“Perfect.”
“Glad you think so,” said the American, “but I think you’re playing with goddamn fire here.”
“Have a little faith,” chided Gault.
“Faith, my ass. How are we going to evacuate the plant, that’s my question? The Geeks may only be watching now but a go order can come down any second, and I don’t think I can stop them from—”
Gault cut him off. “I’m not asking you to. Just sit tight and keep your eyes and ears open. I’ll be reachable for the next three or four days. In the meantime, download everything including the official warehouse assault report to my PDA.” He parted the tent flaps and looked out at the rocks and sand, at the sparse bunchgrass and withered scrub date palms. This part of Afghanistan always looked like a wasteland. Then a flash of movement caught his eye and he saw three people coming toward him from the mouth of a small cave halfway up the valley—a woman with two heavily armed guards flanking her. Amirah, coming to take him to the lab. He let out the held breath that had started to burn stale in his chest.
“But it’s too late to evacuate the staff . . .” the American said.
“Are you that concerned for their well-being?”
The American laughed. “Yeah, right. I’m thinking of what the Geek Squad could do with what they find in there.”
“They’ll do exactly what we want them to do.” He meant to say “what I want them to do,” but decided to throw the American a bone. “Keep me posted. If you can’t reach me then make sure my assistant has regular updates.”
The American made a rude noise. There was no love lost between him and Toys.
“You sure this bullshit is going to work?”
“Work?” Gault echoed softly as he watched Amirah walk toward him and saw that her step was lively, filled with excitement. He knew what kinds of things excited this woman. “It already has worked.”
He closed the phone and put it in his pocket.
Chapter Ten
Baltimore, Maryland / Saturday, June 27; 6:19 P.M.
“DR. SANCHEZ’S OFFICE.”
“Kittie? It’s Joe. Rudy free?”
“Oh, he’s gone for the day. I think he went to the gym—”
“Thanks.” I cleared the call and then thumb-dialed the number for Gold’s on Pratt Street. They got Rudy to the phone.
“Joe,” he said. Rudy sounds like Raul Julia from The Addams Family years. “I thought you were in Ocean City. Something about a tan, an endless stream of bikinis, and a sixer of Corona. Wasn’t that the great master plan?”
“Plans change. Look, you free?”
“When?”
“Now.”
A slight pause as he shifted gears. “Are you okay?”
“Not entirely.”
Another shift, this time from concern to caution. “Is this about what happened at the warehouse?”
“In a way.”
“Are you feeling depressed or—”
“Cut the shit, Rudy, this is off the clock.” He got that. Since long before Helen’s first suicide attempt Rudy had been my shrink some of the time and my friend all of the time. Now I needed my friend, but I wanted his brain, too. “Get dressed and come outside. I’ll be there in five.”
I MET RUDY Sanchez ten years ago during his residency at Sinai. He’d worked with Helen since the first time she’d been checked in after the spiders started coming out of the walls. Now we were both dealing with Helen’s suicide in different ways. I needed him for my part of it, and he needed me for his. None of Rudy’s patients had ever killed themselves before, and he took it pretty hard. There’s professional detachment and then there’s basic humanity. Rudy’s a great shrink. He was born for the profession, I think. He listens with every molecule of his body and he has insight.
He came out of Gold’s wearing electric-blue bike shorts and a black tank top, carrying an Under-Armour gym bag.
“You have a bike?” I asked, looking around.
“No, I drove.”
“What’s with the shorts?”
“There’s a new fitness trainer. Jamaican gal . . . tall, gorgeous.”
“And . . . ?”
“Bike shorts show off my package.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Jealousy is an ugly thing, Joe.”
“Get in the fucking car.”
We drove to Bellevue State Park, bought some bottled water, and walked off into the forest. I hadn’t said much of anything in the car and Rudy let it be, waiting for me to open up, but after we’d been walking for five minutes he cleared his throat. “This is getting pretty remote for a therapy session, cowboy.”
“Not what it is.”
“Then what? Does the FBI want you to get your forestry merit badge?”
“Need privacy.”
“Your car won’t do it?”
“Not sure about that.”
He smiled. “You ought to consider seeing a therapist about that paranoia.”
I ignored him. The park trail brought us into a small clearing by a brook. I led the way down to the scattering of rocks. For a small brook it had a nice steady burble. Useful. Not that I really expected long-range mics, but safe is better than careless.
“Okay, don’t take this the wrong way, Rudy, but I’m going to take off all my clothes. You can turn around. I wouldn’t want you to lose confidence in your package.”
He sat down on a rock and picked up some small stones to toss. I stripped down to the skin and first examined every inch of my boxers, checking the seams and label. Nothing, so I put them back on.
“Thank God,” Rudy said.
I shot him the finger and went through the process with the borrowed clothes.
“What are you looking for?”
“Bugs.”
“Bugs as in creepy crawlies or bugs as in I’m being ape-shit paranoid and my psychiatrist friend had better keep the Thorazine handy?”
“That one,” I said as I put the sweats on and sat on a rock five feet away.
“What’s going on, Joe?”
“That’s the thing, Rude . . . I don’t know.”
His dark eyes searched my face. “Okay,” he said, “tell me.”
And I did. When I was finished Rudy sat on his rock and stared for a long time at a praying mantis that was sunning herself on a leaf. The sun was a ruby-red ball behind the distant trees and the late afternoon heat was giving way to a breezy coolness as twilight began to gather.
“Joe? Look me in the eye and tell me that everything you’ve said is true.”
I told him.
He watched my pupils, the muscles around my eyes, looking for any shifts in focus. Looking for a tell. “There’s no chance this Mr. Church was playing some kind of game on you? There’s no chance this Javad was in on it?”
“A few days ago I shot him twice in the back. Today I smashed the guy’s face to jelly and then snapped his neck.”
“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 d
efinitely 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 she 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 ch
annel 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.
Patient Zero Page 5