Patient Zero
Page 1
Praise for Patient Zero
“Terrifyingly terrific!”
—Sherrilyn Kenyon, #1 New York Times
bestselling author of the Dark-Hunter series
“A fast-paced, creepy thriller . . . prickly as a hospital needle . . . This guy is good.”
—Joe R. Lansdale, author of Lost Echoes
“Maberry has outdone himself with a deliciously diabolical plot and bone-chilling scenarios.”
—L. A. Banks, New York Times bestselling
author of the Vampire Huntress Legends series
“A first-rate thriller with a bioterror angle that is as horrific as it is plausible . . . Joe Ledger rules.”
—Douglas Preston, coauthor of The Wheel of Darkness
and The Book of the Dead
“Jonathan Maberry deserves to take his place among the best suspense writers of recent years.”
—John Connolly, author of
The Reapers and The Killing Kind
“His writing is powerful enough to sing with poetry while simultaneously scaring the hell out of you.”
—Tess Gerritsen,
author of The Keepsake and The Bone Garden
“It is almost impossible to find a noir-thriller; the two genres are so distinct and separate. Until now. Jonathan Maberry has succeeded in merging the two to such a wondrous extent that we may have to coin neonoir-thriller just to describe it. This book stole a whole evening and most of a night from me, and I was glad of the theft! Patient Zero introduces a cop who is as compelling as any character I’ve read in years. If you took the pace of Grisham, the eerie atmospheric style of Peter Straub or Tom Piccirilli, the Wambaugh-type cop who has become a rarity, and the thriller skill of Lee Child, you’d have the best of all worlds. You’d in fact have Jonathan Maberry’s new novel. This is the new voice of the thriller!”
—Ken Bruen, author of Cross and Priest
“This is the coolest book I’ve read since discovering Covert-One. With this new series, Jonathan Maberry becomes my generation’s Robert Ludlum. Joe Ledger is a hero for the new millennium—tough as nails, sharp as a whip, and up for anything. He’s a man who puts honor before his own self-preservation, who rides the edges and isn’t afraid to go down fighting. The story is absolutely riveting and the scariest concept to come down the pike in a long while. I want Ledger to fight all my battles. I dare you to put this book down before the endgame plays out. I dare you.”
—J.T. Ellison, author of 14
“Fair warning: when you start this book, be sure you have budgeted the time to finish it. It’s very hard to put this one down. Patient Zero weaves science, police procedure, and modern anti-terror techniques into a unique blend and tops it off with a larger-than-life character who is utterly believable. I couldn’t put it down.”
—Jerry Pournelle
“Patient Zero is a feast for thriller lovers! It’s a delicious and diabolical stew of genres and traditions. With a pinch of forensic procedural, a dash of hard-boiled noir, a sprinkle of medical thriller, and a tincture of apocalyptic zombie epic, Jonathan Maberry cooks up a succulent meal of mayhem that slyly comments on our paranoid times. The hardshelled hero, Baltimore shamus Joe Ledger, deserves to stand alongside F. Paul Wilson’s Repairman Jack in the pantheon of genre icons. Highest recommendation!”
—Jay Bonansinga, national bestselling
author of Perfect Victim, Shattered, Twisted, and Frozen
“Patient Zero is an action-packed novel, filled with unforgettable characters and rapid-fire, spot-on dialogue that makes you eager for more. Within this story, Maberry brings new meaning to the word zombie, ripping it from the pages of folkloric fantasy and shoving it into the realm of horrific plausibility. I defy anyone to put this novel down after the first two pages: it simply can’t be done!”
—Deborah LeBlanc, president of the Horror Writers Association and
author of Water Witch and Morbid Curiosity
“Jonathan Maberry has created a new genre. Mixing technology, thrills, chills, and procedural noir, Maberry shows why he is one of the freshest voices in fiction. Every reader will want to ride shotgun on Joe Ledger’s adventures.”
—Scott Nicholson, author of The Skull Ring
“Smart, scary, and relentless! Maberry’s Patient Zero keeps coming at you with action, suspense, and the kind of detail that makes you believe, ‘Yeah, this could really happen.’ ”
—D. H. Dublin, author of Freezer Burn and Body Trace
“This book KICKS ASS! I read the whole thing with a big crazy grin of pure delight on my face, and I haven’t stopped smiling yet. Zombies! Terrorists! Mad scientists! Heavy weapons! Stuff blowing up! And in the middle of it all, Joe Ledger, one truly badass action hero for the new millennium. You want to know what this book is? It’s pure distilled essence of fun. Take a big ol’ swallow of it and hang on tight, ’cause you ain’t sleeping ’til it’s done with you. But you are gonna love the trip.”
—J. D. Rhoades, author of Safe and Sound and Good Day in Hell
“A riveting page-turner. Cool stuff! Hooray for Jonathan Maberry. Please give us more Joe Ledger right now!”
—Victor Gischler
“If Stephen King were to get hold of [Vince Flynn’s] Mitch Rapp, you’d have an idea of what Jonathan Maberry has accomplished with the Department of Military Science’s uberagent Joe Ledger. Patient Zero is a frightening tale that injects a new level of horror into the already terror-filled post-9/11 world. A bioterror weapon that raises the dead? In Maberry’s masterful hands, you will believe!”
—Ken Isaacson, author of Silent Counsel
Also by Jonathan Maberry
Fiction
Ghost Road Blues
Dead Man’s Song
Bad Moon Rising
Nonfiction
Vampire Universe
The Cryptopedia
Zombie CSU
Jonathan Maberry
Patient Zero
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
PATIENT ZERO. Copyright © 2009 by Jonathan Maberry. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Book design by Jonathan Bennett
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Maberry, Jonathan.
Patient zero : a Joe Ledger novel / Jonathan Maberry—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-38285-8
ISBN-10: 0-312-38285-5
1. Detectives—Maryland—Baltimore—Fiction. 2. Terrorism—Prevention—Fiction. 3. Bioterrorism—Fiction. 4. Zombies—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3613.A19P38 2009
813'.6—dc22
2008038234
First Edition: March 2009
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is dedicated
to the often unsung
and overlooked heroes
who work in covert operations
and the intelligence communities.
Author’s Note
Much of the technical information in this novel is based upon actual science. With very few exceptions, the surveillance equipment, computer systems, and weapons used by the fictional Department of Military Sciences are real, though several of these items are not yet available on the commercial market.
Prion diseases, including fatal familial insomnia, are also real; the parasites and control diseases used by Gen2000, however, are purely fictitious, though inspired by similar pathogens currently present in science.
A great number of people have provided help,
advice, and technical information. Any technical errors still remaining are mine. Also, thanks to Michael Sicilia of Homeland Security; the superb team at the Philadelphia Forensic Science Bureau led by Chief Inspector Keith R. Sadler and Captain Daniel Castro; Ken Coluzzi, Chief of Lower Makefield Police Department; Frank Sessa; Dr. Bruno Vincent of the Institut de Pharmacologie Moléculaire et Cellulaire; Kenneth Storey, Ph.D., Carleton University; Pawel P. Liberski, M.D., Department of Molecular Pathology and Neuropathology, Medical University of Lodz; and Peter Lukacs, M.D.
Part One
Walkers
A hero is no braver than an ordinary man,
but he is braver five minutes longer.
–RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Chapter One
WHEN YOU HAVE to kill the same terrorist twice in one week, then there’s either something wrong with your skills or something wrong with your world.
And there’s nothing wrong with my skills.
Chapter Two
Ocean City, Maryland / Saturday, June 27; 10:22 A.M.
THEY CAME FOR me at the beach. Nice and slick, two in front, one big cover man behind in a three-point close while I was reaching for my car door. Nothing flashy, just three big guys in off-the-rack gray, all of them sweating in the Ocean City heat.
The point man held up his hands in a no-problem gesture. It was a hot Saturday morning and I was in swim trunks and a Hawaiian shirt with mermaids on it over a Tom Petty T-shirt. Flip-flops and Wayfarers. My piece was in a locked toolbox in the trunk, with a trigger guard clamped on it. I was at the beach to look at this year’s crop of sunbunnies and I’d been off the clock since the shooting pending a Monday-morning officer-involved discussion with the OIS team. It had been a bad scene at the warehouse and they’d put me on administrative leave to give me time to get my head straight about the shootings. I wasn’t expecting trouble, there shouldn’t have been trouble, and the smooth way these guys boxed me was designed to keep everyone’s emotions in neutral. I couldn’t have done it better myself.
“Mr. Ledger . . . ?”
“Detective Ledger,” I said to be pissy.
No trace of a smile on the point guy’s face, only a millimeter of a nod. He had a head like a bucket.
“We’d like you to come with us,” he said.
“Badge me or buzz off.”
Buckethead gave me the look, but he pulled out an FBI identification case and held it up. I stopped reading after the initials.
“What’s this about?”
“Would you come with us, please?”
“I’m off the clock, guys, what’s this about?”
No answer.
“Are you aware that I’m scheduled to start at Quantico in three weeks?”
No answer.
“You want me to follow you in my car?” Not that I wanted to try and give these fellows the slip, but my cell was in the glove box of the SUV and it would be nice to check in with the lieutenant on this one. It had a weird feel to it. Not exactly threatening, just weird.
“No, sir, we’ll bring you back here after.”
“After what?”
No answer.
I looked at him and then the guy next to him. I could feel the cover man behind me. They were big, they were nicely set—even with peripheral vision I could see that Buckethead had his weight on the balls of his feet and evenly balanced. The other front man was shifted to his right. He had big knuckles but his hands weren’t scarred. Probably boxing rather than martial arts; boxers wear gloves.
They were doing almost everything right except that they were a little too close to me. You should never get that close.
But they looked like the real deal. It’s hard to fake the FBI look.
“Okay,” I said.
Chapter Three
Ocean City, Maryland / Saturday, June 27; 10:31 A.M.
BUCKETHEAD SAT BESIDE me in the back and the other two sat up front, the cover man driving the big government Crown Vic. For all the conversation going on the others might have been mimes. The air conditioner was turned up and the radio was turned off. Exciting.
“I hope we’re not going all the way the hell back to Baltimore.” That was more than a three-hour ride and I had sand in my shorts.
“No.” That was the only word Buckethead said on the ride. I settled back to wait.
I could tell that he was a leftie from the bulge his shoulder rig made. He kept me on his right side, which meant that his coat flap would impede me grabbing his piece and he could use his right hand as a block to fend me off while he drew. It was professional and well thought out. I’d have done almost the same thing. What I wouldn’t have done, though, was hold on to the leather handstrap by the door like he was doing. It was the second small mistake he made and I had to wonder if he was testing me or whether there was a little gap between his training and his instincts.
I settled back and tried to understand this pickup. If this had something to do with the action last week on the docks, if I was somehow in trouble for something related to that, then I sure as hell planned to lawyer up when we got wherever we were going. And I wanted a union rep there, too. No way this was SOP. Unless it was some Homeland thing, in which case I’d lawyer up and call my congressman. That warehouse thing was righteous and I wasn’t going to let anyone say different.
For the last eighteen months I’d been attached to one of those interjurisdictional task forces that have popped up everywhere post 9/11. A few of us from Baltimore PD, some Philly and D.C. guys, and a mixed bag of Feds: FBI, NSA, ATF, and a few letter combinations I hadn’t seen before. Nobody really doing much but everyone wanting a finger in the pie in case something juicy happened, and by juicy I mean career beneficial.
I kind of got drafted into it. Ever since I’d gotten my gold shield a few years ago I’d been lucky enough to close a higher-than-average number of cases, including two that had loose ties to suspected terrorist organizations. I also had four years in the army and I know a little bit of Arabic and some Farsi. I know a little bit of a lot of languages. Languages were easy for me, and that made me a first-round draft pick for the surveillance van. Most of the people we wiretapped jumped back and forth between English and a variety of Middle Eastern languages.
The task force seemed like it would be pretty cool but the reality of it was that they put me on wiretap in a van and for most of the last year and a half I drank too much Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and felt my ass grow flat.
Supposedly a group of suspected low-level terrorists with tenuous links to fundamentalist Shias were planning on smuggling something in that we were told was a potential bioweapon. No details provided, of course, which makes surveillance a bitch and largely a waste of time. When we (meaning us cops) tried to ask them (meaning the big shots from Homeland) what we were looking for, we were stonewalled. Need-to-know basis. That sort of thing tells you everything about why we’re not all that safe. Truth is that if they tell us then we might play too significant a role in the arrest, which means they get less credit. It’s what got us into trouble with 9/11, and as far as I can tell it really hasn’t gotten much better since.
Then this past Monday I caught a little back and forth from a cell phone we were spooking. One name popped up—a Yemen national named El Mujahid, who was a pretty big fish in the terrorist pond and was on Homeland’s must-have list—and the guy talking about him spoke as if El Mujahid was somehow involved in whatever the crew in the warehouse were cooking. El Mujahid’s name was on all of the DHS lists and in that van I had nothing to do but read, so I’d read those lists over and over.
Because I rang the bell I got to play when the takedown was scheduled for Tuesday morning. Thirty of us in black BDUs with Kevlar body and limb pads, helmet cams and full SWAT kit. The whole unit was split into four-man teams: two guys with MP5s, a point man with a ballistic shield and a Glock .40, and one guy with a Remington 870 pump. I was the shotgun guy on my team and we hit this portside warehouse hard and fast, coming in every door and window in the p
lace. Flashbangs, snipers on the surrounding buildings, multiple entry points, and a whole lot of yelling. Domestic shock and awe, and the idea is to startle and overpower so that everyone inside would be too dazed and confused to offer violent resistance. Last thing anyone wanted was an O.K. Corral.
My team had the back door, the one that led out to a small boat dock. There was a tidy little Cigarette boat there. Not new, but sweet. While we waited for the go/no-go, the guy next to me—my buddy Jerry Spencer from DCPD—kept looking at the boat. I bent close and hummed the Miami Vice theme and he grinned. He was about to retire and that boat probably looked like a ticket to paradise.
The “go” came down and everything suddenly got loud and fast. We blew the steel dead bolt on the back door and went in, yelling for everyone to freeze, to lay down their weapons. I’ve been on maybe fifteen, eighteen, of these things in my time with Baltimore PD and only twice was anyone stupid enough to draw a gun on us. Cops don’t hotdog it and generally neither do the bad guys. It’s not about who has the biggest balls, it’s about overwhelming force so that no shots are ever fired. I remember when I went through the tac-team training, the commander had a quote from the movie Silverado made into a plaque and hung up in the training hall: “I don’t want to kill you and you don’t want to be dead.” I think Danny Glover said that. That’s pretty much the motto.