Patient Zero

by Maberry, Jonathan

  “Came to you in a flash.” Toys sneered. “Mother Mary, save me.”

  “I . . . if they . . .”

  “Shut up,” Toys said as he fished out his phone. He dialed a number. A voice answered on the third ring.

  “Line?” Toys asked.

  “Clear,” said the American.

  “I’m calling on behalf of our patron. There’s a problem. Listen to me very closely and take all appropriate action. The Princess and the Boxer have gone off the reservation.”

  “What? Why?”

  Toys’s mouth made an ugly shape as he said, “They think they’re still in church.”

  That wasn’t an agreed code word, but Toys was sure the American would grasp the meaning, and he did. “I never trusted those two from the beginning. Jesus H. Christ.”

  “Yes, well, that’s a comfort to all of us, isn’t it?”

  Toys disconnected and stared at Gault. “Listen to me, Sebastian . . . if El Musclehead is going to launch the latest generation of the plague in America then we have to assume that Amirah has taken some precautions.”

  Gault’s eyes came back into focus. “Precautions?”

  “She’s a wacko, I agree, but I can’t believe that she’d want to destroy the entire world. A lot them are true believers, don’t forget.”

  Gault sat up straight. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that she probably has a bloody cure for this thing. Or a treatment. Something that will keep it from wiping out her own people. El Mujahid might already have been inoculated, but that’s beside the point. What we have to do is get our ruddy asses to the Bunker, beat some information out of your girlfriend, and then make sure Gen2000 starts cranking out the cure just in case our American friend doesn’t stop the Fighter in time.”

  “The Bunker . . . yes.” Gault nodded and his jaw lost some its softness, his eyes grew several degrees colder. “Yes, Amirah will have thought it through.”

  Toys cut him off. “Understand me, Sebastian,” he said in an icy voice, “I work for you and I love you like a brother, but you’ve endangered me by letting this thing get out of hand. I warned you about Amirah a hundred times and now she’s stabbed you in the back. If she has a cure then we are going to bloody well get it.” His green eyes glittered. “And then we are going to put a bullet right through that brilliant little brain of hers.”

  Gault closed his eyes for a moment as if to block out that image, but when he opened them Toys saw that some kind of change had occurred. The eyes that looked out at him from Gault’s puffy and tear-streaked face were vicious, almost feral in their hateful intensity.

  “Yes,” he snarled.

  Chapter Eighty-One

  Crisfield, Maryland / Thursday, July 2; 6:00 P.M.

  THE FORENSICS TENT was set up in one corner of the parking lot. As Dietrich had promised it was an actual circus tent. The silk sides and scalloped dome were painted with brightly colored animals—elephants, zebras, giraffes, and monkeys—and around the base was a life-sized line of capering clowns. Inside, Jerry Spencer was the ringmaster.

  Teams of experts had spent the whole day collecting evidence and transporting it out of the building in protective bags. The tent had several hermetically sealed plastic clean rooms that were marked with the logo of the Centers for Disease Control. Men and women wearing white hazmat suits worked in one of these and they had a production line going with one autopsy after another. A refrigeration truck was backed up to that end of the tent and the bodies of autopsied walkers were double-sealed in body bags and stacked like cordwood inside.

  There were a dozen experts at the meeting along with Jerry, Grace, Dietrich, Rudy, and Hu. Somehow Church had managed to change into a clean suit. I was still in the soiled fatigue pants and T-shirt I’d worn under the Hammer suit. I must have smelled pretty ripe.

  “Let’s start with the bodies,” Jerry said as soon as everyone was seated. He nodded to a tall black woman with golden skin and pale brown eyes.

  Dr. Clarita McWilliams was a professor of forensic pathology at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. “We have a total body count of two hundred seventy-four. That breaks down as follows: eleven terrorist soldiers, five scientists and technicians, two unspecified support staff, five DMS personnel, and two hundred fifty-one of the . . . um . . . ‘walkers.’ ” She briefly looked around the room through her half-moon glasses, then cleared her throat and plowed ahead. “There were ninety-one adult male walkers; one hundred and twenty-two adult female walkers; twenty-one male children under the apparent age of eighteen and seventeen female children of the same approximate age. The ethnic breakdown of the walkers stands at one hundred twenty-four Caucasians, seventy-three black, twenty-eight Asian, and twenty-six Hispanic. If you want a more precise racial breakdown it’ll take some time.”

  “So what does that tell us?” I asked.

  “It’s close enough to a general population cross section,” McWilliams said. “Maybe a little heavy on the male-to-female mix. If there’s a pattern it isn’t yet apparent.”

  “What do we know about where these people were from?” I asked.

  Dietrich held up his hand. “I’ve been working on that using recovered wallets, cell phones, and so on. Most of these people seem to be concentrated in Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. None from anywhere else.”

  “Just like the kids in Delaware,” I said. “Random but all East Coast.”

  “Any IDs with the name Lester Bellmaker?” Grace asked. “Or any variation on Bellmaker? Maybe Belmacher or something like that?”

  Dietrich scanned a sheet of paper on a clipboard. “Nah. Closest we have there is a Jennifer Bellamy. No Lesters.”

  “It’s a dead end,” Church said quietly. “We have to consider that the name is an alias.”

  “Aldin seemed to think it was important to give it to us,” I said. “He used his last breath.”

  “Time will tell,” Church said. “Anything else, Dr. McWilliams?”

  She shook her head. “Medically speaking we haven’t yet found anything that goes outside of what Dr. Hu has already shared regarding these walkers. One item of interest is that less than half of the victims I’ve seen displayed any visible bite marks. Most have injection marks and presumably that’s how the pathogen was introduced.”

  Grace asked, “Of the ones with the bite marks have you determined if any of them were bitten postmortem?”

  “No. There’s no evidence that these walkers preyed on each other. That suggests that they are attracted only to living flesh.” She looked ill as she said it.

  “Like in the movies,” Hu said, but she ignored him.

  I turned to Jerry. “What’s next?”

  “Frank?” he asked, turning to Frank Sessa, a sturdy man of about sixty with a shaved head, wire-framed glasses, and the callused knuckles of a long-time karate practitioner. Frank and I went way back; both in martial arts circles and through chemical analysis work he did for law enforcement.

  Sessa laced his fingers and leaned forward on his forearms. “Your terrorists have some odd choices when it comes to explosives. They used explosive organic peroxide. It’s a colorless liquid with a pretty strong smell. It’s generally stored as a twenty-five-percent solution in dimethyl phthalate to prevent detonation, so whoever rigged the booby traps knew something about temperature control as applied to explosives. This is difficult stuff to work with and way above the level of what I’d expect from a Unabomber wannabe.”

  He gave us a technical rundown on how this stuff is made, handled, and used. It was pretty damned disturbing news. “Now, I understand that these walker-things are also dormant at low temperatures,” Sessa said, “and on the surface there might be a tendency to say, well, the place is already cold so that’s why they chose an explosive that is safest at low temps, but I’d hesitate going there. There are plenty of explosives that are not nearly as temperature-sensitive as this stuff. I don’t know who your bad guys are, but to me it kinda looks like someone
was showing off. It’s too much bomb for the purpose to which it was put, and they used the wrong amounts in at least two places.”

  “What do you mean?” Dietrich asked. I said nothing; I thought I already knew the answer. So did Jerry.

  “Well, the amount they had at the door where they were storing the infected people . . . that was too big or too small depending on how you look at it. If the intent was to blow open the door or kill whoever tried to open it, then it was too much; on the other hand if it was intended to destroy the contents of the room it was way too small. If they’d been using dynamite I’d have dismissed it as some fool who doesn’t understand how explosives work, but then we have the computer room. There was a good amount of the explosive, but it was all at one end of the room. If their intent had been to destroy all of the computers they could have used less of the material but put a portion inside each of the units. Less blast but much more effect in terms of security.” He shook his head. “No, this is a combination of high-tech knowledge, lots of money, and strange choices.”

  Jerry gave me a knowing smile, but I kept my face straight.

  For the next two hours we heard from one expert after another. Ballistics told us what we expected: the terrorists were using standard AK-47s and a variety of bought-on-the-street handguns. The AKs were converted to take M-16 magazines and standard NATO 7.62-millimeter rounds. That’s nothing new; gun collectors have been doing it for years. The fingerprint guys lifted plenty of sets and so far three of the terrorists had popped up in the computers, each with known ties to Al Qaeda or El Mujahid. Of the scientists, none of them were in the computers; but that wasn’t particularly surprising.

  Church’s chief computer wizard, Utada, spoke next. “As Mr. Sessa pointed out we aren’t seeing a total loss with the computers. In fact we got pretty lucky because two mainframes are completely intact, and we’re salvaging stuff from three more.”

  “What have we found so far?” Grace asked.

  Hu answered that. “Tons. If the data is supported by the lab work my guys are doing right now then we might have a name for some or all of the component parasites. That’s going to save us a lot of time in putting together a protocol.”

  I thanked the forensics experts and let them get back to work, though Jerry stayed behind.

  Church said, “We haven’t actually heard from you yet, Detective Spencer. What are your thoughts on this?”

  Jerry smiled and gave me a sly look. “Captain Hotshot here already knows what I’m thinking, but let me give it to those of you who aren’t cops.” It was a nice dig at the feds in the room. I did my best not to smirk. “Point one,” he said, ticking the items off on his fingers, “this place is built to be a rat maze. The only viable entry point was the door Joe’s team used. From an approach point of view nothing else was moderately safe. I believe that these suckers planned it that way. Point two: once Joe and his boys were inside they were offered a single route to follow. Anyone who’s in this business would know that they’d leave a man behind to guard the door. There was only one possible position a shooter would take to defend that position and right behind him there was a hidden door on well-oiled hinges. Absolutely silent when it opened, allowing an ambush man to sneak up and Taser young whatshisname.”

  “Skip Tyler,” I supplied.

  “Yeah. Tyler. They take him out with a liquid Taser, cart him off and dump him in a room, but they leave his weapons where he can easily find them? Why not just cut his throat or feed him directly to the walkers? There’s only one way that makes sense.” He didn’t elaborate on that point quite yet. “Point three: they take out the second guy.” He snapped his fingers at me.

  “Ollie Brown.”

  “Right, they Taser Brown and drag him down to their lab. Now, the bad guys know full well that they’ve been infiltrated. So why the drama? Why capture Joe’s guys instead of killing them? There were only three armed DMS agents left, and between the armed guards in the building and a couple hundred walkers they could easily have simply wiped the team out, or taken them hostage to use as bargaining chips. They didn’t try; they didn’t even try to use Brown as a hostage when Joe broke in. They didn’t try to flee. No, it doesn’t add up. This whole thing should have been a massacre or a standoff . . . and it was neither.”

  “It came pretty bloody close,” muttered Grace.

  “Don’t get me wrong, Major,” Jerry said. “I’m not saying they were interested in the well-being of your teams. It probably would have worked out equally well for these guys if you’d all died in there.”

  “Charming,” Grace said.

  “My point is that this was not a matter of them fighting back. Nothing that I’ve seen supports that. Tell me I’m wrong, Joe.”

  “You know you’re right, Jerry,” I told him. The others around the table were staring at us and there was a mixture of expressions. Church’s face, as usual, told me nothing; but Grace was nodding, putting the pieces together herself. Rudy had one eyebrow raised the way he did when he was looking in at his own thoughts. Dietrich looked a little puzzled and kept looking to Church as if for instructions. Hu looked skeptical.

  “Why would they do that?” Hu asked.

  “Because they wanted us to find what we found,” I said.

  Hu shook his head. “No . . . no way. That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Yes it does,” murmured Church. We all looked at him, but he nodded to me. “You have the floor.”

  “All of this is a setup,” I said. “Jerry’s absolutely right: they could have taken us out and should have. We had a small team and no intelligence at all about the inside of the building. Once we were inside they shut down the refrigeration units and turned up the heat to activate all of the walkers that had been lying dormant before we got there. So, between the booby trap in the big warehouse room, the walkers released into the halls, and the appearance of the guards who suddenly decided to open up with their AKs, we were herded into the lab. They set explosives in the computer room, but not enough to destroy all of their research, and none of the armed guards in the hall tried to use a keycard to enter the lab. Jerry checked . . . their keycards had the right code, but they didn’t use them. We were played.”

  “To what end?” Rudy asked. “I mean, I can see the shape of it when you lay it out like that, but what’s the point? You’ve managed to kill all of the walkers, all of their scientists and personnel are dead, we have the computers, and we have whatever else can be salvaged from the lab. The way you’re describing it the terrorists have handed us the solution to the threat.”

  When I didn’t answer, he added, “Why would they do something like that?”

  Chapter Eighty-Two

  El Mujahid / Pier 12 / Brooklyn, New York

  THE FREIGHTER ALBERT Schweitzer docked at Pier 12 in the shadow of the Queen Elizabeth 2 and was met by a parking lot filled with ambulances, paratransit vehicles, limousines, and cabs. The ambulatory wounded were escorted down the boarding ramp by nurses and orderlies; the more serious cases wheeled in chairs or on gurneys. Sonny Bertucci walked down under his own steam, though he used a cane and looked frail. He was met by two agents from Global Security. They led him to a white van with the name of a private ambulance company stenciled on the doors. The agents got into the back with Bertucci and the driver shut the door, climbed into the cab, and drove out of the parking lot and within half an hour they were on the New Jersey Turnpike heading south.

  At the Thomas Edison Rest Stop the van pulled around behind a row of parked semis and stopped next to a black Ford Explorer with Pennsylvania plates. Both drivers got out and shook hands and together they walked around to the back of the white van. The van driver knocked three times, waited, and knocked once more before opening the door.

  “Your ride is—”

  That was as far as he got. The driver of the Explorer pressed a silenced .22 against the back of his head and fired two quick shots. The van driver collapsed just as the doors opened; Sonny Bertucci reached out and caught
him and together he and the Explorer’s driver hauled the corpse into the van, laying it next to the two bodies of the Global Security agents. Both of them had their throats cut, and the big man held the hook of his cane in his left hand. The hook ended in a six-inch wickedly sharp stiletto that had fit into the shaft of the cane, the seam hidden by a decorative metal band.

  Bertucci tossed the weapon into the back and together he and the driver of the Explorer closed and locked the van’s doors. When they were done they embraced warmly, slapping each other on the back.

  “It is so good to see you!” beamed the driver.

  El Mujahid grinned despite the pain of his healing wounds. “Ahmed, it is very good to see a friend in this place.” He paused and jerked his chin toward the van. “Gault knows?”

  “So it seems,” said Ahmed. “I received a call about fifteen minutes ago saying that you were to be terminated. I assume one of them,” the driver said, jerking his head toward the closed van, “got a similar call.”

  “Yes. It came in while we were driving. I couldn’t hear what was said but I could tell from his eyes that he’d gotten a kill order. Thank you for taking care of things.”

  “My pleasure. Come, let us go . . . we cannot risk being here if Gault has other agents coming.”

  Once they were both seated inside the Explorer and pulling back into the flow of traffic, Ahmed asked, “What is the news from home? How is my sister?”

  El Mujahid smiled. “Amirah sends her love.”

  “I miss her.”

  The Fighter patted the man on the shoulder. “Soon we will all be together, in this world or in paradise.”

  “Praise Allah,” said Ahmed as he accelerated to seventy and headed south.

  Chapter Eighty-Three

  Sebastian Gault / Over Afghani Airspace / Thursday, July 2

  “IT’S A REAL honor to have Mr. Gault make this visit,” said Nan Yadreen, the Red Cross liaison for Afghanistan. “And a bit of a surprise. If we’d had more notice we would have prepared a better reception.”