Patient Zero jl-1

by Jonathan Maberry

  I swung my right hand around in a palm shot that turned his head so hard to the right that I heard his neck bones grind. It would have stopped anyone; it didn’t stop him any more than the two slugs had stopped him. But it gave me a few seconds’ escape from those teeth, and even as Javad started wrenching his face back toward me I hooked my leg around his and chopped at the back of his knee. Maybe he couldn’t feel pain but a bent knee is a bent knee—it’s a gravity thing. He canted to one side and I used his sagging weight to spin and drive him into the wall. I caught him by the back of the hair and slammed him face forward into the wall once, twice, again and again. His jaw disintegrated; but I grabbed what was left of his chin and twisted my fingers into his hair and then I pivoted my hips as hard and as fast as I could, taking his head with me. My body turned faster and farther than his neck could.

  There was a huge wet snap!

  And then Javad was gone. His body switched off like someone had kicked the plug out and he simply dropped. I stepped back and let him fall.

  I could barely breathe; sweat poured down my face, stung my eyes. I heard a sound behind me—I wheeled around and Church was leaning against the frame of the open doorway.

  “Welcome to the new face of global terrorism,” he said.

  Chapter Six

  Easton, Maryland / Saturday, June 27; 2:36 P.M.

  “WHAT WAS HE?”

  We were back at the table. They’d let me clean up in a bathroom. I showered and dressed in borrowed gym clothes. The shakes had started in the shower. Adrenaline accounted for a lot of it, but it was more than that. After thirty minutes my hands were still trembling and I didn’t care if Church saw it.

  He shrugged. “We’re still working on a name for his condition.”

  “Condition? That son of a bitch was dead!”

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

  I had to sit with that for a while. Church waited me out.

  “That is the same guy I shot at the warehouse, right? I mean, I put him down hard. I saw blood and bone on the walls…”

  “Javad Mustapha, an Iraqi national,” Church agreed, nodding. “Your shots were mortal but not immediately so; he was still alive when he was transported to the hospital where he was pronounced DOA. He ‘revived’ shortly after arrival.” He spread his hands. “We controlled that incident and you won’t find specific mention of it in the papers or in any official report.”

  “Holy Christ… are we talking zombies here?”

  Church smiled faintly. “We’re calling him a ‘walker.’ Short for ‘Dead Man Walking.’ The head of my science team has too much of a pop culture sensibility. And before you ask, it’s not anything supernatural.”

  “How did this happen? Some kind of toxic spill… a plague…?”

  “We don’t know. A prion disease, perhaps, or a parasite; maybe both, but certainly something that causes hyperactivity of the stem cells. True to the nature of parasites, the infected have a totality of purpose built around procreation. Not sexually, of course, but through a bite that is apparently one hundred percent infectious. We’ve only begun to research it.”

  “Is it only his bite that’s infectious?” I asked. It felt like ice-cold army ants were marching around in my gut.

  “We’ve done a number of tests on sweat and other body fluids but the strongest concentration of the disease is in the saliva. The bite transmits the infection.”

  I looked at the bruise on my arm. “I’m not wearing Kevlar. If I’d been bitten in there…”

  He looked at me.

  Anger was a white-hot furnace in my chest. “You’re a total rat bastard, you know that?”

  “As I said, Mr. Ledger, this is the new face of terrorism. A fierce, terrible bioweapon we don’t yet understand. It may take us months to even construct a viable research protocol, which means that time is completely against us. We think that your friend Javad in there was the bioterrorist approximation of a suicide bomber, that he was the ‘patient zero’ for an intended plague directed at the U.S. The blue case recovered at the scene was some kind of climate-controlled containment system, quite possibly to protect the other cell members from their own weapon. None of the others at the warehouse showed any signs of infection.” He paused. “We think we stopped them.”

  “You… ‘think’?” I heard how he leaned on the word.

  “Yes, Mr. Ledger, but we don’t know. And we have to know, just as we have to be ready in case this happens again. If Javad is the only plague vector then we’ll scratch one up for our side and start looking for their next trick, or try to be ready for whenever they try this trick again. If, on the other hand, there are other teams out there ready to launch others like Javad… well, that’s part of the reason the DMS was formed.”

  “Then you’d sure as hell better check with the task force commander because two panel trucks pulled out of that warehouse the night before we hit it. We tracked one and lost one…”

  “Yes. Losing one was sloppy.”

  I fought the urge to flip him the bird. “Who’s behind this? Is this an Al Qaeda thing, because the task force was never able to pin that down?”

  “That’s still uncertain, though we have some suspicions. The other members of the cell were a mixed bunch. Al Qaeda, Shia extremists, two Sunni extremists, and even one from the Egyptian Islamic Jihad.”

  “Shia and Sunni working together?”

  “Interesting, isn’t it?” Church said dryly. “The name you picked up in your wiretap—El Mujahid—lends a little weight to the idea of collaboration. He’s been known to work with several of the more extreme splinter groups.”

  “I assume you interrogated the surviving cell members?”

  He said nothing.

  “Well…?”

  “They’re all dead. Suicide.”

  “How? Didn’t you search them for cyanide pills in their teeth and all that shit?”

  Church shook his head. “Something a bit cleverer than that. Each of them had been infected with a pathogen of a type as yet unidentified; they needed to take a drug every eight hours to keep the disease dormant. Without the drug the disease becomes active with incredible speed and immediately begins to erode vascular tissue. We didn’t know this until they started bleeding internally, and even then we barely got enough information out of the last one to understand the shape of it. The control substance was hidden in ordinary aspirin tablets. We would never have known to look.”

  “Is this the same disease that my dancing partner in there had?”

  “No. And as far as we can tell it’s noncommunicable. I have some of the top scientists in the world working with the DMS, and so far they’ve been scratching their heads. Some of them are actually impressed.”

  “So am I. This is some pretty sophisticated stuff we’re talking about.”

  “And yet simple; you wouldn’t even need much in the way of guards and threats. One person with the pill bottle to control them all is all they’d need. Very easy to manage. This level of sophistication raises our opinion of this cell and makes their potential that much greater.”

  I said, “What happened to the other guys? The ones who auditioned before me? Did they get bitten?”

  “One did, I’m sorry to say. Two others did not.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  It was an effort not to leap across the table and tear his throat out. I watched Church’s face, saw the shift of his body language as the anger in my voice registered. If I’d gone across that table he’d have been ready for me. “What about the other two? You go rescue them?”

  “No. They both managed to cuff the suspect.”

  “Then I don’t understand.”

  “It isn’t only the physical component of the test that matters, Mr. Ledger. Each of them faced the moment of truth, as you yourself are doing now, and each of them reacted…” He paused, pursing his lips. “Inadequately.”

  “In what way?”

  “In ways that
identified them as unsuitable candidates.” He waed his hand, dismissing that line of discussion.

  “Why am I here?”

  “Ah, the golden question. You’re here, Mr. Ledger, because we are scouting for candidates to flesh out our DMS team. We’re a new agency. We have lots of funding and we have a nicely vague set of parameters. Our intelligence division is hard at work to infiltrate and report on cells such as the one your team took down in Baltimore. We’re surveilling the location where the first panel truck went, and we have high hopes of discovering the destination of the other.”

  “And you want me to sign up?”

  He showed his teeth again. Kind of a smile. “No, Mr. Ledger, I want you to go to the FBI academy as planned.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Only now you’ll have a clearer focus on which parts of that training to pay more attention to. Medical and management courses would be worthwhile. You can probably imagine which others would be of use.”

  We sat for a while with that comment hanging in the air.

  “And when I’m done?”

  Church spread his hands. “If the threat is over—truly over—you may never hear from me again. If you look for proof of my existence, or of the existence of this organization, you’ll find nothing of any use; and I don’t advise trying. You will of course say nothing about what happened here. I make no threats, Mr. Ledger; I believe I can trust both your intelligence and common sense in this matter.”

  “What if there are more of these things, these…walkers?”

  “In that eventuality I will very probably be in touch.”

  “You have to know that this isn’t over. It can’t be. Nothing’s that simple.”

  “I appreciate your cooperation today, Mr. Ledger.”

  With that he stood and offered me his hand. I looked at it and then at him for maybe ten full seconds during which neither his hand nor his eyes wavered. Then I stood and shook his hand. As he left Buckethead and the others came for me and drove me back to my car. They didn’t say a word, though on the drive back each of them cut me wary glances every now and then.

  As they drove off I memorized the license number. Then I got into my SUV and sat for maybe twenty minutes, staring through the window at the beach and the happy people playing in the sun. A second wave of the shakes hit me and I had to clamp my jaws shut to keep my teeth from chattering. It was like the way I felt after 9/11. The world had changed again. Just as “terror” had become a far more common word to us all then, terror was a much scarier word to me now.

  What would I do if Church called me back?

  Chapter Seven

  Sebastian Gault / Helmand Province, Afghanistan / Six days ago

  HIS NAME WAS El Mujahid, and it meant “fighter of the way of Allah.” Farm life had made him strong; his devotion to the Koran had given him focus. His love for the woman Amirah had given him purpose and very probably driven him mad, though from the profiles he’d paid to have done on this man, Sebastian Gault thought that the Fighter was already a bit twitchy before Amirah screwed his brains out.

  That made Gault smile. More kingdoms have risen and collapsed, more causes fought and died for over sex—or its teasing promise—than for all the political ideologies and religious hatred that ever existed. And as far as Amirah went, Gault could certainly sympathize with the brutish El Mujahid. Amirah was a ball-twisting vixen of truly historic dimensions, a true Guinevere—she could inspire great heroics, could stand by and support the rise of well-intentioned kingdoms, but at the same time she drove kings and champions to mad deeds.

  Gault poured himself a glass of water and settled into his chair. It was a battered plastic folding chair by a rust-eaten card table set inside a canvas tent that smelled of camel dung, gasoline, and gunpowder. Add the coppery stink of blood and you’d have the perfume of fanaticism, which Gault had smelled in a hundred places over the last twenty-five years. In the end it always smelled like money to him. And money, he knew, was the only force in the universe more powerful than sex.

  Gault leaned back and sipped his water and observed El Mujahid through the open tent flap. The Fighter stood right outside and was growling orders to his men. Even those who were bigger and more physically powerful than the Fighter seemed shrunken in his presence, their wattage dialed down as his shone like the sun. Once he sent them out to do whatever bit of nastiness he assigned them, they would swell like giants and through them El Mujahid’s fist would reach out and strike with godlike force across borders and around the world.

  Gault thought the man was very well named; a name that could have been a code, a disguise, but wasn’t. It was as if the man’s peasant parents—a couple of nearly illiterate dust farmers from some godforsaken corner of Yemen—had known that their only child was destined to become a warrior. Not merely a soldier for Allah, but a general. It was a powerful name for a child, and as the boy grew into a man he had embraced the potential of his name. Unlike so many of his peers he was not recruited by groups of militant fundamentalists—he sought them out.

  By the time El Mujahid was thirty he was on the wanted lists of over forty nations, and on the top ten most wanted list of the United States. He had ties to Al Qaeda and a dozen other extremist groups. He was single-minded, relentless, smart—though not particularly wise—and when he spoke, others listened. That made him terribly feared, but feared in the way a guided missile was feared.

  Amirah… ah, thought Gault, now she was something entirely different. If the Fighter was the missile, then the Princess—for that was what her name meant—was the hand at the controls. Well… she shared those controls with Gault. By his estimation it was the most effective, harmonious, and potentially lucrative collaboration since Hannibal met an elephant handler. Probably more so.

  The tent flap whipped open and the Fighter strode inside. He never simply walked anywhere—he had the same swagger as Fidel Castro, moving through space as if he wanted to bruise the air molecules and teach them their place. It always reminded Gault of the character of the Roman general Miles Gloriosus from the old Broadway musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Gloriosus’s opening line, bellowed from offstage, was: “Stand aside everyone… I take large steps.” Sometimes Gault had to dig his fingernails into his palms to keep from smiling when El Mujahid strode into the room.

  The Fighter snatched up the water bottle and poured himself a glass, sloshing half of it on the table, and threw it back. Gault wondered at what point affectation had given way to true personality trait.

  “The teams are leaving now,” the Fighter said as he dragged over a chair and threw himself into it. The cheap seat creaked under his bulk, but he ignored it. He was a handsome man with unusual looks for someone of Yemen birth. His eyes were a pale brown, almost gold, and his skin, though tanned by the blistering sun, was not as dark as many of his countrymen. Over the last eighteen months Gault had arranged for highly skilled cosmetic surgeons to do some touch-up work on the Fighter, including resizing his ears, a comprehensive dye job on his hair—head to feet—tonal changes to his vocal chords, and some bone smoothing on his brow and chin. They were all small operations but the total effect was that El Mujahid looked even more like a European. Like a Brit. Give him a modern haircut, lose the fierce mustache, and put him in an Armani suit, Gault considered, and he could pass for northern Italian or even Welsh. The anomaly of the Fighter’s complexion, and his ability to speak an uninflected English with a hint of a British accent, factored heavily in Gault’s plans for the man, and Gault had paid good money to make sure that under the right circumstances the Fighter would make a believable non-Arab. He’d even provided a series of audiotapes to allow the Fighter to practice speaking with an American accent.

  Gault looked at his watch—a Tourneau Presidio Arabesque 36 that he’d taken from a former colleague who had no further need for checking the time of day. “As always, my friend, you are precise to the minute.”

  “The Koran says that—” But that was all Ga
ult heard. El Mujahid loved his long-winded scripture quotations and as soon as the big man was in gear Gault tuned him out. He sometimes forced himself to mentally say “yada yada yada” to drown out the doctrine. That worked well, and he had himself trained to start paying attention again when the Fighter wrapped it up with his trademark closer: “Allah is the only God and I am his wrath on Earth!”

  Grandiose, but catchy. Gault liked the “wrath” part. Wrath was useful.

  “Very apt,” he said of the unheard scripture. “Your men should be praised for their devotion to the cause and to the will of Allah.”

  Gault was a lapsed Presbyterian. Not completely atheist—he believed some kind of god existed somewhere; he just didn’t think the human race had the Divine All on speed dial… and whatever calls they did make were certainly not being returned. To Gault religion was something to be factored in to any equation. Only a fool dismissed its power or ignored its useful potential; and only a suicidal fool allowed even a hint of disingenuousness to flavor his words. Financial backer or not, Gault would find himself lying in parts all over this corner of Afghanistan if El Mujahid thought that he was mocking his faith. The Fighter’s swagger might have started as affect, but his faith had never been anything but absolute.

  The Fighter nodded his thanks for the comment.

  “Will you stay for dinner?” Gault asked. “I had some chickens flown in with me. And fresh vegetables.”

  “No,” the Fighter said, shaking his head with obvious regret. “I’m crossing over into Iraq tomorrow. One of my lieutenants has stolen a British half-track. I will oversee the placement of antipersonnel mines and then we need to put it somewhere that the British or Americans can find it. We’ll stage it well… the front end will have been damaged by a land mine and there will be one or two British wounded in the cab. Very badly wounded, unable to speak, but clearly alive. This has worked many times for us. They care more about their wounded than they do about their cause, which should convince even the stupidest of men that they do not have God in their hearts or holy purpose to guide their hands.”