Patient Zero

by Maberry, Jonathan

  Nobody moved a muscle.

  “That’s settled then. Stand at ease.” I gave them a quick rundown of my military and law enforcement career, and then told them about my martial arts background. I wrapped it up by saying, “I don’t do martial arts for trophies or for fun. I’m a fighter, and I train to win any fight I’m in. I don’t believe in rules and I don’t believe in fair fights. You want a fair fight, join a boxing club. I also don’t believe in dying for my country. I have a kind of General Patton take on that: I think the other guy should die for his. Any of you have problems with that?”

  “Hooah,” murmured Sergeant Rock, which was more or less Ranger slang for “fucking-A.”

  “We may actually be doing a field op as early as tomorrow. We don’t have time for male bonding and long nights around a campfire telling tales and listening to a harmonica. They brought us on board to be field ops. First-liners and shooters. We’re going to try a quiet infiltration, but if we get a kill order then scared or not we’re going to put hair on the walls. When we lock and load, gentlemen, then those living dead motherfuckers had better start being scared of us because, by God, sooner or later we are going to wipe them out. Not hurt ’em, not slow ’em down . . . we are going to kill them all. End of speech.”

  I shifted to stand in front of Sergeant Rock. His dark brown skin was crisscrossed with scars, old and new. “Name and rank.”

  “First Sergeant Bradley Sims, U.S. Army Rangers, sir.”

  Sir. That would take some getting used to. “Okay, Top, why are you here?”

  “To serve my country, sir.” He had that noncom knack of looking straight through an officer without actually making real eye contact.

  “Don’t kiss my ass. Why are you here?”

  Now he looked at me, right into me, and there were all kinds of fires burning in his dark brown eyes. “Few years ago I stepped back from active duty to take a training post at Camp Merrill. While I was there my son Henry was killed in Iraq on the third day of the war. Six days before his nineteenth birthday.” He paused. “My daughter Monique lost both her legs in Baghdad last Christmas when a mine blew up under her Bradley. I got no more kids to throw at this thing. I need to tear off a piece of this myself.”

  “For revenge?”

  “I got a nephew in junior year of high school. He wants to join the army. His choice if he enlists or not, but maybe I can do something about the number of threats he might have to face.”

  I nodded and stepped to the next man. Scarface. “Name and rank.”

  “Second Lieutenant Oliver Brown, Army, sir.”

  “Duty?”

  “Two tours in Iraq, one in Afghanistan.”

  “Action?”

  “I was at Debecka Pass.”

  That was one of the most significant battles of the second Iraq War. I’d heard a general on CNN call it a “hero maker,” and yet the mainstream news barely mentioned it. “Special Forces?”

  He nodded. He did it the right way, just an acknowledgment without puffing up with pride. I liked that. “That where you picked up the scar?”

  “No, sir, my daddy gave me that when I was sixteen.” That was the only time he didn’t meet my eyes.

  I moved on. Joker. “Read it out,” I said.

  “CPO Samuel Tyler. U.S. Navy. Friends call me Skip, sir.”

  “Why?”

  He blinked. “Nickname from when I was a kid, sir.”

  “Let me guess. Your dad was a captain and they called you ‘Little Skipper.’ ”

  He flushed bright red. Hole in one.

  “SEALS?”

  “No, sir. I washed out during Hell Week.”

  “Why?”

  “They said I was too tall and heavy to be a SEAL.”

  “You are.” Then I threw him a bone. “But I don’t think we’re going to be doing much long-distance swimming. I need sonsabitches that can hit hard, hit fast, and hit last. Can you do that?”

  “You damn right,” he said, and then added, “Sir.”

  I looked at the last guy. Jolly Green Giant. He towered several inches over me and had to go two-sixty, all chest and shoulders, tiny waist. Yet for all the mass he looked quick rather than bulky. Not like Apeman. One side of his face was still red and swollen from where I’d hit him.

  “Give it to me.”

  “Bunny Rabbit, Force Recon, sir.”

  I shot him a look. “You think you’re fucking funny?”

  “No, sir. My last name is Rabbit. Everyone calls me Bunny.”

  He paused.

  “It gets worse, sir. My first name’s Harvey.”

  The other guys tried to hold it together, I have to give them that—but they all cracked up.

  “Son,” said Top Sims, “did your parents hate you?”

  “Yeah, Top, I think they did.”

  And then I lost it, too.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Sebastian Gault / The Hotel Ishtar, Baghdad / Four days ago

  SO MANY PARTS of Gault’s plan were in motion now, and it was all going beautifully. Gault and Toys, together and separately, had been on-site to oversee the most critical phases, and it had been like taking a stroll in a summer garden. No one they knew could move around the Middle East with the freedom Gault enjoyed; certainly no one in the military. Even ambassadors had five times the restrictions that were imposed on him. He, however, was unique. Sebastian Gault was the single biggest contributor—in terms of financial aid and materials—to the Red Cross, the World Health Organization, and half a dozen other humanitarian organizations. He had poured tens of millions into each organization, and he could say, with no fear of contradiction or qualification, that he had helped to ease more suffering and save more lives than any other single person in this hemisphere. Without benefit of a government behind him, with no armies, no overt political agendas, Gault, through Gen2000 and his other companies, had helped eradicate eighteen disease pathogens, including a new form of river blindness, a mutated strain of cholera, and two separate strains of TB. His comment at the World Health Summit in Oslo had first been a beauty of a sound byte and had later more or less become the credo of independent health organizations worldwide: “Humanity comes first. Always. Politics and religion, valuable as they are, are always of second importance. If we do not work together to preserve life, to treasure it and keep it safe, then nothing we fight for is worth having.”

  In truth, the wisest statement Gault had ever heard—and he heard it from his own father—was that “everyone has a price.” Good ol’ dad had added two bits of his personal wisdom as codicils to that. The first was: “If someone tells you that they can’t be bought it’s a matter of you having not offered the right amount.” And the second was, “If you can’t find their price, then find their vice . . . and own that.”

  Sebastian Gault loved his father. Damn shame the man had smoked like a furnace, otherwise he might be here to share in the billions rather than lying dead in a Bishops Gate cemetery. Cancer had taken him in less than sixteen months. Gault had been eighteen the day before the funeral, and had stepped right in as owner-manager of the chain. He sold it immediately, finished college, and invested every dime in pharmaceutical industry stock, taking some risks, acting as his own broker so that he saved his fees for reinvestment, buying smart, and constantly looking toward the horizon for the next trend. Unlike his peers he never bothered looking for the Golden Fleece pharma stock—the elusive wonder drug that will actually cure something. Instead he focused on new treatment areas for diseases that might never be cured. It wasn’t until well after he made his first billion that he even paid attention to cures; and even then it was cures for diseases that nobody cared about, things that affected tribes in third-world shit holes. If it hadn’t been for Internet news he might never have even gone in that direction, but then he had a revelation. A major one. Cure something in the third world, take a visible financial loss on the effort to do so, and then let the Internet news junkies turn you into a saint.

  He tried it, a
nd it worked. It was easier than he expected. Most of the third world diseases were easy to cure; they exist largely because no major pharmaceutical company gives a tinker’s damn about starving people in some African nation whose name changes every other week. When Gault’s first company, PharmaSolutions, found a cure for swamp blight, a rare disease in Somalia, he borrowed money to mass-produce and distribute the drug through the World Health Organization. The WHO—the most well-intentioned and earnest people in the world, but easily duped because of their desperate need for support—told everyone in the world press about how this fledging company nearly bankrupted itself to cure a tragic disease. The story hit the Internet on a Tuesday morning; by Wednesday evening it was on CNN and by Thursday midday it was picked up by wire services everywhere. By close of business on Friday PharmaSolutions stock had doubled; by the close of business the following week the stock price had gone vertical. That was the first time Gault, then twenty-two years old, made it onto the cover of Newsweek.

  By the time Gault was twenty-six he was a billionaire several times over. He openly pumped millions into research and scored one cure after another. When he launched Gen2000 he stepped into the global pharmaceutical arena for real, but by then he owned billions in stock in other pharma companies. The fact that at least half of the diseases for which he ultimately found a cure were pathogens cooked up in his lab never made it into the press. It wasn’t even a rumor in the wind. Enough money saw to that; and so far his father—bless his soul—had been right. Everyone had a price or a vice.

  Toys was reading the London Times. “Mmm,” he murmured, “there’s speculation—again—about your being given a knighthood; and another rumor about a Nobel Prize.” He folded down the paper and looked at Gault. “Which would you prefer?”

  Gault shrugged, not terribly interested. The papers dredged that much up every few weeks. “The Nobel win would drive up the stock prices.”

  “Sure, but the knighthood would get you laid a lot more often.”

  “I get laid quite enough, thank you.”

  Toys sniffed. “I’ve seen some of the cows you bring home.”

  Gault sipped his drink. “So how would a knighthood change that?”

  “Well,” Toys drawled, “ ‘Sir Sebastian’ would at very least get some well-bred ass. As it is now you seem to rate your playmates by cup size.”

  “Better than the half-starved creatures you find so thrilling.”

  “You can never be too thin or too rich,” Toys said, quoting sagely.

  They were interrupted by the chirp of Toys’s cell phone. Toys looked at it and handed it over without answering. “The Yank.”

  Gault flipped it open and heard the American’s familiar Texas drawl. “Line?”

  “Clear. Good to hear from you.” As usual Toys bent close to listen in.

  “Yeah, well, the shit’s hit the fan round here and we’ve all been scrambling. I’ve been in continuous meetings for the last couple of days. There’s the matter of a tape from Afghanistan. An attack on a village. You follow me?”

  “Of course.”

  “You should warn me about shit like that, dammit. That’s set a lot of brushfires and Big G has been trying to take over the whole show. There’s been a lot of pressure to crowd the new team out.”

  “The DMS?”

  He could almost hear the American flinch at the use of an uncoded word. “Yeah. The President wants them in, and everyone else wants them out, and I mean out: closed down.”

  “Any chance of that?”

  “None, far as I can see. For whatever reason the President seems to be defending this group against all comers. I actually witnessed him read the riot act to the National Security advisor in front of a couple of generals. It’s getting ugly in D.C.

  “I’m working on planting one of my guys in this group.”

  “How sure are you that you can?”

  The American paused. “Pretty sure.”

  Toys raised his eyebrows and mimed applause. Gault said, “Keep me posted.”

  He closed the phone and set it aside. Toys walked back to his chair and settled into it and the two of them considered the implications of the call.

  Toys said, “Perhaps I’ve been underestimating that bloke.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Baltimore, Maryland / Tuesday, June 30; 3:36 P.M.

  “OKAY,” I SAID, “so we danced a bit earlier. Is anyone too damaged to train? More to the point, is anyone too banged up to go into combat today or tomorrow if it comes to it?”

  “Well . . . my nuts still hurt,” Ollie said, then added, “sir. But I can pull a trigger.”

  “I’m good,” Bunny said. He tossed the ice pack onto the floor beside the mats.

  Skip winced. “Nuts for me, too, sir. I think they’re up in my chest cavity somewhere.”

  “They’ll drop when you hit puberty,” Bunny said under his breath. He looked at me. “Sir.”

  “Skip the ‘sir’ shit unless we’re not alone. It’s already getting old.”

  “I can fight,” Skip said.

  I nodded to First Sergeant Sims. “What about you, Top? Any damage?”

  “Just to my pride. Never been blindsided before.”

  “Okay.” I nodded. “Church wants Echo Team to be operationally ready to carry out an urban infiltration sometime in the next day or two. The last two combat teams were KIA by these walkers. I haven’t seen the tapes yet, but they tell me those guys were at full complement and fully trained, but because of the unknown nature of the enemy at the time they became confused, and that caused hesitation, which proved disastrous. The five of us are supposed to be the new bulldogs in the junkyard. Sounds great, sounds very heroic—but on a practical level I’ve never led a team before.”

  “As pep talks go, coach,” Bunny said, “this one kinda blows.”

  I ignored him. “But what I have done is train fighters. That I know I can do. So, because I’m the big dog I get to teach you four to fight the Joe Ledger way.”

  So far the Joe Ledger way had involved them getting their asses handed to them, so they weren’t all that eager to rush in. Not a “rah team” moment.

  “How exactly are we supposed to kill these walker things?” Skip asked. “They, er, being dead and all.”

  “Try not to get bitten, son,” Bunny said. “That’s a start.”

  “In the absence of further info from the medical team we’ll proceed on the assumption that the spine and/or brain stem is the key: damage that and you pull the plug on these things. I kicked the living shit out of the first one—Javad—and I might as well have been shaking his hand; but then I broke his neck and he went right down. Seems reasonable that there’s activity in the brain stem area, so for us the new sweet spot is the spine.”

  “Let me ask something,” Skip said. “The way you dropped Colonel Hanley . . . don’t you think that was a little harsh?”

  “Church said something that had me scared and pissed off.” I told them about Rudy sitting there with a gun to his head.

  “She-e-e-it,” Top said, stretching it out to about six syllables.

  “That’s not right,” Skip said.

  “Maybe not,” I admitted, “but it put me in a zero-bullshit frame of mind. I don’t play well with others when they get between me and what I want.”

  “Yeah,” said Bunny, “I feel you.”

  “Even so,” Skip said, “it reduced our operational efficiency by one man.”

  Top answered that before I could. “No it didn’t. Hanley was a loudmouth and a showboat. He got mad and focused his anger on the cap’n as if he was the problem at hand. A man thinking with his heart ’stead of his head has stepped out of training. He’d get us all killed.”

  “Yeah,” Bunny agreed, “the mission always comes first. Don’t they teach you that in the navy?”

  Skip shot him the finger, but he was grinning.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  The DMS Warehouse, Baltimore / 3:44 P.M.

  THE FOUR
OF them went to change out of civvies into the nondescript black BDUs that one of Church’s people supplied—correct sizes, too, even for Bunny. I was about to head off to the bathroom to swap out of my clothes when I saw Rudy standing by the row of chairs, an armed guard by his side. I walked over to Rudy and we shook hands, then gave each other a tight hug. I looked at the guard. “Step off.”

  He moved exactly six feet away and stared a hole through the middle distance.

  I punched Rudy lightly on the shoulder. “You okay, man?”

  “Little scared, Joe, but okay.” He glanced covertly at the guard and lowered his voice. “I’ve spent the last few minutes talking to your Mr. Church. He’s . . .” He fished for an adjective that probably didn’t exist.

  “Yeah, he is.”

  “So, you’re Captain Ledger now. Impressive.”

  “Ridiculous, too.”

  He lowered his voice another notch. “Church took me on a quick tour. This is not some fly-by-night operation. This is millions of taxpayer dollars here.”

  “Mm. I still don’t know anything about how it runs. I’ve only seen two commanding officers—Church and this woman, Major Grace Courtland. Have you met her?”

  Rudy brightened. “Oh yes. She’s very interesting.”

  “Is that the shrink talking or the wolf in shrink’s clothing?”

  “A little of both. If I was crass I’d make a joke about wanting to get her on my couch.”

  “But of course you’re not crass.”

  “Of course not.” He looked around the room. “How do you feel about all this?”

  “Borderline freaked. You?”