Michaels shrugged and sniffed. “They must’ve slipped out in the panic.”
“We were locked down,” Gensler said almost to himself. “No one was getting in, yet they somehow got out. And no one saw them either way.”
“We sure as hell saw what they did,” Michaels said, looking at his cellphone screen. “The visitors might not be able to get to their cars yet, but even with the Wi-Fi shut down, tourists’ videos of the explosion are already all over the net.”
Gensler looked up abruptly. If there was enough coverage that videos could get out, any call he needed to make might go out as well. It might be picked up by any manner of surveillance device, but that didn’t bother the former Marine in the slightest.
“Pam,” he said, all but snapping to attention, “I’ll be in my office. Let me know if anyone needs me.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, but he was already on his way out of the security room, his thumb dancing on his phone screen.
As he strode down the hall, surveying the activity outside, he felt a swell of pride mingling with his misery. His staff and the local authorities were working together at prime efficiency. Something terrible, inexplicably terrible, had happened, but the response was more than he could have hoped, or asked, for. He prayed that it continued.
A good sign was that the person he was calling answered on the first ring.
“Chuck,” Gensler said. “You’ve heard?”
“I’ve heard,” retired General Charles Leonidas Lancaster replied. Unbeknownst to Gensler, he was replying from Tashkurgan, Kashgar, Xinjiang, China. “I’m watching the video now.”
“Chuck,” Gensler continued with immediate confidence born of long experience. “I’ve checked our surveillance footage closely and I can’t tell if it was the juice carton or not.”
Lancaster paused a microsecond longer than normal. “Well,” he said evenly, “if the explosive wasn’t in the juice carton—”
Gensler interrupted. “Didn’t you tell me about a report you read where a soldier swore his superior officer wasn’t shot, but exploded from the inside? It was in Syria, I think.”
“Yemen,” Lancaster corrected. “Yes, I did. And I know just the man to talk to about it.”
“Good,” Gensler replied, feeling more hopeful than he had since setting eyes on the angelic blond girl.
“I’ll need a full report, Bernie.”
“You’ll get it,” Gensler promised. “NSA be damned, you’ll get it. But one more thing for now, before this place is overrun—”
“What?” Lancaster asked quickly, knowing how these things went.
“Chuck,” his fellow former Marine said, his voice tight and unbelieving. “There was no blood. A little girl blew up from the inside, and I saw flesh and bone, and even muscle, but no blood. I may be going mad, but I tell you. To my dying day, I’ll swear on a tall stack on Bibles. There was no blood.”
Chapter 2
Josiah Key learned all he needed to know about Sujanpur, Punjab, India, one smoggy afternoon. It was the afternoon when no one seemed surprised to see a naked man run through their festival market carrying a child’s corpse.
The former Marine corporal had come to this village after being assigned to investigate reports of bloodless bodies. He and his Cerberus team had been following the rumors all along the India/Pakistan border—from Attari to Amritsar to Dera Baba Nanak, then finally, to this smallest, humblest, most northern town, which was also closest to the border.
The problem was that they just kept missing the corpses because all the previous cities were quick to get rid of their dead. It wasn’t like Attari, which was the last Indian stop on the Trans-Asian Railway, or Amritsar, the spiritual center of the Sikh religion, or Dera Baba Nanak, which was one of the most sacred Sikh centers, would let any corpse, bloodless or blood-full, gather dust.
By the time Key and his team arrived, the possible evidence had already been cremated. India hardly had time, or room, for the living, let alone the dead. But the mortician at the last stop shared, as all the previous ones had, word of another such body. Thankfully, like many morticians everywhere, the ones in India prided themselves on their English proficiency.
Not surprisingly, a bloodless corpse was quite the conversation starter, especially among dealers in dead bodies. And the chance to talk to living people who weren’t grieving was also something that loosened tongues, especially when the ones not-grieving were a placid, handsome man; his tall, muscular associate; and a lithe, green-eyed, redheaded young woman—all wearing slightly shimmering, thin, light, gray T-shirts, slacks, loafers, and open, zip-up jackets.
“You’re in luck with this one,” the Dera Baba Nanak mortician had said, obviously having a different standard for “luck” than the average citizen. “My Sujanpur colleague says it is a child’s corpse.”
“Not so lucky for the kid,” Morton Daniels—Key’s tall, muscular, shameless right-hand man—commented.
“No, no,” said the mortician. “Traditionally all Hindus are cremated, except saints and children. The body should be washed in a mixture of milk, yogurt, butter, and honey while mantras are being—”
The team didn’t hear the rest since they were already out the door and into the Ford Ecosport Ecoboost—the fastest sport-utility vehicle they could readily find in India. Terri Nichols, Key’s lithe, redheaded, right-hand woman, had floored it and made the sixty-nine kilometers in record time, despite the habitual traffic on these Punjab roads. The vehicle’s interactive map showed her exactly where the small local constabulary was, but they all studied the area as they neared.
It was a humble, unimpressive town that seemed to be stuck between the 1950s and 1970s, wedged between canals of the Ravi River. The air was heavy with moisture, with the colors of green and brown seemingly coated on everything from wood to marble to metal. Off in the distance they heard calliope music and saw what looked like cheap Christmas lights.
“Place is supposed to have a big garment market,” Nichols murmured, having let the Ecosport’s onboard computer feed her information along the way. “Probably means most townies are good with English too.”
She, like Key, had wanted to get familiar with the local language, until they both quickly discovered that India had more than a hundred major languages, as well as nearly sixteen hundred minor ones.
Nichols pulled in front of the small police department, and Key and Daniels were out the door almost before she had stopped the vehicle. But they all reached the front desk at the same time.
The cooperative constable on duty, who was, indeed, conversant in English, directed them to a cement hut out back, where unclaimed, unidentified corpses were stored. All it took was one look at Key’s impressive International Crime Investigation Department ID. It was so much more effective than any explanation Key could give about the Cerberus organization he ostensibly worked for. No matter how he tried to describe that, even to himself, it hardly sounded credible.
So, although the Sujanpur constable on duty had no way of knowing it, the Cerberus team’s support unit had made sure the hunters were supplied with effective identification cards, and even badges, tailored to whatever location they were sent. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the Cerberus support unit, CID was the name of India’s most popular, longest-running TV series, with more than a thousand episodes to its credit—all of which had been seen by the Sujanpur constable on duty.
“Lucky for us there’s only a couple of thousand people in this backwater,” Nichols murmured as they walked out the rear door of the small station, crossed the worn, muddy, rectangular yard, and stepped into the bunker that housed the bodies.
“We spend way too much time in morgues,” Daniels complained as they all surveyed the depressing