Patient Zero

by Jonathan Maberry

  The place looked like a movie set full of extras.

  How the fuck did an ancient blood cult have what looked like fifty or sixty members in this day and age?

  Jimmy lay on the ground in a circle of cultists, these wearing red robes and holding weird hatchets in their hands. He was tied hand to foot. His hair still swept up and back into the massive mullet he rocked with abandon. Even in the dark I could see his eye swollen shut over the gag stuffed into his mouth.

  He’d gone down swinging.

  Good for him.

  More cultists stood around the elephant, who had been put on its knees in front of what had to be the high priest in a white robe. The mighty beast knelt there, its massive head drooping, resting on short shorn tusks. Black eyes shone in the light, glassy. They must have doped the creature to make it so passive.

  The high priest held a claymore sword, its four-foot steel blade sweeping up and over his shoulder, where he let it lie as he gestured and spoke in some weird version of language—Sumerian, I assumed. The longer he spoke the tighter the band around my skull became.

  He was heading toward the finale.

  A short podium stood next to him and on it a black box. Slim and sleek, it just sat there, unassuming.

  “I don’t see a trigger,” Ledger said.

  I shrugged. It wasn’t my area of expertise.

  “I could drop him from here, but if he has a dead man’s switch or someone else has the trigger then it’ll do no good.”

  “We don’t have much time,” I said.

  He nodded, taking my word for it.

  With a flourish, the high priest screamed out a guttural sound and swung the claymore over his head.

  I was pushing through the foliage, moving toward the high priest, when I heard Ledger say: “Gotcha, motherfucker.” One second before his gun went off.

  * * *

  I cleared a short rise of dirt and saw one of the cultists, this one in a yellow robe with a widening red stain, lying on the ground bonelessly. Six inches from his outstretched hand lay a black tube that looked like a flashlight with a button on top.

  The trigger.

  I wasn’t going to touch it, but I wasn’t going to let anyone else, either. Two long strides and it was at my feet. Then I started shooting motherfuckers in robes.

  I dropped the high priest first as he ran toward me with his sword. Two quick shots in his chest turned his robe pink from the inside. He stumbled past me as the life ran out of him. The sword fell and stuck in the ground, jolting him to a stop until he slewed sideways and collapsed.

  Cultists swarmed in confusion, looking for someone to hurt. I jerked my head around, watching in all directions. Any of them that started my way, I put down, so close that aiming became instinctive. Pull the trigger, pivot, acquire target, pull the trigger; pivot, acquire target, rinse and repeat; eject magazines when empty and replace them as fast as possible.

  Cultists tried to circle me, but they were disrupted by Ledger coming up firing into them. Every time they would slide into formation, a formation that would easily take me down if they charged, Ledger popped another one.

  I didn’t know how much ammunition Ledger had left, but I was running low. You can only carry so many backup magazines. Once I was out, I would have just my backup gun from the small of my back, with its six bullets.

  After that, I was going for the claymore.

  The cultists had stopped trying to close in, their numbers shredded but still more than ours. They seethed on the other side of a short field of their fallen brothers. Ledger stepped beside me, scooping up the trigger as he did. One quick hand motion and he had the thing in two pieces. Lowering his head, he brought the wires inside to his mouth and bit through a yellow one, pulling it loose with a jerk of his head.

  He spit the wire out and dropped the trigger into the dirt. “There. One less thing to worry about.”

  He holstered his gun.

  “What are you doing?”

  He grinned. “I’m out.”

  I raised my Colt. “My last clip.”

  He tilted his head behind me. “Save it.”

  I turned my head to find the elephant climbing to its feet. On its back was one rightfully pissed-off Jimmy the Zookeeper, his face twisted in rage, his hair twisted like a tornado. He gave a rebel yell and leaned forward over the elephant’s forehead, pointing toward the cultists. The elephant stumbled a little, obviously groggy, but those big black eyes locked on the ones who tried to kill it, and from where we stood I could see that this mighty creature knew and it was going to deliver retribution. Even as the elephant tripped forward, it picked up speed, charging the cultists like a runaway freight train.

  Robes are terrible for running away in a panic, all trippy and tangly.

  Some of them made it.

  Most didn’t.

  “This has been a really weird day,” Ledger said.

  I shrugged as we watched Jimmy ride the elephant across the paddock, knocking over cultists like bowling pins. “Not overly.”

  * * *

  I pulled the Comet up to the entrance of the Atlanta airport and left it running as we got out. I didn’t ask how Ledger was going to fly with the M4 he had in a bag over his shoulder. Being affiliated with a secret military organization has its benefits. We stood at the back of the car and shook hands.

  “I’m sure we’ll run into each other again,” Ledger said.

  “More than likely.”

  We held each other’s grips for a moment. I don’t do good-byes very well. I wasn’t choked up or anything, they’ve just always been foreign to me.

  We’d just let go when a noise from the trunk made us both look.

  Oh. Damn.

  I went around and popped the lid.

  The smell that rolled out was atrocious.

  Big Jolly blinked up at us. He’d been in there for over ten hours.

  He’d had to go to the bathroom about five hours before this.

  He smelled like a chicken-processing plant on a hot summer day.

  “That is your problem,” I told Ledger.

  He grimaced and hauled Jolly up and out of my car. “I’ll give him to TSA to hose off.”

  “I’ll send you a bill for cleaning my trunk,” I said as he walked away, pushing Big Jolly in front of him.

  “You do that.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  James R. Tuck writes the Deacon Chalk series and the Robin Hood: Demon’s Bane series (with Debbie Viguie) and edits anthologies such as Mama Tried: Crime Fiction Inspired by Outlaw Country Music. He also writes the Mythos series as Levi Black. He’s on the Internet, look him up.

  WET TUESDAY

  BY DAVID FARLAND

  THE WAREHOUSE, DEPARTMENT OF MILITARY SCIENCES FIELD OFFICE, BALTIMORE, MARYLAND; SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2014, 7:03 AM

  _______________

  Some people are too evil to live. I know because I work with them every day. Take this case just a few days ago.

  “This had better be critical,” I groused, “waking me on a Sunday morning.” My head throbbed dully from the aftermath of last night’s party.

  Church stood at my door beneath a black umbrella. He looked pastier than normal, as if he’d grown five years older in the past day. His lack of sympathy for my hangover carried in his tone. “Got a dead Saudi prince.” He handed me a photo fresh off the AP newswire.

  I squinted at it.

  I’d seen what was left after car bombs before. Usually a fractured frame from a car, lots of smoke stains full of the explosive’s residue, and a charred corpse or two. What remained of the prince’s stretch limo and its passengers resembled a can of diced tomatoes that’d been blown up over a bonfire. Too many body parts for just one person.

  “Looks like the prince isn’t the only one who got face time with Allah,” I said.

  “Whole family,” Church confirmed. “Two wives and four or five kids. Detonated in downtown Riyadh.”

  The Kingdom Centre loomed in the background, a d
istinctive tower with a top like a strange crown. I’d had lunch there once. I could never see that crown without thinking that the eye of Sauron should have been gleaming from its center.

  “In the heart of the city? Holy shit!”

  Now, one fewer rich Saudi oil-monger in the world is no skin off my ass, but when you drag women, children, and innocent bystanders into it, that’s a different story. “Sounds like somebody was being made an example of,” I said. “What’d he do to torque off the local Wahhabis, give financial backing to some American porn producer?”

  Church shrugged. “Here’s the kicker, Captain. It was a self-driven car, no chauffeur.”

  He gave me a second to let it click. We hadn’t seen that one before—a new death delivery system. There’s an arms race that has been going on for thousands of years, from the time that man invented the first club, to spear-throwers, to … well, this. A new death delivery system. The thing is, I saw the potential instantly. Back in the Middle East, suicide bombs are popular. It makes a statement: I hate you so much, I’m willing to kill myself to be rid of you. You’ve got to be a true believer to be a suicide bomber—and an asshole. But for the past few years, a lot of these suicides have been committed by kids—twelve or thirteen. The jihadists fill the young boys with bloodlust, maybe inject them with a bit of heroin, and then aim them at an embassy or military compound. Half the kids don’t even know how to drive, so the jihadists tape their foot to the gas.

  But the kids get scared, and sometimes they try to drive the wrong way, or they get shot while trying to break through a checkpoint.

  Self-driven cars would allay that problem, take out the human dynamic. And a big truck could carry massive payloads.

  Church said dryly, “Looks like we’ve got a terrorist who’s taken his childhood fascination with remote-controlled cars to a whole new level. I need you to shut him down.”

  Now, I don’t like terrorists, but I admire them sometimes, the way you can admire a jaguar in the jungle, all full of deadly grace. I imagined my target that way.

  “I’m guessing you want it done now?”

  “With this kind of terrorist,” Church said, “there’s always a ticking bomb waiting to go off. We don’t know what targets might be lined up, but I want the killing spree stopped. Now would be good.” Church smiled, and I smiled in return.

  This was already feeling up close and personal.

  THE WAREHOUSE, DEPARTMENT OF MILITARY SCIENCES FIELD OFFICE, BALTIMORE, MARYLAND; SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2014, 7:19 AM

  Ashley slipped me one of her come-on glances as she placed a folder, stamped with TOP SECRET and a couple of compartmented code words, on my desk. “Here’s the latest from the CIA, Joe. I included links to a handful of videos.”

  Somehow, knowing that Ashley wasn’t getting her Sunday off, either, made me feel better. She didn’t appear sleep-deprived. A lot of top researchers are like that—half machine—but she was special.

  She had platinum-blond hair that drifted like sunlit fog to her nicely rounded butt and swayed enticingly as she walked; sapphire eyes as deep as cenotes in the Yucatán, so wide they gave her a perpetual expression of mild surprise; and a wardrobe of blouses that fit like second skins, hugging in exactly the right places. Never mistake her for the stereotype blonde, however. Ashley is the Baltimore Field Office’s top analytical researcher, and a deadeye with any firearm you hand her. She’s outshot me on the range a couple of times, and not because I let her.

  She also has a low purr of a voice that always sounds like a come-on. Something in my vitals stirred.

  “Thanks, Ash.” I returned the best smile I could muster under the circumstances. Maybe when I wrap this up we can do something video-worthy ourselves, I thought.

  Her pursed lips and the glance over her shoulder as she sashayed away weren’t exactly a turndown.

  As usual, Ashley had been thorough. The fat folder she’d brought me contained maps; geo-coords; a page of photos with names, personal data, and high-value target ID numbers; and half a dozen black-and-white stills of a rambling, single-story building taken by Lockheed Martin’s RQ-170 Sentinel. Developed by LM’s Skunk Works specifically for the CIA and operated by the U.S. Air Force, the Sentinel collected much of the intel that had resulted in Osama bin Laden meeting his seventy-two virgins in May 2011.

  Except this facility wasn’t in Abbottabad, Pakistan, or Kandahar, Afghanistan. This building was identified as a technological research facility on the outskirts of the Syrian city of Al-Raqqah, capital of the northern Syrian governate, or province, of the same name. The CIA had confirmed that ISIS was using the place to create car bombs.

  Conclusive proof of that came with the videos Ashley had provided. Though annoyingly jerky, they followed a trio of Middle Eastern men, middle-aged by their salt-and-pepper beards, as they sauntered along the kind of assembly line one would see in a DOD explosive ordnance plant. A great deal of gesticulating punctuated their muffled discussion.

  The last video included white arrow markers and a voice-over by some spook linguist who called himself Mack. Yeah, I know, really imaginative. I kept thinking Dweeb and picturing the Napoleon character from that odd little movie made in Idaho a few years back. Nothing dynamite about this guy, however.

  When the flighty camera managed to zoom in on each of the terrorists’ faces for a couple seconds, Dweeb identified each man by name. None of the hot ISIS leaders one occasionally hears about in the news—when the news services actually admit that Islamist terrorism exists—but I knew who they were. I tried to adjust my monitor’s focus. Or maybe my bleary eyes just needed adjusting.

  Dweeb went on to explain, in a monotone as dry as a stale biscuit, that even with these state-of-the-art upgrades to their factory, the three scientists doubted they could produce sufficient car bombs in time.

  In time for what?

  That made my short hairs stand at attention and not just the ones on the back of my neck.

  I watched eagerly as they went into a room where they had taken a mannequin and had fitted its head and arms with various gears so that it could move in a semi-realistic way. A red butch wig completed the description.

  Shit, I thought. These guys weren’t just rigging up cars to drive themselves, they were creating robot drivers so that they could fool any bystanders. All the better to get close to military checkposts.

  The kicker was, the mannequin was wearing a uniform: Royal Mail. I saw the joke immediately: I’ve got a message for England.

  “Pay dirt,” I told Church. “But these guys aren’t settling for one lousy prince. Sounds like they’re planning something big. Watch this.” I showed him the video.

  Church arched an eyebrow. “Time to deploy the fleet.” Before I could ask what he meant by “the fleet,” he ordered, “Contact Bug.”

  Jerome Taylor, known as Bug to everybody including his mother, is DMS’s resident computer supergeek. He’s also the undisputed nerd master of pop culture. That’s actually proven useful on a few occasions.

  “What did he mean by ‘the fleet’?” I asked Bug via telecom a few minutes later. He’s located at our headquarters based at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn.

  Bug grinned like a prankster about to pull off a practical joke. Obviously, he hadn’t been out partying a few hours earlier. “Fly cams,” he said.

  I flashed a quizzical smile.

  “Remember that hummingbird UAV our friends at DARPA announced in, what, 2011, 2012?” When I nodded, Bug said, “Well, they’ve taken it a step further. Several steps, including taking it operational. CIA’s using them all over the Middle East, where houseflies are as thick as mosquitoes on a Louisiana bayou.”

  I couldn’t resist. “How many of them have been swatted in the line of duty?”

  “Only one so far,” Bug said, “when it literally got in the face of its intended target.”

  That explained the random jerkiness of Dweeb’s videos. I guess that was the price we’d have to pay for up-close-and-personal imagery in
telligence.

  THE WAREHOUSE, DEPARTMENT OF MILITARY SCIENCES FIELD OFFICE, BALTIMORE, MARYLAND; SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2014, 5:28 PM

  “Here you go, Cap,” Bug said. His face filled the massive telecom screen on Church’s office wall. “First feeds from Al-Raqqah Technological Research Facility.”

  Bug’s face blinked out, to be replaced by … a bug’s-eye view of a surprisingly modern laboratory.

  “The fly’s eyes are the camera’s lenses,” Bug said as our pest-sized drone made an initial reconnaissance loop around the spacious room. It jinked like a fighter pilot with pursuers on his six, and careened toward a turbaned man with a neatly trimmed beard.

  The target absently waved our bug away with a hand bearing several heavy gold rings, and it swooped in toward a top-of-the-line, secure computer setup parked on a desk in a windowless corner.

  “Indistinguishable from the real thing,” Bug said from offscreen. I didn’t miss the grin in his voice. “That’s our lead scientist it just buzzed.”

  “Skip the sales pitch, Bug,” I said, “and cut to the chase.”

  “Right.” The screen blanked for a few seconds, then lit up with an over-the-shoulder view of our scientist at his computer. Metadata in the video’s lower corner showed a time-hack a couple of hours after the opening recce shot. A log-in box, labeled in Arabic, glowed on the monitor, while lean, gold-ringed fingers darted across a keyboard. When one hand rose in a shooing motion near the guy’s ear, the drone skated clear, maintaining its view of the hardware.

  “Did you capture that?” I asked Bug when the log-in screen yielded to an austere email in-box, also in Arabic.

  “Sure we got a freeze-frame,” Bug said. “I gained access to our terrorist’s system a few minutes after he walked away. His whole email account and the contents of his research files are now being analyzed and translated by our Arabic section. We should have results for you first thing tomorrow.”

  I nodded, and suddenly got a nervous feeling, as if someone were training a sniper rifle on the back of my head. I couldn’t shake the feeling that … something was coming soon. “Get it to me sooner,” I said. “Tomorrow might be too late.”