My cat, Cobbler—a marmalade and white tabby—hopped up on the toilet tank and watched me with his big yellow eyes.
I knotted a towel around my waist and thought about the beers in the fridge, but even though the adrenaline was out of my bloodstream the shakes were still right there beneath the surface. I passed on the beer and put a frozen pizza in the oven, and turned on the TV. Normally I’d surf over to one of the horror or SF channels and see who was eating whom, but right now I wanted no part of that. All I needed now was to stumble on a rerun of Dawn of the Dead and I’d probably lose it. So I put on the news. The top story was a follow-up on the fire at St. Michael’s Hospital that had occurred the same night as the warehouse raid. Over two hundred dead and half the hospital burned to the ground. They were calling it the worst hospital fire in modern U.S. history.
More depression I didn’t need, so I surfed over to a different news channel and watched a few minutes of the preevent press hype over the big Fourth of July event in Philly. They were rededicating the Liberty Bell and also installing a brand-new one—the Freedom Bell—that had been built according to the specs of the original. Something the First Lady and the wife of the Vice President had cooked up as part of their Patriotic American Women organization. Lots of rah-rah stuff to build morale for the troops in the field and raise domestic support for our overseas action. The whole event was going to center around the ringing of the Freedom Bell, which would be symbolic of American democracy and freedom ringing out around the world. Must have sounded good to Congress because they approved it and hired some woman to make the new bell, and she was supposed to be a descendant of the British metalsmith who’d cast the original Liberty Bell. My task force team was one of over a dozen similar groups that were supposed to be on site during the festivities, though overall security was naturally a Secret Service gig. We were basically thugs in suits for the day, just in case bin Laden showed up with a hundred pounds of C4 strapped to his chest. Life in post-9/11 America. Happy holidays, bring the whole family.
I switched off the set and closed my eyes. What was it Church had said? Mr. Ledger, we are very much in the business of stopping terror. There are threats against this country greater than anything that has so far made the papers.
“No kidding,” I said aloud.
So how did I work this? I’m self-aware enough to know that I have a somewhat fractured personality. Not exactly multiple personality disorder, but clearly there were different drivers at the wheel depending on my mood, and depending on my needs. Over the years I’d been able to identify and make peace with the three dominant personalities: the Modern Man, the Warrior, and the Cop. At the moment all three of them were trying to grab the wheel.
The Modern Man, the civilized part of me, was in full-blown denial mode. He didn’t want to believe in monsters and he wasn’t all that comfortable with secret government departments and all that James Bond crap. The Warrior was okay with the cloak-and-dagger stuff because it partly defined him, it allowed him the chance to be who and what he was: a killer. He was useful in a firefight, but I seldom let him out to play. He was lousy at tea parties. Then there was the Cop. That part of me had become dominant over the last few years, and he also upheld the nobler parts of the Warrior’s personality—the codes of ethics, the rules.
With my eyes closed I settled back into meditative breathing and let the parts of me sort it all out. It was almost always the Cop who got the others to shut the hell up. The Cop was the thinker. I dismantled this thing bit by bit and laid everything on the table so the Cop could take a good long look.
There were parts that didn’t fit. The most obvious was the fact that the terrorists we took down at the warehouse had been such a mixed bag. These guys aren’t known for tolerance and team spirit.
The suicide plan was also weird. Each of hostiles at the warehouse had been infected by a disease and had to take regular doses of an antidote to stay alive. That was impressive, but it also seemed like overkill. It was too sophisticated for its own purposes, considering that the mere threat of it should have been enough. It also spoke of a degree of technological sophistication that was, as far as I could judge, beyond the reach of your average extremist cell. If this was all real, and if it turned out that the plague that created these walkers was developed by the same mind, or minds, that created the control disease, then the DMS might be facing an actual real-world mad scientist. In another mood, or perhaps on another day, that might actually be funny. Right now it scared the hell out of me.
Then there was Javad. Was he really dead and somehow reanimated? Impossible? You bet; and yet I know what I saw.
From now on, Church had said, we may have to consider “dead” a relative term.
I found it hard to believe that Javad was the only infected person. There hadn’t been a lab at the warehouse. Church had to know that, too; and I should have remarked on it. The oven timer dinged and I opened my eyes. I took the pizza with me into the little nook off the kitchen where I had my computer. I ate a slice while it loaded. Then I got to work. The Cop in me was in gear now. Church had said that if I looked I wouldn’t find anything about him or the DMS. I wanted to put that to the test, so I stayed up all night searching the Internet.
I did a search on the warehouse Church had been using. Baylor Records Storage. To dig deep I had to log on through the department Web site, and there was a serious risk in that. Everything is logged, everything is tracked.
“Screw it,” I said, and kept going. But Baylor Records turned out to be a dead end. Previous owner was dead and there were no direct heirs, so the government had snapped it up for back taxes. Easy enough for someone like Church to commandeer. I searched all night to see if there was any connection between Baylor Records and the old container company warehouse where we’d taken down the terrorist cell; but if a connection existed I couldn’t find it.
Early Sunday morning Rudy called to say he’d spent all of last night and this morning researching prions.
“What happened to ‘leave it alone, Joe’?”
“What can I tell you,” he said tiredly. “So we both need therapy.”
“You find anything interesting?”
“Lots, but none of it germane to what you mean. The whole prion thing seems less and less likely, though. As dangerous as they are the infection rate is extremely slow. It can take months or years for it to manifest. I’ll keep looking, though. And don’t forget about our session on Tuesday.”
“Yes, mother.”
“Don’t start with me, cowboy,” he warned, and hung up.
The rest of Sunday went like that. I logged hour after hour on the Net, and Rudy and I shared URLs via e-mail and IM, but we didn’t seem to be getting any closer to an explanation for what Javad was or how he came to be like that. Around midnight I finally shut off the machine, took a shower, and shambled off to bed. I was hitting brick walls everywhere I went, and I guess another person would have thrown in the towel, but that’s not my sort of thing. I just needed to rest and then attack this again with a fresher set of wits.
Chapter Sixteen
Gault and Amirah / The Bunker / Six days ago
THEY LAY EXHAUSTED on the table, their clothes tangled around her waist and his ankles, his body purple and red with claw marks and bites. He never left a mark on her, not even the smallest of love bites. That would be suicide.
They never spoke of love afterward. Never told each other how much this meant, or how much they meant to each other. They already knew what the other would say. It had all been said in that first moment of eye contact. Pillow talk would limit the feeling, it would define what did not need to be defined and therefore cheapen it all to some kind of clandestine Romeo and Juliet pap. This was much bigger and, Gault hoped, likely to end with less personal tragedy.
She spoke first, saying simply, “I’ve had some vague reports. Baltimore?”
“Mm, yes,” he drawled. “Seems our warehouse is a total loss.”
“What about Javad?”
He paused, staring at the speckled surface of the acoustic ceiling tiles, deciding which version of the truth to tell her. He loved Amirah but there were levels of privacy that even she didn’t get to enter; which would make it easier if he had to kill her one of these days. He liked to keep his options open. “Uncertain.”
“He hasn’t gotten out. I’ve been tracking the news feeds . . .”
“I know, which means that we still have to move forward with the next few steps of the operation.”
“What about the other two locations? If the Americans know about the warehouse . . .”
“Don’t worry,” Gault said. “They know about one of them—the big one; but not about the other one. Right now they’re holding off, probably hoping to find where the other lorry went.”
She nodded, the motion massaging his bicep, which was starting to fall asleep. “When will you evacuate the plant?”
“Why bother? We don’t really need it anymore and I’m rather hoping they raid it.”
Amirah turned her head sharply. “Why?”
“How, why, and when they raid that plant will tell us a great deal about their intelligence gathering, and their wits.”
“Shouldn’t those details be handled by your American friend?”
“He’s too close to it to risk any direct involvement. Besides,” Gault said, “there’s something else I need him to focus on. There are some indications that there is another player in the game, possibly a new counterterrorism organization or department. Right now this is just guesswork, but it bears looking into.”
Amirah sat up and her black robes fell down to cover her with an unintentional display of rumpled modesty. She pushed a strand of glossy black hair away from her face. Without the chadri her face was incredibly beautiful. Full lips, high cheekbones, a broad clear brow, and those eyes. Gault loved those eyes. Like a falcon or some creature out of myth.
“Is it the Brits? You think Barrier is—”
He shook his head. “No, not Barrier. Something the Yanks have cooked up, but as I said—I’m not sure who yet. I have feelers out through Homeland, the FBI, a few other agencies. If I’m right then they’ll show their hands soon enough.”
“You should put your pet monkey on it. He’s tenacious.”
Gault smiled. “His name is Toys . . . and yes, he is tenacious.” In fact, Gault thought, he’d love to cook you over a slow fire.
“So . . . what are you going to do about the plant?”
“I rather think I’m going to let them raid it. I can’t think of a better way of inspiring useful fear than letting me break in and see what’s going on in that place. It’ll do us worlds of good.”
“But what about El Mujahid? He’s the master of creating fear, and his mission is already in the works. If you allow the raid on the warehouse does that mean you’ll use that instead of what my husband is—”
“Hardly,” Gault assured her. “I’m relying on the Fighter to deliver the master stroke; but a raid on the plant will surely set the atmosphere . . . after which everything will go exactly as we want.”
She frowned at him, chewing a lip as she considered this. He knew that she was sorting through the possible outcomes based on what she knew—what he’d allowed her to know. She would come to very logical conclusions, and on the whole they would be right; but they would be incomplete. Which was fine.
“Don’t worry, my princess,” Gault said, and turned onto his side so he could stroke her hair and brush the back of his hand against her cheek. “This is going very, very well for us. We need the Yanks to think they’re containing the situation. If they have a new special operations group, then it will help focus attention in the right direction for us. The best manipulations are always those in which the mark thinks he is in charge.”
Amirah kissed him. “You have the mind of a scorpion, my love.”
“Now, what do you have to show me?”
Her eyes lit up. “If creating great fear is what you want, then you’ll be very happy with what we’ve done since the last time you were here.”
“As good as Javad?”
“Oh no . . . this is much, much better.”
He almost said “I love you.” Instead he kissed her deeply and passionately and then whispered in her ear: “Show me.”
Chapter Seventeen
Baltimore, Maryland / Monday, June 29; 6:03 A.M.
NEXT MORNING I called a friend who worked early shift at DMV records and asked her to run Buckethead’s plates, but that went nowhere. No such plates existed. Big surprise.
I logged back onto the department server to reread the task force report on the warehouse; it was gone. Completely gone. No file name, no incident folders, nothing.
“You bastard,” I said aloud. Church had impressed me before, but now he was beginning to scare me. He threw enough weight to be able to locate and remove the official records of Homeland Security’s Interjurisdictional Counterterrorism Task Force. That meant accessing local, state, and federal computer mainframes. Holy shit.
There was a hard copy of the report in my desk at the squad room, but I had doubts that it would still be there if I went in to get it. This wasn’t helping my feelings of paranoia. I turned and looked around my apartment. How aggressive would these guys be? Surely they wouldn’t . . .
One second later I was searching my apartment from top to bottom looking for microphones, phone bugs, fiber-optic surveillance threads. I looked hard and I looked everywhere. I found nothing. That didn’t mean there was nothing to find, though; Homeland and that whole crew had a lot of very sneaky toys that were designed not to be found. All the search resulted in was a two-degree drop in my paranoia and an itchy spot between my shoulder blades like someone had a laser sight on me.
Cursing under my breath I headed into the bedroom to put on a suit in preparation for the OIS hearing, but as I was picking out a tie the phone rang. I snatched it up thinking it was Rudy.
“Detective Ledger? This is Keisha Johnson.”
I recognized her voice. She was the lieutenant overseeing the Officer Involved Shooting investigation for the Task force raid. I thought about the searches and calls I’d made despite Church’s warning to stay away from this and had a brief panic attack.
“Yes . . . ?” I said cautiously, heart in my throat.
“In your absence we reviewed all of the videotapes from the raid last Tuesday, and after several discussions with your commanding officer and the supervisors for the task force, we’ve concluded that your shooting was in keeping with the best policies and practices of the Baltimore Police Department and no further hearings or actions will be required at this time.”
I said something clever like: “Um . . . what?”
“Thank you for your willingness to cooperate, and good luck at Quantico. We’ll be sorry to lose such a fine officer.” And with that she hung up.
I stared at the phone in total shock. There was no way that an OIS hearing would be handled like this. Not ever, not even if everyone involved agreed that the shooting was completely righteous. Department policy mandated a hearing, token or not. This was weird and I didn’t like it one damn bit. The paranoia was back stronger than ever. But the logic was all twisted. If I’d somehow rattled Church’s cage by trying to find some answers, why would he smooth the way for me by canceling the hearing? I couldn’t see the advantage to him in it.
I sat back down at my computer and pulled up the list of URLs Rudy had sent on prion diseases. Maybe that would give me a direction to follow, and I spent hours buried in science that was beyond me, but not so far beyond that it couldn’t scare me. I learned that prion diseases are still very rare, about one case out of a million people worldwide, and only about three hundred cases here in the States. It was rare but seriously dangerous, and the mysteries surrounding the little buggers often led to panic reactions. The whole mad cow thing was prion disease at its worst, and the haste with which tens of thousands of cattle were slaughtered showed the degree of fear assoc
iated with the threat. Not that any of this helped. I’m pretty darn sure Javad didn’t get the way he was from eating a bad McBurger. Then I clicked on another of Rudy’s URLs which took me to an article on a prion-based disease called “fatal familial insomnia” in which a small group of patients worldwide suffered increasing insomnia resulting in panic attacks, the development of odd phobias, hallucinations, and other dissociative symptoms. The whole process takes months and the victim generally dies as a result of total sleep deprivation, exhaustion, and stress. I searched all around the topic and though there was no connection at all to a state resembling living death the concept stuck in my head. Unending wakefulness. No sleep. No rest. No dreams.
“Jesus . . .” It was a horrifying thought, and what a terrible way to die.
Could Church have been wrong? Was Javad actually suffering from a disease whose symptoms led the doctors to believe he was dead when maybe he was really in a coma? His coming back from the dead could have been nothing more sinister than waking up from a cataleptic coma. Some part of that felt right to me, but as I read on I hit another speed bump. Several of the sites said that the victims could not be put to sleep, not even through artificial means. They didn’t lapse into a terminal coma at the end of their suffering. They died, and apparently stayed dead. Besides, even if Javad had been in some kind of walking catatonia it didn’t explain how he’d shrugged off the two .45s I’d put in his back. Clearly there was too much of the picture that I couldn’t see, and it was maddening.
Chapter Eighteen
Grace, Maryland / Monday, June 29; 8:39 A.M.
GRACE COURTLAND SAT in her comfortable leather swivel chair and sipped a Diet Coke and watched the eight color monitors that showed the inside of Joe Ledger’s car, each room of his apartment, and the consulting room in Dr. Rudy Sanchez’s office. She’d been amused when they’d each searched for bugs. None of them had found anything, of course. If they had someone on her staff would lose his job. For what the DMS paid for holographic relay technology it had better not show up on a sweep or be visible to the naked eye. The DMS had deep pockets and Mr. Church liked having toys that no one else in the schoolyard had.
Patient Zero Page 7