Patient Zero (41 page)

The Liberty Bell Center / Saturday, July 4; 12:04 P.M.

AS SOON AS I was inside the sound of chaos diminished and I crept into a long, darkened corridor that led, I knew, into a maze of offices and workrooms. The center wasn’t that big but there were still a hundred places someone could hide. I moved forward through several rooms, encountering one locked door after another. It would be suicide to kick each door, but these were interior locks and I could trip most of them with a stiff piece of plastic. I used my Barnes Noble member card. It was slow going, searching and clearing every room without backup. I wondered what was taking Skip so damn long to send someone after me.

I was hoping that O’Brien and Ollie had tried to make a run at the First Lady and had been cut down by Colby and his team. Agents on the Presidential Detail are incredibly tough and resourceful. But with every step my hopes diminished. I didn’t know who or what O’Brien was, but if Brierly was right and Ollie was a top CIA killer, then this was exactly his sort of operation: a hunt-and-kill.

What confused me was the fact that Brierly did not seem to be our man. Having spoken with him and seen him in action I could not believe that he was any part of the chaos back in the hall; and yet Ollie had been with O’Brien. And someone had fired those shots that saved O’Brien. Very accurate shooting in a hysterical situation, which showed professional calm.

I stopped when I saw a splash of blood on the floor. Very fresh. Creeping forward I found more, and then a place where feet had scuffed in the blood. Two sets of shoes. A scuffle? Had someone else come in following O’Brien and Ollie and been ambushed by them, or had the two traitors had a falling-out?

Then it occurred to me that one of them might have become infected. What if the walker plague had turned one of them into a monster? Was I chasing two armed men or one man and a zombie? Or two zombies? The thought chilled me.

“Joe?”

Grace’s voice in my earjack made me jump and I faded to one side and crouched down behind the open door of a mop closet, pistol aimed into the darkness.

“Joe      where are you?”

“I’m inside the center,” I whispered. “O’Brien came in here with Ollie Brown. I’m following a blood trail but no sign of them yet. I could use some backup.”

“Top Sims is on his way in with Skip. I have two other agents on the door.”

“Good. What’s the situation outside?”

“It’s bad. We’re getting the crowd quieted down, but I think some of them are already infected. Several people are showing signs of sickness. I have our people going through the crowd and separating out anyone who was hit by those darts.”

“Grace      if they start to turn      ”

“I know, Joe,” she said in a voice that was hard but scared. We were both thinking about St. Michael’s, but this was much worse. Members of Congress were here, and the VP’s wife; and on both sides of the glass were TV cameras. “I called Church and he had the President order an immediate media blackout. Church said that the President has declared a state of emergency for the Philadelphia metropolitan area. Oh God!”

Through the mike I could hear a fresh wave of screams.

And then gunfire.

Then nothing as Grace’s link went dead.

“Grace      ” I said into the silent link. I wanted to run back. I needed to go forward. I was totally torn.

I heard a muffled sound behind me and whirled, but it was one of the Secret Service agents standing in the shadow of an open doorway. I recognized him. Agent Colby, Brierly’s second in command. I could see a couple of other agents behind him.

“God, am I glad to see you. Is that the safe room? Is the First Lady okay?”

Colby took a step into the hallway and smiled.

But it wasn’t a smile.

His lips peeled back from his teeth and bloody drool dripped from his mouth. With a feral growl like a hunting cat Colby and the other agents rushed me.

The Bunker

ABDUL STEPPED INTO the hall, his automatic rifle ready. He was happy to be away from the hall where all sense and reason seemed to have fled. Though he understood the plan El Mujahid and Amirah had devised he still thought it was insane. It did not fit with his understanding of the Koran; but there was nothing he could do about it. He knew enough about the
Seif al Din
to realize that Amirah was distributing two different versions of it, one to the general staff and another to the more valuable team members. Anah, Amirah’s assistant, had tried to give him a shot but he’d fended her off, not wanting any part of this.

He was almost happy when the alarms rang, warning of an intrusion at the rear hatch.

The monitors were offline but Abdul had a good idea what was happening. Gault was not fool enough to have come here alone. So Abdul sent a team of soldiers to the hatch to intercept whatever backup the infidel had brought with him. Now he was hurrying that way himself to take charge of the situation.

He switched off the safety and took a more comfortable grip on his weapon as he stepped through a portal from the side corridor to the one that led to the hatch.

Toys stepped out from behind a stack of crates and put the barrel of his pistol against the back of Abdul’s head.

“Shhhhh,” Toys said with a smile.

The Liberty Bell Center / Saturday, July 4; 12:05 P.M.

COLBY CAME AT me with incredible speed, reaching with hooked fingers, teeth snapping at me while he was still two yards away. Even with everything that had happened—everything that was still happening—it took me totally off guard. I brought my gun up but not in time as he leaped in and drove me back against the wall. The other agents were three steps behind him.

My back slammed into the wall and for a fragment of a second the thought
I’m dead
flashed through my mind; but even as I was thinking that my body was moving. Years of conditioning make the limbs move at the reflexive level, and it was all of those years of drills, of repetitive movements, that saved me. But it was so close.

As I hit the wall my hips turned to the left and I slammed the butt of my pistol into Colby’s temple. It made his mass turn with mine and we rolled down the wall together, turn after vertical turn, putting distance between us and the other walkers. When we hit the doorway we jolted to a stop and I rammed the barrel of the .45 into Colby’s mouth, and even as he bit down on it I pulled the trigger. The big hollow-point blew out the back of his head and punched a hole the size of a nickel through the forehead of the agent right behind him. Both of them were instantly dead, but the sudden drop of Colby’s body coupled with the locked teeth around the pistol jerked the weapon out of my hand.

I pushed myself away and dodged instantly to my left as a third walker lunged over the corpses of his fellows. His arms closed around empty space.

There were three more of them—four in all. The one who had jumped at me had fallen forward. He made a grab for my ankle but I rushed forward to meet the attack of the next closest walker.

Even as I closed the short six-foot distance I whipped the folding RRF knife from its pocket holster and with a flick snapped the blade into place. The motion took a fraction of a second and as the lead walker hit me I spun away like a ballet dancer but at the end of the pirouette I ducked low and slashed him across the back of the knee. The RRF was wickedly sharp and the creature’s tendons parted like old string. As he staggered and went down I shoved him toward the second walker and lunged past their colliding bodies and slammed into the third, using a hard palm at the end of a stiffened arm to drive him back; then I ducked under his outstretched arms, avoiding his snapping teeth, and came up behind him. I grabbed his hair with my left hand and slammed the point of the knife up into the sweet spot—the arched opening at the base of the skull. The blade pierced the spinal cord and the walker shuddered to a stop and instantly fell forward.

The walker who’d tried to grab me after I’d killed Colby was scuttling forward now, running at me low and fast. I used my knife arm to parry his reaching arms and sidestepped like a bullfighter, then brought the RRF up and over and down and buried the entire blade in the wind-gate, the soft spot at the top of the skull. I gave the blade a brutal half turn and yanked it up, sidestepping to avoid the arching spray of blood and brain tissue.

That left two.

The one I’d crippled was crawling along the floor toward me but the other was up and running at me. When he was two paces out I stepped in and to the side so that his mass missed me by half an inch. Again I changed my step into a pivot and came up behind him and tried for the sweet spot again, but the hair was greasy with gel and he slipped away with my blade stuck into the solid bone of his skull. His twist wrenched the handle out of my hand and it wasn’t worth fighting for, so I let it go and wrapped my arm around his throat and gave him a reverse hip throw. When you’re facing forward it’s a hard fall but not fatal; when the thrower is back to back with the person he’s trying to throw then all of the hundreds of pounds of force are trapped in the weakest body point. His neck snapped like a bundle of wet sticks.

The last walker was crawling forward, but I jumped over his arms and came down on the small of his back. The vertebrae cracked audibly. He flopped down, dead from the waist down. I couldn’t leave him like that so I recovered the RRF. This time there was no way for the walker to twist away as my blade found its target and shut him off.

Grace / The Bell Chamber / Saturday, July 4; 12:05 P.M.

ONE MOMENT GRACE was speaking to Joe via commlink and then next the air around her was whining with bullets. A reporter was blasted backward as a bullet punched through his chest and he knocked Grace back and down. As she fell she saw three men separate themselves from the crowd. Each of them had guns and she recognized the weapons as the high-density plastic handguns that terrorists used to sneak through airport metal detectors. Probably firing ceramic rounds. No metal at all, she thought as she pushed the dead reporter off her and drew her weapon.

The foremost of the three gunmen saw her and raised his weapon but Grace gave him a double tap—chest and head—and flung him back against the wall. She swung her gun to the second killer just as two figures came suddenly in from the killers’ blind side. Gus Dietrich took the left-hand gunman out with three quick shots: two to the middle of his back and one to the back of his head. Next to him, Bunny appeared, no weapon in his hand, but he didn’t need one for the other killer: he chopped down on the man’s wrist with a balled fist, knocking the gun to the floor, then grabbed him by throat and crotch and slammed him into a corner of the Liberty Bell display case. He stepped back to let the broken body drop.

Then a fourth man stepped out of the crowd of tourists and pointed a polymer pistol at the back of Bunny’s head. Grace didn’t bother to call a warning; she put two rounds in the man and he spun away trailing blood. Bunny threw her a grim nod and scooped up the man’s plastic pistol.

Then the rest of the Secret Service agents were there.

“There are still hostiles in the crowd,” Grace yelled. “Search everyone.”

The agents moved very fast, and they plowed into the crowd, gruffly shoving congressmen and tourists alike. They found one final hostile, a trembling young man dressed like a Japanese tourist. He managed to get his pistol into his mouth before the agents could tackle him. The blast took off the top of his head.

Rudy pushed his way through the crowd toward Grace.

“Are you all right—?” she began, but he interrupted.

“Grace      some of these people are getting sick. It’s happening already      faster than before. We have to do something. We have to separate them before this becomes another St. Michael’s.”

As he spoke one of the reporters staggered forward and dropped to his knees and vomited. He looked up at them with a fevered face and eyes that were already becoming glassy. The man reached out a desperate claw of a hand toward them. “Help      me      ”

The Liberty Bell Center / Saturday, July 4; 12:07 P.M.

I WIPED MY knife and slid it back into its pocket clip then retrieved my gun and cleaned it quickly on Colby’s tie. I had no idea how many agents had gone with the First Lady. Was there a chance she was safe somewhere? Would we get that much of a break?

I tapped my ear mike but there was nothing, not even static. It must have been damaged when I’d hit the wall. I was alone.

I was also furious with myself for not having brought a stronger force here to Philly; or maybe for not pressuring Church into canceling the event. We’d both looked at this as a likely scenario and we’d still allowed it go forward. I realized as I thought these things that this was one of the aftershocks of 9/11. For a while after that everything that could draw a crowd was canceled, but then our culture moved on and there were no more attacks. We became complacent. Maybe we even thought that, against all evidence, we really had Al Qaeda on the run and that we’d taken the fight so effectively to them that we could settle back into normal life here in the States.

Today we were paying the price for complacence. Did the blame belong to me? Church? Or was this a cultural failing? If I lived through the day I’d have to take a closer look at those questions; but social philosophy doesn’t help you in the heat of a firefight, so I pressed on.

There was still no sign of backup coming for me, but I couldn’t wait. I crept forward, going room by darkened room. I tried light switches in the hallway and in several rooms but got nothing. Someone must have thrown the circuit breakers. The only light was the dim red glow of emergency lamps. I had to check every locked room, every closet to see if I could locate the First Lady, or Agent O’Brien, and throughout I could feel a hot spot between my eyes as if Ollie Brown was laying his laser sight on me and waiting for the right moment to punch my ticket.

Five rooms in I heard wet sounds coming from the far side of a row of desks. I knew what those sounds would be and I really didn’t want to look; but I had no choice. Taking a fresh grip on my .45 I rounded the desks on the balls of my feet.

There were three of them on their knees, heads bent forward, like lions around a zebra carcass. Only the carcass was that of a Secret Service agent and the lions were office workers—two women and a man wearing business casual and sporting Liberty Bell Center IDs around their necks. Their hands and mouths were black with blood.

Bile rose in my throat and I gagged. Just a tiny sound, just enough so that their heads snapped up like the wary predators they were. The closest of them, a woman, hissed at me.

I shot her in the head. The impact flung her back and she toppled over the dead agent in a perverse imitation of intimacy.

The other two rose up and lunged but I was ready.

Two shots, two kills.

I stared at the bodies, and then at the dead agent. His throat had been savaged. Would he reanimate, or was this beyond the pathogen’s wound-repair mechanism? I pointed my gun at his head and just as my finger was tightening around the trigger I heard three separate sounds at the same moment.

From far behind me I heard Top Sims calling my name. At my feet I heard the first feeble twitch as some new and monstrous force fired the engines that would raise this fallen hero up as an undead killer. And up ahead I heard the First Lady scream.