“He’d better be okay—”
He smiled. “Dr. Sanchez is currently eating his way through an entire catering platter and probably psychoanalyzing Sergeant Dietrich’s rather complicated childhood. He’s fine and he can wait.”
No one said anything. “Okay,” I said, surprised at how calm my voice sounded. “So now what do we do?”
“Major Courtland will bring you up to speed. The entire staff will meet in the main hall in thirty minutes.” He paused and then held out his hand. “Welcome aboard, Mr. Ledger.”
“I don’t mean to offend you two,” I said, taking his hand, “but you’re both total assholes.” I gave his hand my best squeeze and damn if the son of a bitch didn’t match me pound for pound.
“I’ll cry about that later,” Church said.
We let go of each other and I folded my arms. “If I’m going to be team leader, where’s the actual team?”
“You just kicked the effing hell out of them,” Courtland said.
I turned and looked at the five men. Oh crap.
I’ve worked with street thugs, murderers, and the worst kind of lowlifes for years and have knocked in their heads, shot them, Tasered them, and sent them to prison for life, but none of them ever gave me the kinds of looks I was getting from my “team.” If they’d had a tree limb and a rope I’d be swinging in the wind.
I thought I heard Church give a quiet chuckle as he turned and left.
Maybe this was the moment where I was supposed to make some kind of speech, but before I could say anything Courtland beat me to it.
“Get cleaned up,” she snapped. “Ledger . . . come with me.” She started for the door.
I started to follow her but sensed movement and turned to see Apeman coming toward me. His face was purple with rage, hands balled into white-knuckled fists.
“You suckered me, asshole, and first chance I get I’m going to wipe the floor up with you.”
“No,” I said, “you’re not.” And I punched him in the throat.
I stepped out of the way as he fell.
The room was dead silent and I deliberately turned my back on the other four as I said to Courtland, “I hope to hell you have a medic here, ’cause he’s going to need one.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Sebastian Gault / The Hotel Ishtar, Baghdad / Five days ago
“LINE?”
“Clear,” said the Fighter.
“What have you to report, my friend?” Gault was chin deep in a tub of soapy water, the Goldberg Variations playing quietly on the CD player. The young woman in the other room was asleep—knowing this call was coming in, Toys had slipped something into her drink before escorting her to Gault’s room. She’d sleep for four more hours and wake up without feeling any adverse effects. It was useful being a chemist and having an assistant without a conscience.
El Mujahid said, “Everything in place.”
“Jolly good. Once you complete the first stage my lads in the Red Cross will make sure the correct transfers take place. With any luck you should be on a hospital ship heading out of the Gulf by midnight.”
“Sebastian . . . ?” said El Mujahid.
“Yes?”
“I’m putting a lot of trust in you. I expect you to hold up your end of things.”
“My hand to Allah,” Gault said as he used his toes to turn on the hot water tap, “you can certainly trust me. Everything will go smoothly.”
There was a short silence at the other end of the line, and then the Fighter said, “Tell my wife I love her.”
Gault smiled up at the ceiling. “Of course I will, my old friend. Go with God.”
He clicked off and tossed the phone onto the closed lid of the toilet. He was laughing when he did it.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Baltimore, Maryland / Tuesday, June 30; 2:46 P.M.
AFTER MAJOR COURTLAND called in the medical team she joined me in the hallway and I could tell she was reevaluating me. Her eyes roved over my face like a scanner and I could almost hear the relays click in her head. Across the hall was a men’s room and I started toward it but she stopped me with a touch on my arm.
“Ledger . . . what made you think Mr. Church wanted you to do that?”
I shrugged. “He said time was short.”
“That’s not the same thing as telling you to go in there and start kicking everyone’s ass.”
“You have a problem with it?”
She smiled again, a nice smile. It transformed her from a cobra to something a hell of a lot more appealing: an actual human being. “Not at all. As much as I hate to say it I’m rather impressed.”
“ ‘Hate to say it’?” I echoed.
“You are a very hard person to like, Mr. Ledger.”
“Call me Joe. And no, I’m not. Lots of people like me.”
She didn’t comment on that. “Let me put it another way . . . you’re a very hard man to trust. Especially in an operation of this kind.”
“Grace—may I call you Grace?”
“You may call me Major Courtland.”
“Okay, Major Courtland,” I said, “it isn’t my goal in life to get you to trust me. You jokers pulled me into this. I didn’t submit a résumé. I’m not military. So if you have issues about trust or anything else up to and including liking me, then, seriously, please go and screw yourself. Major.”
She blinked once.
“I did not and do not want my life tied up in cloak-and-dagger bullshit, dead guys, or pissing contests with either the testosterone crowd in there or some prissy-assed Earl Grey–drinking, scone-munching major who isn’t even my freaking boss. I don’t know you and I don’t give a rat’s ass if you trust me.”
“Mr. Ledger—”
“I have to take a piss.” I headed down the hall to the bathroom.
I USED THE toilet and then washed my face first with hot water and then cold, dabbed it dry with a fistful of paper towels, and then leaned on the edge of the sink, staring at my face in the mirror. My skin was flushed and my eyes had the jumpy look you usually see in junkies. My hair stuck out in all directions.
“Well,” I said to my reflection, “aren’t you a picture?”
I didn’t have a comb so I used wet fingers to plaster down my hair, and as I stood there the full weight and enormity of what was going on hit me like a freight train. I bowed over the sink, tasting bile, ready to throw up . . . but my trembling stomach held. I raised my head again and looked into my eyes and saw fear in there, the naked realization of what all this meant.
There were more of them out there. More walkers. And I was being asked to step up and be . . . what? Some kind of Captain Heroism who would lead the boys in the Red, White, and Blue to victory? What was I getting myself into? This wasn’t task force duty, this wasn’t even SWAT-team level. I’d never even smelled anything this big before and now I was expected to train and lead a black ops team? How frigging insane was this? Why were they asking me? I’m just a cop. Where are the guys who actually do this for a living? How come none of them were here? Where’s James Bond and Jack Bauer? Why me, of all people?
My reflection stared back, looking dazed and a little stupid.
Working the task force had not prepared me for this. After eighteen months of that—and the years since the World Trade Center—I’d come to share the more or less common view that the terrorists had fired their worst shots and were now hiding in caves and reevaluating the wisdom of having overplayed their hand. Now Church tells me that they hold the key to a global pandemic.
By raising the actual dead?
God Almighty. Flying planes into buildings is bad enough. Chemical weapons, anthrax, nerve gas, suicide bombers . . . that stuff has collectively been the definition of terrorism to the global consciousness for years, and that’s been more than bad enough. This was so much worse I didn’t know if I could put it into any reasonable perspective. If they were trying to spread Ebola it wouldn’t be this bad because Ebola doesn’t chase and try to bite you. Wh
oever was behind this was one sick son of a bitch. Smart, sure, but sick. This went beyond religious fundamentalism or political extremism. Right at that moment I was sure we were looking at something born out of a mind that was truly and genuinely evil.
I don’t think I clearly understood Church until that moment. If I were in his place, looking into that same future, how would I handle it? How ruthless would I be? How ruthless could I be?
“I think you already answered that question, boyo,” I murmured, thinking about the five men in that room.
Church may act like a Vulcan but he had to be feeling all this stuff, too. If so, then the strain of holding back all of his emotions, all of his humanity, must be terrible. If I were going to work for him, then I’d have to look for signs of that pressure, look for cracks. Not only in me, but in him, too. On the other hand Church could be a monster himself . . . just one on our side. There were guys like that. Hell, after World War II our own government hired a bunch of Nazi scientists. Better the devil you know. More to the point, there was the comment FDR supposedly made about Somoza. Something like, “He’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”
Great. I’m going to work for a monster in order to fight other monsters. So what did that make me?
The bathroom floor seemed to tilt a bit as I headed for the door.
Chapter Thirty
El Mujahid / Near Najaf, Iraq / Five days ago
“THEY’RE COMING,” SAID Abdul, El Mujahid’s lieutenant. “Two British Apache attack helicopters. Four minutes.”
“Excellent,” the Fighter murmured. He took one last look around and then handed a bundle of clothes to Abdul. “There is nothing of value here. Burn them.”
The half-track sat askew in the middle of an intersection of two lonely roads, thirty-six kilometers from Najaf. Smoke still curled up from beneath the chassis. Additional smoke rose from a dozen corpses. There was blood everywhere, muted by sand to the color of dusty roses. Two cars were in flames—an old Ford Falcon and a Chinese Ben Ben—both with registration numbers that would tie them to Jihadist sympathizers. The entire picture was perfect: a battle fought to a tragic victory. A half-track crippled by a roadside bomb; a few British soldiers, outnumbered by insurgents, taking heavy casualties as they bravely fought through an ambush. All of the hostiles dead. Of the seven Brits in the truck, four were dead—badly mangled and burned—and three clung to life.
“Go, go, go,” whispered El Mujahid, and his lieutenant melted away and slipped down into a rat hole hidden by a spring trapdoor covered with coarse dry bushes. In the stillness nothing moved, and the only sound apart from the whup-whup-whup of the helo rotors were the piteous moans of the wounded.
“Allah akbar!” said El Mujahid, and then used his thumb to test the edge of the piece of jagged metal debris he had selected. He laced the tip of the metal against his forehead, right at the hairline; he drew a breath, held it, and then exhaled sharply as he ripped the metal through his skin, tearing down from upper left to lower right, through his eyebrow, across the bridge of his nose, along his cheek all the way to his jawline. Pain exploded in his face and blood surged from the cut. He could feel tears in his eyes and he had to bite down against the white-hot agony of the wound. It was worse—far worse—than he expected and it nearly tore the cry from his throat.
The helicopters were nearly overhead. With a gasp he flung the metal from him and slumped back into the wreckage, deliberately snorting blood out of his nose and mouth, making sure that the droplets touched everything. By the time the first helicopter landed he was perfectly placed, his torn face transformed into a mask of bright blood, his clothing soaked. His heart raced and he could feel blood flow from the wound with each pulse beat.
He closed his eyes and as he heard the first footfalls as the soldiers leaped from the helicopter he raised one gory hand and reached toward them, and now he let out the scream. It was a wet gargling cry, inarticulate and savagely hurt.
“Here!” he heard a voice yell, and then the half-track rocked as men clambered inside. There were hands on him, touching him, probing him, feeling for his pulse.
“This one’s alive. Get the medics!”
Fingers scrabbled around his throat, feeling for the little dogtag chain, pulling it free. “Sergeant Henderson,” a voice said, reading the name. “One hundred third armored.”
“Clear the way, let me get to him,” said a different voice; and then there was a compress against his face as the medics worked to save the lives of the British wounded.
It took every ounce of strength that the Fighter possessed not to smile.
Chapter Thirty-One
Baltimore, Maryland / Tuesday, June 30; 2:51 P.M.
WE WERE IN Courtland’s office, just the two of us. Everything was still not unpacked and I had to sit on a plastic folding chair. We were both drinking bottled spring water. One wall of the office was a big picture window that looked out onto the harbor. The afternoon sunshine made everything look peaceful, but the lie buried within the illusion was appalling. I turned away from the window and looked at Courtland.
“I’d prefer to have given you the complete version of this, but as Mr. Church pointed out, we don’t have the time, so the learning curve will be more of a straight line.” She sat back and crossed her legs. Even in the fatigue pants I could tell she had nice legs. Except for her personality, which so far was somewhere between a cranky alligator and a defensive moray eel, most things about her were nice. I even liked her husky voice and thick British accent. I just didn’t particularly like her.
“Fire away,” I said.
“After 9/11 your government formed Homeland Security and Great Britain created a similar and rather more secret organization, code name of Barrier. You won’t have heard of it. MI5 and MI6 get most of the press, which is as it should be. Barrier was given a lot of power and freedom of action and was therefore able to stop several major threats against my country that would have been, to us, as devastating as the World Trade Center attack was on you. As I was involved in some of those operations I was loaned out to your government when the DMS was formed.”
“Did you help create the DMS?”
“No,” she said, “that was Mr. Church’s doing, but there were some similarities in both structure and agenda between the DMS and Barrier, and the lines of communication, at least where antiterrorism is concerned, are wide open between the White House and Whitehall. As you probably know there are many such task forces around the country, and all of their intel passes in one way or another through DMS hands. Church is wired in everywhere. When your wiretap flagged the name El Mujahid it rang a bell at the DMS and Church ordered an immediate infiltration of the task force. By the time the team was formed we had three agents in place.”
“Really? Then you do have a working field team?”
“Did,” she said as a shadow passed across her face. “But we’ll get to that. First I need to tell you about the cell your task force took down. After the raid our computer specialists were able to salvage several laptops and we’ve been systematically decrypting their coded records. We haven’t learned as much as we’d like but we are making some headway. So far we’ve decoded what amounts to shipping manifests for weapons, medical supplies, research equipment, and even human cargo.”
“You mean agents they’ve smuggled in?”
She shook her head. “No . . . actual human cargo. Like Javad. Brought into this country in temperature-controlled containers like the one you found here.”
“How many others?”
“We’ve only found references to three, including Javad.”
“Shit,” I said.
“The import records indicate that the other walkers were brought into the country less than twenty-four hours before your task force raided the place. The other two must have been shipped out late the previous day; and there’s a high probability they were in those two lorries.”
“That’s why you took all of the files from the task force, isn’t
it? You wanted the surveillance logs for traffic in and out of this place and you want all of it off the record.”
Again she gave me that appraising look, as if her idiot nephew had learned to tie his own shoelaces. “Yes,” she admitted.
“So where did the other containers go?”
It took her a few seconds to decide whether to tell me.
“Look, Major,” I said, “either you level with me on everything or we’re done here. I don’t know why you have a bug up your ass about me, and I frankly don’t care, but you are wasting my time hemming and hawing.” I started to get to my feet but she waved me back down.
“All right, all right,” she snapped, “sit down, dammit.” She opened a folder, removed a sheet of paper and slapped it down on the desk. “This is the log for the night before the raid. Two lorries left the warehouse lot. One eight minutes after midnight, the other at oh-three-thirty. Task force agents were assigned to follow both and report their destinations. One was tracked to a crab-processing plant near Crisfield, Maryland. The other was ‘lost’ in traffic.” She stabbed an entry with a forefinger. “You were tailing the one that got lost in traffic.”
I plucked the paper off the desk, glanced at it, and then tossed it down. “Good God, Major, if this is any indication of the precision of your intel then I’m going to grab my loved ones and make a run for the hills.”
“You’re denying that you were assigned to the tail?”
“No, I was definitely assigned to tail the truck, Major, but I didn’t do that tail. Four blocks into the follow I was pulled and replaced by another officer. My lieutenant called on the task force’s secure channel and had me report back to the surveillance van because there was more cell phone chatter and I was the only guy on shift who understands Farsi. I spent twenty minutes listening to one of the hostiles talk to an Iraqi woman living in Philadelphia. Mostly they talked about blow jobs and how much he wished she’d give him one. Really cutting-edge espionage stuff. You can believe me when I tell you, sister, that when I tail someone I don’t lose them.”
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