Patient Zero jl-1

by Jonathan Maberry

  “That would be a no, then.” His color was starting to look bad as all of this sank in.

  “Could a prion do that?”

  “Before today I would have said no unreservedly. And I still don’t think so.”

  “What the hell are prions anyway? I can’t remember what I remember about them.”

  “Well, there’s a lot of mystery attached to them. Prions are small proteinaceous infectious particles that resist inactivation by ordinary procedures that modify nucleic acids. Does that make sense?”

  “Not even a little.”

  “Sadly it doesn’t get much simpler. Prions are cutting-edge science and we are quite sure that there is more we don’t know than we do know. Prion diseases are often called spongiform encephalopathies because of the postmortem appearance of the brain with large vacuoles in the cortex and cerebellum; makes the brain look like Swiss cheese. The diseases are characterized by loss of motor control, dementia, paralysis, wasting, and eventually death, typically following pneumonia. Mad cow disease is a type of spongiform encephalopathy. Coming back from the dead, however, is definitely not a known symptom.”

  “So… prions couldn’t turn a terrorist into one of these monsters?”

  “I don’t see how. You said Church was only guessing. It’s been what… five days since you shot Javad? That’s not a lot of time to do that kind of medical research. Church may be completely wrong as to the cause.”

  “Doesn’t change the fact that Javad was dead, though.”

  “Dios mio.”

  “Rudy… you do believe me, right?”

  He stared at the mantis some more. “Yes, cowboy. I believe you. I just don’t want to.”

  I had nothing to say to that.

  Chapter Eleven

  Grace Courtland and Mr. Church / Easton, Maryland; 6:22 P.M.

  MR. CHURCH SAT in the interrogation room and waited. There was a discreet tap on the door and a woman entered. She was medium height, slender, and had looks that Church had once heard referred to as “disturbingly pretty.” She wore a tailored gray suit and skirt, low-heeled pumps and coral blouse. Short dark hair, brown eyes with gold flecks. No rings, no jewelry. She looked like a Hollywood accountant or an executive at one of the snootier ad agencies.

  “You saw?” Church asked.

  She closed the door and glanced at the laptop Church had on the table before him, the screen lowered to hide its contents. “Yes. And I’m not happy with losing the walker.” Her voice was low and throaty with a London accent. “I know we have other subjects, but—”

  Church dismissed that with a little movement of his head. “Grace, give me an assessment of his capabilities based on what just happened.”

  She sat. “On the plus side he’s tough, resourceful, and vicious, but we already knew that from the warehouse videos. He’s tougher than any of the other candidates.”

  “What’s on the minus side?”

  “Sloppy police work. Two lorries left the warehouse the night before his task force raided it, one was tracked, one wasn’t. Ledger was involved.”

  “I think that when we acquire all of the records from the task force things might look different where Ledger’s involvement is concerned.”

  Grace looked dubious.

  “What else is in the minus column?” Church asked.

  “I don’t think he’s emotionally stable.”

  “Have you read his psych profile?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you already knew that.”

  She pursed her lips. “He’s no yes man. He’d be hard to control.”

  “As a team player, sure; but what if he was a team leader?”

  Grace snorted. “He was a sergeant in the army with no combat experience. He was the lowest-ranking member of the joint task force. I hardly think…” Grace stopped, sat back in her chair and cocked an eyebrow. “You like this bloke, don’t you?”

  “Liking him is irrelevant, Grace.”

  “You really see him as management material?”

  “Still to be determined.”

  “But you’re impressed?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  Grace turned and looked at the window to the other room. Two agents in hazmat suits were strapping Javad’s corpse to a gurney. She turned back to Church. “What would you have done if he’d been bitten?”

  “Put him in Room Twelve with the others.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  She turned away for a moment, not wanting Church to see the contempt and horror in her eyes. Her face reflected the horror, shock, and grief she—and so many others in the DMS—felt. It had been a dreadful week. The worst of Grace’s life.

  “Your assessment,” he prompted.

  “I don’t know. I think I’d need to see him in a few other situations before I would want to see him wearing officer’s rank. After what happened at the hospital we can’t afford to have anything less than first chair when it comes to team leadership.”

  “If it was your choice to make, would you invite him into the unit?”

  She drummed her fingers on the table. “Maybe.”

  He pushed the plate toward her. “Have a cookie.”

  She saw that the plate held Oreos and vanilla wafers. She declined with a polite shake of her head.

  Church raised the screen of the laptop and turned it so they could both see it. “Watch,” he said and pressed the play button. A high-resolution image appeared of a group of men in black combat fatigues moving rapidly through an office hallway.

  “The warehouse?” she asked. “I’ve seen this already.”

  “You haven’t seen this part.” On the screen Joe Ledger stepped into shot about twenty yards ahead of the agent whose camera had provided the footage. Ledger spotted two task force officers taking fire from three hostiles who were shooting from a secure position behind a stack of heavy crates. Bullets tore chunks from the paltry cover behind which the agents crouched. Ledger came up on their seven o’clock, well out of their line of sight; he had his pistol in his hand but to open fire from that distance would have been suicide. He might get one or two but the other would turn and chop him up. There was no cover at all between Ledger and the hostiles, but he hugged the wall, running on cat feet, making no noise that could have been heard above the din of the gunfire.

  When Ledger was ten feet out he opened fire. His first shot caught one of the hostiles in the back of the neck and the impact slammed him into the crates. As the other two turned Ledger closed to zero distance and fired one more shot and the second hostile staggered back, but then the slide on Ledger’s gun locked open. There was no time to change magazines. The third hostile instantly lunged at him, swinging his rifle barrel to bear. Ledger parried it with his pistol and then everything turned into a blur. All three hostiles were down.

  Grace frowned but declined to comment as the file repeated in slow motion, leaning forward at the point where the slide locked back on Ledger’s gun. The slow-mo even caught the elegance of the ejected brass arching through the air. Ledger had the pistol held out in front of him so it was obvious that he recognized the predicament of the empty magazine but he did not visibly react to it. His hands separated and while he was still in full stride he used the empty gun to check the swing of the hostile’s rifle while simultaneously jabbing forward with his left hand, fingers folded in half and stiffened so that the secondary line of knuckles drove into the attacker’s windpipe. As this was happening Joe’s left foot changed from a regular running step into a longer lunge and the tip of his combat boot crunched into the cartilage under the hostile’s kneecap; and a fraction of a second later Ledger’s gun hand came up and jabbed the exposed barrel of the pistol into the hostile’s left eye socket.

  The attacker flew backward as if he’d been hit by a shotgun blast. Ledger completed his step and was smoothly reaching to his belt for a fresh magazine when the footage ended.

  “Bloody hell!” Grace gasped. It came out before s
he could stop the words.

  “Elapsed time from the slide locking back to completed kill is 0.031 seconds,” said Church. “Tell me why I want him for the DMS.”

  She hated when he did this to her. It was like being in school, but she kept her annoyance off her face. “He showed absolutely no hesitation. He didn’t even flinch when his gun locked open, he simply went into a different form of attack. It’s so smooth, like he’d practiced that one set of moves for years.”

  “In light of that video and your assessment would you consider him a likely candidate for us?”

  “I don’t know. His psych evals read like a horror novel.”

  “Past tense. His dissociative behavior was directly related to a specific traumatic event that happened when he was a teenager. His service record since then doesn’t show an unstable personality.”

  She shook her head. “That trauma happened during a crucial phase of his life. It informed the rest of his development. It’s why he began studying martial arts. It’s why he joined the army, and it’s why he became a policeman. He keeps looking for ways to channel his rage.”

  “It seems to me that he’s found ways to channel it. Very useful ways, Grace. If he was lost in rage then his pathology would be different. A rageaholic would have taken up something confrontational; instead he’s refined his abilities through an art known for its lack of flamboyance.”

  “Which could be interpreted as someone desperate to maintain control.”

  “That’s one view. Another is that he’s found control, and it’s saved him.”

  Grace drummed her fingers on the table. “I still don’t like those old psych evaluations. I think there’s a ticking bomb there.”

  “You should read your own, Grace. The recent ones,” Church said mildly, and she shot him a withering look. “Tell me, Grace—if he’d been with Bravo or Charlie teams at St. Michael’s do you think things would have gone differently?”

  Grace’s jaw tightened. “That’s impossible to say.”

  “No it isn’t. You know why things went south at the hospital, and you saw this tape. My question stands.”

  “I don’t know. I think we would need to observe him a lot more.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Then go and observe him.”

  With that he got up and left the room.

  Chapter Twelve

  Baltimore, Maryland / Saturday, June 27; 6:54 P.M.

  RUDY GOT QUIET as we walked back to my SUV. I undid the locks but he lingered outside, touching the door handle. “This cabrón Church… what’s your take on him?”

  “Car could be bugged, Rude.”

  “Fuck it. Answer the question. Do you think Church is a good guy or a bad guy?”

  “Hard to say. I certainly don’t think he’s a nice guy.”

  “Given what he has to do, how nice should he be?”

  “Good point,” I said. I reached in and keyed the ignition, then turned the radio up loud. If the car was bugged that might help, though I suspected it no longer mattered.

  “He’s asking you to take a lot on faith. Secret government organizations, zombies… do you feel that he was trying to trick you in some way?”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t think he was lying about that. Even so… I can’t seem to wrap my head around all this. It’s impossible. It doesn’t fit, it’s all too…” I couldn’t put it into words, so I stared at the day around us. Birds sang in the trees, crickets chirped, kids laughed on the swings.

  Rudy followed my gaze. “You find it hard to believe in those things when you can stand here and see this?”

  I nodded. “I mean… I know it was real because I was there, but even so I don’t want it to be real.” He said nothing and after a moment I hit him with another bomb. “Church said he’d read my psych evaluations.”

  Rudy looked like I’d slapped him. “He didn’t get them from me.”

  “How do you know? If he’s on the same level as Homeland you could be bugged and monitored out the wazoo.”

  “If I get so much as a whiff of violation—”

  “You’ll what? Raise a stink? File a lawsuit? Most people never do. Not since 9/11. Homeland counts on it.”

  “Patriot Act,” he said the way people say “hemorrhoids.”

  “Terrorism’s a tough thing to fight without elbow room.”

  He gave me an evil glare. “Are you defending an intrusion into civil liberties?”

  “Not as such, but look at it from the law enforcement perspective. Terrorists are fully aware of constitutional protections, and they use that to hide. No, don’t give me that look. I’m just saying.”

  “Saying what?”

  “That everyone thinks this is an either/or situation and it’s more complicated than that.”

  “Patient records are sacred, amigo.” He only ever calls me that when he’s pissed.

  “Hey, don’t jump on me. I’m on your side. But maybe you should consider the other side’s point of view.”

  “The other side can kiss my—”

  “Careful, bro, this whole car could be bugged.”

  Rudy leaned close to the car and said, loudly and distinctly, “Mr. Church can kiss my ass.” He repeated it slowly in Spanish. “¡Besa mi culo!”

  “Fine, fine, but if you get disappeared don’t blame me.”

  He leaned back and gave me a considering look. “I’m going to do three things today. First, I’m going to go over every square inch of my office and if I find anything out of place, any hint of violation, I’m going to call the police, my lawyer, and my congressmen.”

  “Good luck with that.” I climbed in and pulled the door shut.

  “The second thing I’m going to do is see what I can find out about prions, something that indicates whether they can somehow reactivate the central nervous system. Maybe there have been some studies, some papers.”

  “What’s the third thing?”

  He opened the door. “I’m going to go to evening mass and light a candle.”

  “For Helen?”

  “For you, cowboy, and for me… and for the whole damn human race.” He got in and closed the door.

  We didn’t speak at all on the drive back.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Gault and Amirah / The Bunker / Six days ago

  WITH EL MUJAHID and his soldiers gone that left only six people in the camp besides Gault. Four guards, a servant, and Amirah, who was both the wife of El Mujahid and the head of Gault’s covert research division here in the Middle East. She was a gorgeous woman and a freakishly brilliant scientist whose insight into disease pathogens bordered on the mystical.

  While he waited for her he switched on his PDA and accessed the files the American had sent, most of which were official reports on the task force raid. Most of it had gone exactly as arranged—although the American did not know that. There were a lot of things Gault chose not to share with the nervous Yank. He did wonder, however, why the crab processing plant had not yet been raided. He made a note to ask Toys to look into that.

  The tent flaps opened. He turned to see her standing there, and for a moment all thoughts of raids and schemes evaporated from his head.

  Amirah was slim, average height, dressed in the black chadri that showed only her eyes, and she might have gone unnoticed in a bazaar or on a crowded street. Unless, of course, any sane man made eye contact with her, then the anonymity would disintegrate like a sand sculpture in the face of a zephyr. This woman could stop traffic with her eyes. Gault had seen her do it. Conversations always faltered when she entered a room, men actually walked into walls. It was the strangest of reactions because it was so contrary to Muslim tradition. To catch a woman’s eye once is okay, to do so twice was haram, a social and religious gaffe of serious consequence, especially in the traditional circles in which this woman and El Mujahid traveled. And yet no one—not one man Gault had seen—had ever looked into her eyes and not been affected.

  It wasn’t sex, either, because all a man could see of Amirah were he
r eyes, and in the Middle East there were millions of women with beautiful eyes. No, this went deeper than sex, deeper even than religious law. This was power. Real, palpable, earthshaking power; and it was there in Amirah’s eyes, as if her eyes were a window into the heart of a nuclear furnace.

  The first time Gault had seen her was two months before the Americans invaded Iraq. They were two among thousands at an anti-Coalition rally in Tikrit. He had been there, quietly recruiting and waiting for contact that, his sources had told him, could bring him to El Mujahid. Gault had felt something touch him, almost like hot fingers scraping the skin of the back of his neck, and he’d turned to see this woman standing fifteen feet away, staring at him. He’d been at a loss for words for the first time in his life, totally riveted by the impact of those eyes and of the fierce, vast intelligence behind them. She had walked up to him, affecting the modest gait of a good Muslim woman, and while the crowd was entirely focused on Saddam, who was giving a rousing speech in which he promised to rebuff any U.S. attempt to set foot on Iraqi soil, the woman bent close and said: “I am Amirah. I can take you to paradise.”

  In any other circumstances that line would have been cheap, a prostitute’s come-on; but to Gault it was the code phrase he’d been waiting to hear for many weeks. He was so taken aback, so startled that this was the messenger he’d come to Tikrit to find, that he almost flubbed the countersign, but after two or three stammering attempts he managed to say: “And what will I see there?”

  She had said three magical words that filled Gault with great joy. Leaning a few inches closer Amirah had whispered, “Seif al Din.”

  What will I see there?

  Seif al Din. The Sword of the Faithful.

  That moment flashed through Gault’s mind as Amirah stepped into the tent. He got to his feet, smiling, wanting to take her in his arms, to tear away that ridiculous black rag she wore. He saw his need mirrored in her eyes and she smiled. All he could see of her smile was the soft crow’s feet at the corners of those lustrous brown eyes; and he knew that her smile was as much a promise as it was an acknowledgment. They could do nothing, share nothing while they were here in El Mujahid’s tent. Two guards stood behind her, both giving him hard stares.