Patient Zero (7 page)

Baltimore, Maryland / Saturday, June 27; 7:46 P.M.

I DROPPED RUDY at his office. As he got out of the car he said, “Joe      I know how obsessive you can get about things.”

“Me? Really.”

“I’m serious. Church is on some creepy level of government and he told you to leave it alone. I think you should take him at his word.”

“Yeah, let me get right on that.”

“What’s your alternative? Poke at it with a stick until all the hornets come out of the nest? Think about it      Church didn’t approach you through channels, that means he wants this kept off the record. That frightens me, cowboy, and it should frighten you.”

“I’m too wired to be scared. God      I think I need to get totally shitfaced tonight.”

He closed the door and leaned in through the window. “Listen to me, Joe      go easy on the booze. No screwing around. You’ve experienced two major traumas in only a few days. No matter how much of a macho façade you put on I know that killing those men at the warehouse had to do you some damage.”

“They dealt the play.”

“Like that matters? Just because they were doing something immoral doesn’t take away your emotional connection to it. This isn’t to say that you were in any way wrong. God knows I hope I would have the physical and moral courage to do what you did in there. You’re a white hat, Joe, but that comes with a price tag. You have a heart and a mind and pretty soon you’re going to have to open up those doors and take a close look at what kind of damage is there as a result of this.”

I said nothing.

“I’m saying this as your friend as well as your therapist.”

I still said nothing.

“Don’t think I’m kidding, Joe. This isn’t something you can shrug off. You’re required to have sessions with me about this, and you can’t go back on the job until I file my report. As of yet I don’t have anything to file. You’ve blown off two scheduled sessions so far. You need to talk about it.”

I stared out the window for a minute. “Okay.”

In a softer tone he added, “Look, cowboy, I know how tough you are      but believe me when I tell you that nobody is
that
tough. A complete separation from your feelings is not proof of manly strength      it’s a big glaring neon warning sign. I know you think you called me today to ask my opinion as a pal and as a medical doctor, but I have to believe that you’re reaching out for support for what you’ve been through. As far as this thing with Javad and Mr. Church goes      well, if you were capable of simply shrugging that off with no traumatic effects then I would either be afraid of you or afraid for you.”

“I’m feeling it,” I assured him.

Rudy studied my face. “I have a two o’clock open on Tuesday.”

I sighed. “Yeah, okay. Tuesday at two.”

He nodded, pleased. “Bring Starbucks.”

“Sure, what do you want?”

“My usual. Iced half-caf ristretto quad grande two pump raspberry two percent no whip light ice with caramel drizzle three-and-a-half-pump white mocha.”

“Is any of that actually coffee?”

“More or less.”

“And you think I’m damaged.”

He stepped back and I drove off. I could see in the rearview that he watched me all the way out of the parking lot.

Baltimore, Maryland / Saturday, June 27; 7:53 P.M.

I HEADED HOME and as soon as I was in the door I went straight to the bathroom, stripped and stuffed everything, even my boxers, into the trash and then stood under the hottest spray I could stand and tried to boil the day off my skin.

My cat, Cobbler—a marmalade and white tabby—hopped up on the toilet tank and watched me with his big yellow eyes.

I knotted a towel around my waist and thought about the beers in the fridge, but even though the adrenaline was out of my bloodstream the shakes were still right there beneath the surface. I passed on the beer and put a frozen pizza in the oven, and turned on the TV. Normally I’d surf over to one of the horror or SF channels and see who was eating whom, but right now I wanted no part of that. All I needed now was to stumble on a rerun of
Dawn of the Dead
and I’d probably lose it. So I put on the news. The top story was a follow-up on the fire at St. Michael’s Hospital that had occurred the same night as the warehouse raid. Over two hundred dead and half the hospital burned to the ground. They were calling it the worst hospital fire in modern U.S. history.

More depression I didn’t need, so I surfed over to a different news channel and watched a few minutes of the preevent press hype over the big Fourth of July event in Philly. They were rededicating the Liberty Bell and also installing a brand-new one—the Freedom Bell—that had been built according to the specs of the original. Something the First Lady and the wife of the Vice President had cooked up as part of their Patriotic American Women organization. Lots of rah-rah stuff to build morale for the troops in the field and raise domestic support for our overseas action. The whole event was going to center around the ringing of the Freedom Bell, which would be symbolic of American democracy and freedom ringing out around the world. Must have sounded good to Congress because they approved it and hired some woman to make the new bell, and she was supposed to be a descendant of the British metalsmith who’d cast the original Liberty Bell. My task force team was one of over a dozen similar groups that were supposed to be on site during the festivities, though overall security was naturally a Secret Service gig. We were basically thugs in suits for the day, just in case bin Laden showed up with a hundred pounds of C4 strapped to his chest. Life in post-9/11 America. Happy holidays, bring the whole family.

I switched off the set and closed my eyes. What was it Church had said?
Mr. Ledger, we are very much in the business of stopping terror. There are threats against this country greater than anything that has so far made the papers.

“No kidding,” I said aloud.

So how did I work this? I’m self-aware enough to know that I have a somewhat fractured personality. Not exactly multiple personality disorder, but clearly there were different drivers at the wheel depending on my mood, and depending on my needs. Over the years I’d been able to identify and make peace with the three dominant personalities: the Modern Man, the Warrior, and the Cop. At the moment all three of them were trying to grab the wheel.

The Modern Man, the civilized part of me, was in full-blown denial mode. He didn’t want to believe in monsters and he wasn’t all that comfortable with secret government departments and all that James Bond crap. The Warrior was okay with the cloak-and-dagger stuff because it partly defined him, it allowed him the chance to be who and what he was: a killer. He was useful in a firefight, but I seldom let him out to play. He was lousy at tea parties. Then there was the Cop. That part of me had become dominant over the last few years, and he also upheld the nobler parts of the Warrior’s personality—the codes of ethics, the rules.

With my eyes closed I settled back into meditative breathing and let the parts of me sort it all out. It was almost always the Cop who got the others to shut the hell up. The Cop was the thinker. I dismantled this thing bit by bit and laid everything on the table so the Cop could take a good long look.

There were parts that didn’t fit. The most obvious was the fact that the terrorists we took down at the warehouse had been such a mixed bag. These guys aren’t known for tolerance and team spirit.

The suicide plan was also weird. Each of hostiles at the warehouse had been infected by a disease and had to take regular doses of an antidote to stay alive. That was impressive, but it also seemed like overkill. It was too sophisticated for its own purposes, considering that the mere threat of it should have been enough. It also spoke of a degree of technological sophistication that was, as far as I could judge, beyond the reach of your average extremist cell. If this was all real, and if it turned out that the plague that created these walkers was developed by the same mind, or minds, that created the control disease, then the DMS might be facing an actual real-world mad scientist. In another mood, or perhaps on another day, that might actually be funny. Right now it scared the hell out of me.

Then there was Javad. Was he really dead and somehow reanimated? Impossible? You bet; and yet I know what I saw.

From now on,
Church had said,
we may have to consider “dead” a relative term.

I found it hard to believe that Javad was the only infected person. There hadn’t been a lab at the warehouse. Church had to know that, too; and I should have remarked on it. The oven timer dinged and I opened my eyes. I took the pizza with me into the little nook off the kitchen where I had my computer. I ate a slice while it loaded. Then I got to work. The Cop in me was in gear now. Church had said that if I looked I wouldn’t find anything about him or the DMS. I wanted to put that to the test, so I stayed up all night searching the Internet.

I did a search on the warehouse Church had been using. Baylor Records Storage. To dig deep I had to log on through the department Web site, and there was a serious risk in that. Everything is logged, everything is tracked.

“Screw it,” I said, and kept going. But Baylor Records turned out to be a dead end. Previous owner was dead and there were no direct heirs, so the government had snapped it up for back taxes. Easy enough for someone like Church to commandeer. I searched all night to see if there was any connection between Baylor Records and the old container company warehouse where we’d taken down the terrorist cell; but if a connection existed I couldn’t find it.

Early Sunday morning Rudy called to say he’d spent all of last night and this morning researching prions.

“What happened to ‘leave it alone, Joe’?”

“What can I tell you,” he said tiredly. “So we both need therapy.”

“You find anything interesting?”

“Lots, but none of it germane to what you mean. The whole prion thing seems less and less likely, though. As dangerous as they are the infection rate is extremely slow. It can take months or years for it to manifest. I’ll keep looking, though. And don’t forget about our session on Tuesday.”

“Yes, mother.”

“Don’t start with me, cowboy,” he warned, and hung up.

The rest of Sunday went like that. I logged hour after hour on the Net, and Rudy and I shared URLs via e-mail and IM, but we didn’t seem to be getting any closer to an explanation for what Javad was or how he came to be like that. Around midnight I finally shut off the machine, took a shower, and shambled off to bed. I was hitting brick walls everywhere I went, and I guess another person would have thrown in the towel, but that’s not my sort of thing. I just needed to rest and then attack this again with a fresher set of wits.

Gault and Amirah / The Bunker / Six days ago

THEY LAY EXHAUSTED on the table, their clothes tangled around her waist and his ankles, his body purple and red with claw marks and bites. He never left a mark on her, not even the smallest of love bites. That would be suicide.

They never spoke of love afterward. Never told each other how much this meant, or how much they meant to each other. They already knew what the other would say. It had all been said in that first moment of eye contact. Pillow talk would limit the feeling, it would define what did not need to be defined and therefore cheapen it all to some kind of clandestine Romeo and Juliet pap. This was much bigger and, Gault hoped, likely to end with less personal tragedy.

She spoke first, saying simply, “I’ve had some vague reports. Baltimore?”

“Mm, yes,” he drawled. “Seems our warehouse is a total loss.”

“What about Javad?”

He paused, staring at the speckled surface of the acoustic ceiling tiles, deciding which version of the truth to tell her. He loved Amirah but there were levels of privacy that even she didn’t get to enter; which would make it easier if he had to kill her one of these days. He liked to keep his options open. “Uncertain.”

“He hasn’t gotten out. I’ve been tracking the news feeds      ”

“I know, which means that we still have to move forward with the next few steps of the operation.”

“What about the other two locations? If the Americans know about the warehouse      ”

“Don’t worry,” Gault said. “They know about one of them—the big one; but not about the other one. Right now they’re holding off, probably hoping to find where the other lorry went.”

She nodded, the motion massaging his bicep, which was starting to fall asleep. “When will you evacuate the plant?”

“Why bother? We don’t really need it anymore and I’m rather hoping they raid it.”

Amirah turned her head sharply. “Why?”

“How, why, and when they raid that plant will tell us a great deal about their intelligence gathering, and their wits.”

“Shouldn’t those details be handled by your American friend?”

“He’s too close to it to risk any direct involvement. Besides,” Gault said, “there’s something else I need him to focus on. There are some indications that there is another player in the game, possibly a new counterterrorism organization or department. Right now this is just guesswork, but it bears looking into.”

Amirah sat up and her black robes fell down to cover her with an unintentional display of rumpled modesty. She pushed a strand of glossy black hair away from her face. Without the
chadri
her face was incredibly beautiful. Full lips, high cheekbones, a broad clear brow, and those eyes. Gault loved those eyes. Like a falcon or some creature out of myth.

“Is it the Brits? You think Barrier is—”

He shook his head. “No, not Barrier. Something the Yanks have cooked up, but as I said—I’m not sure who yet. I have feelers out through Homeland, the FBI, a few other agencies. If I’m right then they’ll show their hands soon enough.”

“You should put your pet monkey on it. He’s tenacious.”

Gault smiled. “His name is Toys      and yes, he is tenacious.”
In fact,
Gault thought,
he’d love to cook you over a slow fire.

“So      what are you going to do about the plant?”

“I rather think I’m going to let them raid it. I can’t think of a better way of inspiring useful fear than letting me break in and see what’s going on in that place. It’ll do us worlds of good.”

“But what about El Mujahid? He’s the master of creating fear, and his mission is already in the works. If you allow the raid on the warehouse does that mean you’ll use that instead of what my husband is—”

“Hardly,” Gault assured her. “I’m relying on the Fighter to deliver the master stroke; but a raid on the plant will surely set the atmosphere      after which everything will go exactly as we want.”

She frowned at him, chewing a lip as she considered this. He knew that she was sorting through the possible outcomes based on what she knew—what he’d
allowed
her to know. She would come to very logical conclusions, and on the whole they would be right; but they would be incomplete. Which was fine.

“Don’t worry, my princess,” Gault said, and turned onto his side so he could stroke her hair and brush the back of his hand against her cheek. “This is going very, very well for us. We need the Yanks to think they’re containing the situation. If they have a new special operations group, then it will help focus attention in the right direction for us. The best manipulations are always those in which the mark thinks he is in charge.”

Amirah kissed him. “You have the mind of a scorpion, my love.”

“Now, what do you have to show me?”

Her eyes lit up. “If creating great fear is what you want, then you’ll be very happy with what we’ve done since the last time you were here.”

“As good as Javad?”

“Oh no      this is much, much better.”

He almost said “I love you.” Instead he kissed her deeply and passionately and then whispered in her ear: “Show me.”