Her desk was stacked with reports on Ledger. Bank account records, tax returns, school transcripts, his complete military record, and copies of everything filed about him since he joined the Baltimore Police. She’d read it all, but Joe Ledger was still a puzzle. There were so many things about him that made him excellent material for the DMS, and Grace was finding it harder and harder to hold to her position that Ledger was a screwup. If it wasn’t for that damning evidence on the task force duty log . . .
That morning she’d read through Ledger’s military service file. He had scored high marks in every area of training and had excelled in close-quarters combat, surveillance and countersurveillance, land warfare, and all immediate action drills. There were several letters recommending Ledger for OCS, but each included notes saying that Ledger had declined the offer. One handwritten note, from Colonel Aaron Greenberg, base commander at Fort Bragg, read: “Staff Sergeant Ledger has indicated that his goal is to use his army training to better prepare him for a career as a law enforcement officer in his hometown of Baltimore, MD. I expressed to him that this was a gain for Baltimore PD but a real loss for the army.”
It was a pretty remarkable letter, but she chose to interpret it as a lack of ambition. What really caught her attention, though, was the transcript of a deposition of Ledger’s company commander, Captain Michael S. Costas. Following the warehouse raid Church had sent agents to depose Costas under oath and after signing a secrecy agreement. Costas spoke freely and glowingly about Ledger, but one exchange in particular must have struck Church—it was the only section highlighted in yellow:
DMS: Captain Costas, in your professional opinion do you believe Joe Ledger to be reliable?
COSTAS: Reliable? That’s a funny question. Reliable in what way?
DMS: If he were to become part of a special branch of the military?
COSTAS: You mean like Homeland? Something like that?
DMS: Something like that, yes.
COSTAS: Let me put it this way. I’ve been in the army since I was eighteen, and a Ranger since I was twenty. I’ve been in combat in the Mog and in Desert Storm. I’ve also served in training schools for Rangers and I’ve learned to trust my judgment on which men are going to become very good and which are likely to be only passable.
DMS: And it’s your belief that . . . what? That Ledger was one of those who would become very good?
COSTAS: Hell, I knew that about him before he went to Ranger school. No, what I saw in Joe during his time in my company is that he was going to be great. Not good . . . but truly great. You don’t see his kind very often, not unless you’ve been in a lot of war zones. I have been in a lot of war zones and I can tell you right now that Joe Ledger is a hero waiting to happen.
DMS: A hero?
COSTAS: Trust me, if you can inspire him, if you can tap into the core of that man, into what he believes . . . then by God he’ll show you things you’ll never see in another soldier. I guarantee it.
“Hero indeed,” Grace muttered, turning up her nose at Costas’s effusiveness; but as she immersed herself in Ledger’s life something shifted inside of her. She reread it, then slapped the report cover shut. “Bollocks.”
Ledger was a good fighter, that much was certain, but with all the DMS had to face could they risk having someone like him aboard? The soldier in her wanted to have nothing to do with him. And yet, the woman in her wasn’t so sure. On the screen Ledger hammering away at his computer keyboard, his face intent, his blue eyes bright and—
“Stop it, you stupid cow,” she said aloud, and turned away from the screen for a moment. This was counterproductive bullshit. This was a side effect of being alone in a lonely job in a foreign country. This was hormones and biology and that was all.
But when she turned back to the screen Joe’s eyes were still as blue.
She punched a button that brought up an Internet display screen that mimicked whatever Ledger was looking at, and Grace forced herself to concentrate on the prion information he was reading. The dry complexity of the medical information was a relief and she could feel the small flare of emotionality subside within her. Grace sipped her Diet Coke and slammed the can down on her desk. There was no way she was going to approve him coming on board. No way in hell.
Chapter Nineteen
Mr. Church, Maryland / Monday, June 29; 8:51 A.M.
MR. CHURCH SAT back in a heavy leather chair, taking occasional sips from a bottle of spring water. The wall in front of him was covered, floor to ceiling, with video monitors. One screen showed Dr. Rudy Sanchez taking notes in his private office while a patrol sergeant broke into tears as he confessed an ongoing love affair with a precinct secretary that his wife had now started to suspect. Church paid no attention to the cop, but he studied Sanchez very closely. He selected a vanilla wafer from a dish and bit off a piece.
Another screen showed Joe Ledger bent over his computer and as he typed the keystrokes were displayed in a digital text bar below the screen.
But what interested him most was the screen on the upper-left side of his display board. On that one Grace Courtland was sipping a Diet Coke and staring with great apparent fascination at Joe Ledger. The camera he had installed in her office was something not even she would find. It was two or three generations above the equipment she used, and her stuff was cutting edge. Church had better sources.
He watched her face, the shape of her mouth, the shift of her eyes as she watched Joe Ledger. Church chewed his cookie. Even if anyone had been there his face would have given away none of his thoughts.
Chapter Twenty
Baltimore, Maryland / Monday, June 29; 9:17 A.M.
I DECIDED TO come at this from a different route, so I called Jerry Spencer, my friend from DCPD who’d gotten his sternum cracked at the warehouse. Jerry was thirty years on the job and was the best forensics man I ever met. If anyone had caught a whiff of this DMS thing it’d be him.
He answered on the fifth ring.
“Jerry. Hey, man, how’s the chest?”
“Joe,” he said. No inflection.
“How are you? You still out on medical or—”
He cut me off. “What do you need, Joe?”
His tone was matter-of-fact, so I decided to be straight with him. “Jerry, have you ever heard of a federal agency called the DMS?”
There was a long silence on the line, and then Jerry said, “No, I haven’t, Joe . . . and neither have you.”
Before I could work out a response to that he hung up.
“Uh-oh,” I murmured, and for the next ten minutes all I did was sit there and stare at the phone. Jerry had been gotten to; a blind man could see that. It strained my head to imagine how much force it would take to spook a guy like Jerry enough to have him blow me off like that.
Cobbler jumped into my lap and I stroked his silky fur while I chewed on the problem.
Until now I’d hesitated doing a direct search on the DMS for fear of that acronym, or the words “Department of Military Sciences,” setting off some kind of alarms. For a while now the government has used different software packages to locate certain combinations of words in e-mail or Net searches. Type in something like “bomb” and “school” and it’s supposed to raise a red flag. Doing this kind of search could land my ass in a sling. On the other hand how could I just leave this be? How could Church expect me to forget it? Even if Church was right and the whole Javad/prion/walking dead thing was over—a one-shot fluke that we lucked into and solved before it got out of the box—that still didn’t alter the fact that the incident changed my whole world. Now I know how those folks feel who see a UFO or Bigfoot—not the nutcases, but the ones who are absolutely sure they’ve seen something outside of normal reality, and have nowhere to go with it.
What would happen if I did that search? I mean . . . what would Church really do as a result? I met the man, and even though I could see him feeding a busload of orphans and nuns to hungry wolves if it furthered his aims, I didn’t take him for petty vind
ictiveness.
So, what would he do if I did a search on “Department of Military Sciences”?
“Kiss my ass, Church,” I said, and hit the enter key.
I got a few hits for college ROTC programs under that name, but in terms of national security or secret agencies, absolutely nothing came up on the search. A waste of time? Maybe. Or maybe I had lobbed a serve into Church’s court.
Chapter Twenty-One
Gault and Amirah / The Bunker / Six days ago
THE LEVEL-A PVC hazmat suit was air-cooled and very comfortable, but Gault still felt like a big marshmallow. He stood close to the airlock. In one hand he held a wireless remote that would trigger the emergency release on the lock in case he had to make a run for it; in the other he held a Snellig 46, an electric wire-dart pistol. Amirah stood behind a Plexiglas wall and her fingers hovered over a computer keyboard.
“What stage is it in?” Gault asked. Their suits were soundproof and the intercoms were of the best quality.
“Advanced stage one.”
Gault cocked an eyebrow. “It’s still alive?”
The creature standing there certainly didn’t look alive. The brown skin had faded to a sickly bruise-yellow; its mouth was slack, lips gray and rubbery. It was only when Gault shifted a few feet to one side in order to see the thing’s eyes that he could detect any trace of intelligence; but even then it was rudimentary.
“I resequenced the hormonal discharge to make the blood chemistry more hospitable for the parasites. They spread the prions at a much more accelerated rate now. The nonessential functions shut down more quickly,” Amirah said brightly. “Higher brain functions deteriorate at a faster rate now.”
“How much faster?”
Amirah paused and turned and flashed him a triumphant smile. “Eight times.”
He frowned. “This is Generation Three?”
She laughed. “Oh no, Sebastian . . . we’ve passed that phase a long time ago. What you’re seeing is Generation Seven of the Seif al Din pathogen. We’ve broken through almost all of the symptomatic barriers.”
Gault’s head whipped around and he stared at the subject then up at the big wall clock. “Seven . . . Christ! When was infection begun?”
“Right before I came to meet you.”
Gault licked his lips. “That’s . . . what, an hour?”
She shook her head. “Less. Forty-seven minutes, and I think we can get that down even more. That rate is based on injection only; we added a new parasite to the salivary glands so infection from bites is much faster, a matter of minutes. By Generation Eight we should have it down to seconds.”
The creature shook its head like an animal shaking off a biting fly. The hazmat suits prevented the subject from hearing or smelling them, which were the two most significant response triggers; however, the sight of them was causing it to become agitated. Without human scent or sound that hadn’t happened with earlier generations. Gault moved his hand experimentally, wanting to see if the creature would track him.
Suddenly it lunged.
Without warning or hesitation it threw itself at Gault, springing across the cold metal floor of the display area, hooked fingers clawing the air as it tried to grab him. Gault cried out and staggered back, but he brought up the Snellig and fired the weapon’s twin flachettes into the monster’s naked chest. He pressed his thumb down on the activator and sent 70,000 volts into the infected predator.
The subject let out a scream like a cougar—high and full of hate—but it dropped down into a fetal ball, twitching as the current burned through it.
“That’s enough,” he heard Amirah shout, and Gault sagged back, releasing the button. His chest was heaving and his heart hammering. Amirah laughed as she came out from behind the Plexi screen. “The new parasite has enhanced predatory aggression by at least half, and it begins far sooner. Even from a nonfatal bite the infection will take hold within minutes and begin reducing cognitive function. In cases of a more serious bite, or in the presence of other traumatic injuries, the infection will spread exponentially faster.”
“He could have killed me!” Gault snapped, rounding on her and pointing the Snellig at her chest. For a white-hot moment he almost pulled the trigger.
But she was still laughing, shaking her head. “Oh, don’t be such an old woman.” She used the toe of one booted foot to pull back the creature’s upper lip. Gault saw that the pale gums were smooth. Amirah said, “I had its teeth pulled in preparation for the demonstration. I’m not an idiot, Sebastian.”
Gault said nothing for a moment, his jaw locked, lips curled back from his teeth in as savage a snarl as he’d seen on the face of the subject. Then, by slow degrees, he forced himself to let go of the moment. He made his face relax first and gradually straightened his body from the defensive crouch. “You could have effing well warned me!”
“That would have been less fun.”
“God, you’re a wicked bitch,” he said, but now he was smiling, too. It was completely artificial but he made it look convincing, thinking, You are so going to pay for that, my dear.
Amirah either couldn’t tell how upset he truly was, or didn’t care—and the hazmat suit hid most of his face—but she looked at the wall clock and then walked back to her control console, pulling off her hood. “The new hormone sequence has one more really marvelous effect,” she said as she punched some keys. There was a heavy metallic chunk as steel panels slid back on the floor. She hit another button and four curved sections of inch-thick reinforced glass rose from the floor. Their sides fit together with only a faintness of the seam visible. The glass walls hissed upward until they reached a large circular track in the ceiling. As the upper edges slid into the tracks there was another chunking sound and the walls stopped moving. Amirah watched the wall clock all the while. The subject lay in the center of a big glass and steel jar.
“Wait for it,” she murmured as the digital counters ticked away the seconds. “Should be right about now. Generation Seven is so wonderfully quick.”
The creature suddenly opened its eyes and peeled back its lips to issue a hiss of animal hatred. No sound escaped the barrier, but Gault still flinched. Then he blinked and looked from the subject to the clock and back again.
“Wait . . .” he said, “that doesn’t . . .”
Amirah’s gorgeous dark eyes sparkled with delight. “Reanimation time is now under ninety seconds.”
He tore off his hood and threw it onto a nearby console. “God,” he gasped, staring at the monster.
“If you were worried that the Americans might harvest one of our subjects for research it doesn’t matter now. They can have all of the subjects we’ve already sent . . . but any preventive measure they design will be built on the wrong generation of the disease.”
She walked over and placed her palm on the glass and even when the subject lunged at her and slammed its face against the inner wall on the other side she didn’t flinch. There was an adoring look on her face as she stared at the subject.
Gault came to stand next to her. The subject kept banging against the glass, its infected brain unable to process the concept of transparency. Even without scent it knew that its prey was there. That was the only thought it could hold on to.
In an awed voice, Amirah whispered, “Once we release these new subjects into the population the infection will spread beyond control. They won’t be able to keep ahead of it.”
Gault nodded slowly but his mind was working at computer speed, putting everything he’d seen and everything Amirah had said into context. It was an effort to keep his feelings about all of this off his face.
“This is unstoppable,” Amirah said with a predatory hiss in her voice. “We can kill them all.”
“Now, now,” he said, wrapping his arm around her, “let’s not lose focus here. We don’t want to kill them all, darling. What would be the point in that? We simply want to make them all very, very sick.”
He stroked her breast through the hazmat material.
<
br /> She said nothing but he saw her turn away as if to look at some gauges and he was certain she was trying to hide her expression. “You told me to continue with the research, to improve the model. What do you expect me to do with everything I’ve developed? Just destroy it?”
“Yes, I bloody well do,” he said, but then he stopped, lips pursed, considering; then something occurred to him. “Actually . . . hold on a bit.”
She turned back to him, her face showing hurt and suspicion. “What?”
“I have a wonderful idea,” he purred. “I think I figured out how to use your new monster. Oh yes, this is both juicy and delicious.”
Still frowning, she said, “Tell me!”
“Before I do you have to promise me that you’ll use it only as I suggest. We can’t really let this generation of the pathogen out. Not ever. You do understand that, don’t you?”
She said nothing.
“Do you understand?” He said it again, slowly, reinforcing each syllable.
“Yes, yes, I understand. You really are such an old woman at times, Sebastian.”
“Dear heart . . . we want to buy the world, not bury it.”
Amirah gave him a slow three-count and then nodded. “Of course,” she said. “I just wanted you to see what we could accomplish. We’ve created a new kind of life, an entirely new state of existence. Unlife.”
He stepped back from her and stared, the devious smile still frozen onto his mouth.
Unlife.
God Almighty, he thought.
“Now . . . tell me your idea,” she said, breaking through the shell of his shocked and fragile thoughts. “How can you use my new pathogen to help us in our cause?”
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