained on the hostages.”
“That it?” Spur’s query crackles in Hack’s earbud.
Hack shakes his head. “What else do you want, their shoe sizes?”
“Weak links, soft spots.”
“Believe it or not, the big gorilla looks shaky, sweaty, not too sure of himself.”
“Pin-Up, can you lock on to this yahoo from this distance? Draw his attention away from the friendlies? Avoid any collateral mishap?”
Pin-Up’s voice: “Ticker. You’re closest to the door. Can you give me a clear shot?”
“Why don’t I just hit the pause button, then go in nice and calm?”
“Negative,” Spur says. “I don’t want to drain you right away, might need you at full power at some point.”
With a nod Ticker silently draws his cutlass and carefully wedges the business end into the seam between the elevator doors. He levers them open about a centimeter. Pin-Up leans over and peers through the crack at the people on the other side of the floor. The six captives bunch together, stone-still with fear.
Pin-Up can see the big guy—broad shoulders, beard, wild mop of dark hair, eyes shifting nervously across the group of hostages—reeking of nervous tension. “Got him,” Pin-Up mutters, locking on to him. She sniffs him with her mind. She absorbs his deepest fear and feels the cellular structure of her skin changing as she whispers, almost to herself, “The Jinn.”
It’s a process not unlike a chameleon instinctively triggering a color shift. The layers of her skin begin to transform, pigmentation changing, the inner strata reshaping, her dark complexion becoming matted black fur, her bones elongating into monstrous, malformed limbs, her skull swelling and growing into the massive incarnation of the gunman’s worst nightmare from his earliest childhood memories. Pin-Up’s new eyes now burn like embers, her fangs dripping blood, the illusion complete.
She pushes the double doors apart and steps into the corridor.
Like a school of fish reacting violently and suddenly to the advent of a bigger, stronger species entering their habitat, the hostages press backward against the wall, some of them letting out gasps, others turning away, the big gunman standing paralyzed, gaping, bug-eyed, rapt with terror as he encounters the embodiment of his primal fears, the Jinn, the ghoul that has haunted many a society down through the ages.
The other trespasser starts bellowing loudly in a foreign language that Pin-Up can’t decipher.
She does not hesitate. Does not blink. She knows she’s about to be shot. With one quick and fluid movement she reaches behind her back, feeling for her pistol, which is wedged under a belt. She draws it and fires—four blasts, two and two—three of the rounds going into the big guy’s upper chest and neck, sending blood mist across the wall, spattering half the hostages.
Pin-Up turns and sees the second gunman raising the machine pistol at her and firing a burst, and that’s all she registers—a flicker in her eyes and a series of enormous pops in her eardrums.
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