Patient Zero jl-1

by Jonathan Maberry

  And there it was again. The slightest fragment of hesitation before she said “we.” It came close to breaking his heart.

  “How is the shutdown process going?” he asked, changing tack again.

  “It’s going… well.” There it was again. Damn it. “We should be completely shut down by the end of the week.”

  “And the staff?”

  “I’ll take care of them.”

  It had always been their intention to gather all nonessential personnel together once El Mujahid’s “heroic sacrifice” was under way, and to terminate them. The largest staff room was rigged to lockdown and flood with gas. Only certain key people would be spared and those few would form the nucleus of a new team that would start an entirely new line of research. All records of the Seif al Din pathogen and the years of lab work that had gone into its creation would be dumped to coded disks and then stored in one of Gault’s most secure locations. Everything else would be deleted or destroyed, all computer memory wiped. That was Amirah’s current task and she’d promised to do it, but there was something in her voice that troubled Gault.

  “I’m glad you’re taking care of things, my love. Do you want me to come and help you clean up the last details?”

  “No,” she said quickly. “I have everything under control. You have more important things to do.”

  “Yes, I suppose I have.” He paused and said, softly, “I love you, Amirah.”

  There was a final pause, and then she murmured, “I love you, too.”

  After the line went dead Gault stood for a long while looking out the window at the plaza below. The erotic elation he’d felt when he had first heard her voice was completely gone. No, that was wrong—there was just enough of it left to make his heart hurt.

  “Amirah…” he whispered to the night. Grief was like a heavy stone around his neck. Gault was too practiced a deceiver to be deceived; Amirah, though clever, was far less skilled at guile. What was it the Americans were so fond of saying? Never bullshit a bullshitter. Her pauses had been too long and in all the wrong places; some of the inflections were brittle. He wondered if she was aware of it, and doubted it. She was sure of her sexual control over him, Gault was certain of that, just as he was certain she was lying to him. About her lab and her staff. That could be a real problem and he knew that he would need to take a look, that he would need to go back to Afghanistan even though it was a poor security risk with so many things in motion. And she was certainly lying about El Mujahid. Her comment about his “sacrifice” was telling, and the things it implied broke his heart.

  He went and built himself a gin and tonic, but as he tumbled ice into the glass he saw that his hands were shaking.

  “God damn her!” he roared and abruptly hurled the glass across the room with such savage force that it shattered into thousands of silvery fragments that fell glistening to the carpet.

  He sagged back against the wet bar. “Damn you,” he said again, and now his eyes burned with tears.

  What should he infer from this and from the other hints he’d picked up over the last few weeks? Did Amirah really have feelings for her brute of a husband? Was that even possible? After all of the sex, after all of the constant betrayal and the plotting behind the Fighter’s back, could she haven fallen back in love with El Mujahid? Gault reached for another glass and mixed another drink, swallowed half of it down a dry throat, and poured more gin into it without adding any extra tonic.

  Then something occurred to him that made his heart go still in his chest. He could hear his pulse throbbing in his ears as the new thought blossomed from a seed of suspicion into a fully realized belief. The gin in his stomach turned to sickness as he realized that all of the pieces of this puzzle did actually fit together but that the picture they made was one that he had never expected or foreseen.

  What if Amirah had never stopped loving El Mujahid? What if this whole thing, from the very beginning before their clandestine meeting in Tikrit, what if everything she had done for him and with him and to him had been part of an older scheme, one that was not of his design? What if this had been something Amirah and El Mujahid had cooked up themselves, something they’d twisted so subtly that he thought he had recruited them? What if they’d suckered him into financing their scheme instead of the other way around? Toys had once suggested this as a possibility but Gault had dismissed it with a laugh.

  But now… what if it was all true?

  “Good Christ,” he said aloud, and now his hands were shaking so badly that gin sloshed out of his glass onto his shirtfront.

  What if Amirah and El Mujahid were not helping him scam the U.S. government out of billions in research and production money? What if money was not even the point? Was that possible? he wondered, but the answer was so obvious. Toys had been right all along. The truth now burned in front of his mind’s eye like a flare. There was only one thing more powerful than money, especially in this part of the world.

  What if this was jihad?

  Gault staggered backward and his back crashed against the wet bar. His legs turned to rubber and he sat down hard on the floor, the rest of his drink splashing onto his thighs. He didn’t feel the wetness or the cold. All he could feel was a rising sense of terror as the realization that he had given the world’s deadliest weapon to a wickedly clever assassin and insured—insured—that nothing could stop the release of the Seif al Din pathogen. El Mujahid was not carrying the weaker strain of the disease with him, Gault was certain of that now. The Fighter was taking with him Amirah’s newest strain, Generation Seven. The unstoppable one. The one that infected too quickly for any kind of response. The Fighter would release it and the plague would sweep the Western Hemisphere. Did Amirah think that its spread could be held back by oceans? Or, in her religious madness did she no longer care?

  He crawled across the floor to the table and grabbed his cell phone, hit speed dial and waited through four interminable rings before Toys answered with a musical, “Hello-o-o!”

  “Get back here!” Gault said in a hoarse whisper.

  “What’s wrong?” Toys said sharply, his voice low and urgent.

  “It’s…” Gault began, then a sob broke in his chest. “My God, Toys… I think I’ve killed us all.”

  The phone fell from his hands as the black reality of apocalypse bloomed like a mushroom cloud.

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  Crisfield, Maryland / Thursday, July 2; 3:13 P.M.

  I SPENT HALF the day with Jerry. Once I’d explained my theories we set about comparing them with what he’d deduced from his forensic walk-throughs. We were both on the same page. I told Jerry to round up all the forensics experts that had arrived while I’d been sleeping and I went off to find Church. Outside I ran into Rudy. He accompanied me to the computer van, where Church and Grace were using MindReader to search for Lester Bellmaker.

  “Jerry Spencer’s ready to give a preliminary forensics report,” I said. “I think we should set that up sooner than later.”

  “You have something?” Grace asked, searching my face.

  “Maybe, but I want you both to hear the forensics first and then we can play ‘what-if.’”

  Church made a call to set up the meeting.

  Grace told us that MindReader had come up with two Lester Bellmakers in North America and six more in the U.K., but so far none of them appeared to have even the slightest connection to terrorists, diseases, or Baltimore. The closest hit had been a Richard Lester Bellmaker who served a tour in the Air Force from 1984 to 1987 and was discharged honorably. That was it. The guy managed a Chuck E. Cheese outside of Akron, Ohio, and no matter how deep Grace searched into his background the guy didn’t ring a single damn bell.

  “We’re getting nowhere,” she said.

  “And slowly,” Church agreed.

  “Could Aldin have been lying to us?” Grace asked, cutting a look at Rudy. “You watched the interrogation videos, and you read the telemetry feeds. What’s your assessment?”

  Rudy s
hrugged. “From what I could see that man was desperate to tell the truth. That much was in his voice. He was trying to make a dying declaration, and he wanted to go out with as clear a conscience as possible.”

  “So, he was telling the truth?” Grace asked.

  Rudy pursed his lips. “It’s probably fair to say that he was telling the truth as he knew it, but we can’t discount the possibility that he may have been regurgitating disinformation fed to him by the guards.”

  “Too right,” Grace agreed. “Which means we could be wasting time and resources on a wild-goose chase.”

  “So what do we do now?” Rudy asked.

  “Keep looking,” Church said.

  Chapter Eighty

  Sebastian Gault / The Hotel Ishtar, Baghdad / July 2

  THE DOOR to Gault’s hotel room banged open and Toys came rushing in with a pistol in his hand. All affect was gone and in its place was a reptilian coldness as he swept the gun across the room. Seeing Gault on the floor, Toys kicked the door shut behind him and rushed to his employer’s side.

  “Are you hurt?” he asked quickly, searching for signs of blood or damage.

  “No,” Gault gasped. “No… it’s…” He disintegrated into tears.

  Toys studied him with narrowed eyes. He lowered the hammer on his gun and slid it into the shoulder holster he wore under his jacket. Then he caught Gault under the armpits and with surprising strength hauled him to his feet and walked him to a chair. Gault sat there, face in hands, sobbing.

  Toys locked the door and verified that the electronic bug detectors were still operating, then he dragged an ottoman over and sat down in front of Gault.

  “Sebastian,” Toys said softly. “Tell me what happened.”

  Gault slowly raised a tear-streaked face to him. His eyes had a look of hopeless panic.

  “Whatever it is we can deal with it,” Toys assured him.

  Uncertainly and with stuttering words, Gault told him about the call to Amirah and of the dreadful realization that had bloomed in his mind. Toys’s face underwent a process of change from deep concern to disbelief and then to fury.

  “That fucking bitch!”

  “Amirah…” Gault’s voice disintegrated into tears again.

  Without word or warning Toys slapped Gault across the face with vicious speed and force. Gault was flung half out of the chair. Gault stared at him, his tears stilled by the impossibility of what had just happened.

  Toys leaned close and in a deadly quiet voice said, “Stop your blubbering, Sebastian. Stop it right fucking now.”

  Gault was too stunned to speak.

  “Try for once to think with your brain instead of your cock; if you had you’d have seen this coming. I bloody well saw it coming, and I’ve been warning you about that bitch and her husband for years. Christ, Sebastian, I ought to kick the shit out of you.”

  Gault climbed back into the chair, eyes still unblinking.

  Toys sat back and waited until the immediacy of his rage passed. “How sure are you about this? Is this a guess or do you know?”

  “I… I don’t know for sure,” Gault managed. “But it all just came to me. In a flash.”

  “Came to you in a flash.” Toys sneered. “Mother Mary, save me.”

  “I… if they…”

  “Shut up,” Toys said as he fished out his phone. He dialed a number. A voice answered on the third ring.

  “Line?” Toys asked.

  “Clear,” said the American.

  “I’m calling on behalf of our patron. There’s a problem. Listen to me very closely and take all appropriate action. The Princess and the Boxer have gone off the reservation.”

  “What? Why?”

  Toys’s mouth made an ugly shape as he said, “They think they’re still in church.”

  That wasn’t an agreed code word, but Toys was sure the American would grasp the meaning, and he did. “I never trusted those two from the beginning. Jesus H. Christ.”

  “Yes, well, that’s a comfort to all of us, isn’t it?”

  Toys disconnected and stared at Gault. “Listen to me, Sebastian… if El Musclehead is going to launch the latest generation of the plague in America then we have to assume that Amirah has taken some precautions.”

  Gault’s eyes came back into focus. “Precautions?”

  “She’s a wacko, I agree, but I can’t believe that she’d want to destroy the entire world. A lot them are true believers, don’t forget.”

  Gault sat up straight. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that she probably has a bloody cure for this thing. Or a treatment. Something that will keep it from wiping out her own people. El Mujahid might already have been inoculated, but that’s beside the point. What we have to do is get our ruddy asses to the Bunker, beat some information out of your girlfriend, and then make sure Gen2000 starts cranking out the cure just in case our American friend doesn’t stop the Fighter in time.”

  “The Bunker… yes.” Gault nodded and his jaw lost some its softness, his eyes grew several degrees colder. “Yes, Amirah will have thought it through.”

  Toys cut him off. “Understand me, Sebastian,” he said in an icy voice, “I work for you and I love you like a brother, but you’ve endangered me by letting this thing get out of hand. I warned you about Amirah a hundred times and now she’s stabbed you in the back. If she has a cure then we are going to bloody well get it.” His green eyes glittered. “And then we are going to put a bullet right through that brilliant little brain of hers.”

  Gault closed his eyes for a moment as if to block out that image, but when he opened them Toys saw that some kind of change had occurred. The eyes that looked out at him from Gault’s puffy and tear-streaked face were vicious, almost feral in their hateful intensity.

  “Yes,” he snarled.

  Chapter Eighty-One

  Crisfield, Maryland / Thursday, July 2; 6:00 P.M.

  THE FORENSICS TENT was set up in one corner of the parking lot. As Dietrich had promised it was an actual circus tent. The silk sides and scalloped dome were painted with brightly colored animals—elephants, zebras, giraffes, and monkeys—and around the base was a life-sized line of capering clowns. Inside, Jerry Spencer was the ringmaster.

  Teams of experts had spent the whole day collecting evidence and transporting it out of the building in protective bags. The tent had several hermetically sealed plastic clean rooms that were marked with the logo of the Centers for Disease Control. Men and women wearing white hazmat suits worked in one of these and they had a production line going with one autopsy after another. A refrigeration truck was backed up to that end of the tent and the bodies of autopsied walkers were double-sealed in body bags and stacked like cordwood inside.

  There were a dozen experts at the meeting along with Jerry, Grace, Dietrich, Rudy, and Hu. Somehow Church had managed to change into a clean suit. I was still in the soiled fatigue pants and T-shirt I’d worn under the Hammer suit. I must have smelled pretty ripe.

  “Let’s start with the bodies,” Jerry said as soon as everyone was seated. He nodded to a tall black woman with golden skin and pale brown eyes.

  Dr. Clarita McWilliams was a professor of forensic pathology at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. “We have a total body count of two hundred seventy-four. That breaks down as follows: eleven terrorist soldiers, five scientists and technicians, two unspecified support staff, five DMS personnel, and two hundred fifty-one of the… um… ‘walkers.’” She briefly looked around the room through her half-moon glasses, then cleared her throat and plowed ahead. “There were ninety-one adult male walkers; one hundred and twenty-two adult female walkers; twenty-one male children under the apparent age of eighteen and seventeen female children of the same approximate age. The ethnic breakdown of the walkers stands at one hundred twenty-four Caucasians, seventy-three black, twenty-eight Asian, and twenty-six Hispanic. If you want a more precise racial breakdown it’ll take some time.”

  “So what does that t
ell us?” I asked.

  “It’s close enough to a general population cross section,” McWilliams said. “Maybe a little heavy on the male-to-female mix. If there’s a pattern it isn’t yet apparent.”

  “What do we know about where these people were from?” I asked.

  Dietrich held up his hand. “I’ve been working on that using recovered wallets, cell phones, and so on. Most of these people seem to be concentrated in Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. None from anywhere else.”

  “Just like the kids in Delaware,” I said. “Random but all East Coast.”

  “Any IDs with the name Lester Bellmaker?” Grace asked. “Or any variation on Bellmaker? Maybe Belmacher or something like that?”

  Dietrich scanned a sheet of paper on a clipboard. “Nah. Closest we have there is a Jennifer Bellamy. No Lesters.”

  “It’s a dead end,” Church said quietly. “We have to consider that the name is an alias.”

  “Aldin seemed to think it was important to give it to us,” I said. “He used his last breath.”

  “Time will tell,” Church said. “Anything else, Dr. McWilliams?”

  She shook her head. “Medically speaking we haven’t yet found anything that goes outside of what Dr. Hu has already shared regarding these walkers. One item of interest is that less than half of the victims I’ve seen displayed any visible bite marks. Most have injection marks and presumably that’s how the pathogen was introduced.”

  Grace asked, “Of the ones with the bite marks have you determined if any of them were bitten postmortem?”

  “No. There’s no evidence that these walkers preyed on each other. That suggests that they are attracted only to living flesh.” She looked ill as she said it.

  “Like in the movies,” Hu said, but she ignored him.

  I turned to Jerry. “What’s next?”