He didn’t have to explain that if there was a containment breach and my team was inside then we’d be flash-fried along with the hostiles. And even though that’s what I would order myself it didn’t make me feel any better about it.
“What’s going on with the prisoner? I thought you’d be interrogating him by now.”
“That would be nice,” he agreed, “but he has two bullets in his chest cavity. He’s in surgery. They’ll page me the moment he’s stabilized enough to answer questions.”
“And what if the control disease kicks in before then?”
“Then there will be that much more pressure on you to bring me another prisoner when you hit the crab plant.”
“Swell.” I finished my coffee. “Okay, take me to your mad scientists.”
Chapter Forty-Six
The DMS Warehouse, Baltimore / Tuesday, June 30; 9:20 P.M.
AS HE LED me to the labs, Church said. “Dr. Sanchez has agreed, conditionally, to help us through the current crisis.”
“What are his conditions?”
“He’ll be here as long as you are. Apparently he thinks you need a minder.” He appeared amused. “Major Courtland is bringing him up to speed on everything.”
“Rudy’s not a fighter.”
“We all serve according to our nature, Captain. Besides, your friend may be tougher than you know.”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t tough. I just don’t want to see you put a gun in his hand.”
“Noted.”
We entered a huge loading dock that had been newly enclosed by cinderblock, and the smell of limestone and concrete hung thick in the damp air. There was a row of oversized trailer homes of the kind used as temporary offices on construction sites. As we passed each, Church threw out a single identifying word. Cryptography. Surveillance. Operations. Computers.
We passed one whose door was marked with a TWELVE in black block letters, and Church made no comment about this one. There were four armed guards outside, two facing out, two facing the unit’s only door, and a tripod-mounted .50 stood behind a half-circle of sandbags, its wicked black mouth pointing at the trailer door. I slowed for a moment, frowning, feeling the tension that was screaming in the air, and I felt a chill like an icy hand close around the back of my neck.
“Damn,” I breathed. “You have more of them in there?”
“Among other things, yes,” he said softly. “It’s also our surgical suite, and that’s where our prisoner is. But to answer your question, we have a total of six.”
“Like Javad?”
Church’s face seemed to harden as he said, “The six walkers were all from St. Michael’s. One doctor, three civilians, two DMS agents.”
“My… God!”
“This evening I’m having three of them sent to our Brooklyn facility for study. The others will remain here.”
“For study? But… you’re talking about your own people.”
“They’re dead, Captain.”
“Church, I—”
“They’re dead.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
Hotel Ishtar, Baghdad / June 30
“WHO WAS ON the phone?” Gault asked as he came out of the bathroom, a plush crimson robe cinched around him. “Was it Amirah?”
Toys handed him a cup of coffee on a china saucer. “No, it was the Yank again.”
“What did he want? No—let me guess. The Americans finally raided the crab plant? Bloody well time, too—”
“No,” said Toys. “It seems they’ve raided the other facility. The one in Delaware. The meatpacking plant.” He overpronounced the word “meatpacking,” enjoying the implications of each syllable.
Gault gave a bemused grunt and sipped his coffee. “That’s unfortunate.” He sat and chewed his lip for a few seconds. “What about the other plant? They were supposed to locate and infiltrate that first.”
Toys sniffed. “Leave it to the U.S. government to always do the right thing at the wrong time. What’s that phrase you like so much?”
“‘Bass ackwards.’”
Toys giggled. He loved to make Gault say it.
Gault finished his coffee and held his cup out for more. Toys refilled it and they sat down; Gault in the overstuffed chair by the French windows, Toys perched on the edge of the couch with his saucer on his knees. An iPod in a Bose speaker dock played Andy Williams singing Steve Allen, with Alvy West on alto sax. Meet Me Where They Play the Blues. Toys had been converting all of Gault’s vast collection of historic big-band music to the iPod. Gault wondered where he found the time.
When the song ended, Toys said, “This alteration in the timetable… is that going to change things? With El Musclehead, I mean.”
“I’ve been working that through in my head. The timing is tricky. It really would have been better if they hit the crab plant first, and I can’t understand why they didn’t.”
“Could they have decrypted the files from the warehouse? You said it was only a matter of time.”
“A matter of very precise time. I paid good money to make sure that those files would not be cracked this quickly. The flashdrive was deliberately and very precisely damaged and the programs corrupted just enough to have given us at least forty hours more, even if they used the best equipment.” He shook his head in frustration. “Dr. Renson and that other computer geek assured me that no technology exists to do it faster.”
“What about MindReader?”
Gault waved that away. “MindReader’s a myth. It’s Internet folklore cooked up in some hacker’s fantasies. They’ve been mythologizing about it since the nineties.”
Toys was insistent. “What if it’s real?”
Gault shrugged. “If it’s real and the DMS has it, then, yes, they could scramble the timetable. But so what? At this point nothing they do can stop the program.”
“You’re the boss,” Toys said in a wounded tone of voice that he knew needled Gault. “But it doesn’t answer the question of what to do about the crab plant… and whether this will spoil the whole operation.”
“No,” Gault said after some consideration, “no, it won’t spoil the plan. Too many things are in motion now. But as far as the plant goes, it won’t be a total disaster.”
Toys studied his face and began to grin. “You’re making that face. I know that face, What have you got cooking over there?”
Gault gave him an enigmatic smile. “Expect another call from the Yank sometime soon.”
“Hm,” purred Toys, “I’ll be waiting with bated breath.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
The DMS Warehouse, Baltimore / Tuesday, June 30; 9:24 P.M.
THE INTERIOR OF the lab was somewhere between a scientist’s wet dream and a god-awful mess, with heaps of books and spilled stacks of computer printouts, coffee cups everywhere and tables laden with every manner of diagnostic and forensics equipment. Gas chromatographs, portable DNA sequencers, and a lot of stuff I’d never seen before even at the State Crime Lab. Sci-fi stuff. Machines pinged and beeped and blipped and a dozen technicians in white lab coats pushed buttons and made notes on clipboards and exchanged grim looks. In the middle of all of this was one desk, bigger than all the others, that was a shrine to pop culture geekiness, and though I pride myself on seldom showing surprise I went a little slack-jawed at what I saw. In an astonishing display of either the blackest humor on record or spectacular bad taste, there were horror magazines, bobble-heads of zombies from half a dozen movies, at least fifty zombie novels with dog-eared pages, and the entire collection of resin action figures of Marvel superheroes as decaying zombies. Seated like a happy school kid in the middle of this oasis of poor taste was a sloppy thirty-something Chinese guy with a bad haircut and a Hawaiian shirt under his lab coat. Church stood beside the desk—but not too close—and his immaculate suit and air of command seemed like a statement by comparison.
“Captain,” Church said, “let me introduce Doctor Hu.”
I stared. “Doctor Who? Are you shitting me? This some
kind of goofy code name or something?”
“H-U,” Church said, spelling it.
“Oh.”
Without rising Hu offered his hand and I shook it. I expected something slack and moist but he broke the stereotype and gave me a hard, dry shake. What he said, though, was, “You’re the hotshot zombie killer. Man, I just saw the footage from Delaware. Wow! Freaking awesome! You can kick zombie ass”
He smelled like old baked bread, which is not as good as it sounds. “I thought you guys called them walkers.”
“Yeah, sometimes.” He shrugged. “It’s more PC, I guess. Doesn’t stress the troops.”
I gave his toys a significant nod. “And you wouldn’t want to appear insensitive.”
Hu grinned. “Denial is stupid. We’re fighting the living dead. Would you prefer we call them ‘undead citizens’? I mean, I originally wanted to call them ALFs.”
I looked from him to Church. “Alien lifeless forms,” Church said with a wooden face.
“Get it?” Hu said, “Because they’re illegal aliens.”
I said, “How do people not shoot you?”
He spread his hands. “I’m useful.”
And I swear to God I saw Church’s mouth silently form the words “Only just.” Aloud he said, “Dr. Hu enjoys his jokes more than does his audience.”
“You said as much about me the first time we met.”
“Mm.” Church turned to the scientist. “Please answer any questions Captain Ledger has.”
“What’s his clearance level?”
Church was looking at me as he said, “Open door. He’s in the family now.” With that he walked over to a nearby workstation, pulled out the chair, sat, crossed his legs, and appeared to totally tune us out.
Hu looked me up and down for a moment, nodding to himself, then he beamed a great smile. “You have any background in science?”
“Forensics on the job,” I said, “a few related night courses, and a subscription to Popular Science.”
“I’ll use smallish words,” he said, trying not to sound as condescending as he was. “We’re dealing with a weaponized disease of immense complexity. This didn’t evolve, this isn’t Mother Nature getting cranky and throwing out a mutation. This isn’t even a disease pathogen that could have evolved. We’re into the bizarro zone here. Somebody brewed this up in a lab, and whoever made this is smart.”
“Joe Obvious speaks,” I said.
“No,” he said, “I mean scary smart. Whoever did this should have a shelf full of Nobel Prizes and a whole alphabet soup behind his name. I don’t have the stuff to make this and Mr. Church buys me lots of nice toys. This would take a major research facility, electron mikes, clean rooms, and a lot of shit you never heard of maybe. Maybe stuff no one’s ever heard of. This is radical technology, Captain.”
“Call me Joe.”
“Joe?” He snapped his fingers. “Hey… your name’s Joe Ledger.”
“Yeah, I thought we’d pretty well established that.”
“You into comic books. Y’know… Dr. Spectrum?” He had an expectant look on his face. “Dr. Spectrum, the superhero from Marvel Comics? His secret identity is ‘Joe Ledger.’ That’s pretty cool, don’t you think?”
“All things considered,” I said, “no, not very much.”
“Doctor…” Church said with a note of soft warning in his voice.
“Okay, okay, whatever. We’re talking about the disease,” he said, and for a moment I saw the scientist behind the geek façade. “Look, science is only occasionally cool and a soul-crushing bore the other ninety-nine percent of the time. Aside from the fact that the empirical process requires endless repetition on each and every freaking step, there’s also the reality of state and federal regulations on what we can and cannot do. A lot of research opportunities are limited and some are blocked. Biological weapons, that sort of thing.”
“Even with the military?”
“Yes.”
“Even supersecret military?” I said, half smiling.
He hesitated. “Well, okay, that starts getting to be a bit more fun, but even then you can’t publish half the time, which means you don’t get prizes and you don’t write bestsellers.”
“No groupies?”
“You joke, but there are women attracted to brains. We don’t all die virgins.”
“Okay. And this relates to zombies how?”
“I think we have ourselves a genuine mad scientist. A supervillain.” He seemed really happy about the idea. I kind of wanted to punch him.
I glanced at Church, who raised his eyebrows in a “you’re the one who wanted to talk to him” kind of look.
Hu said, “I’m serious. We have someone with deep intellect and vast resources. I mean that: vast. Bear in mind that lots of terrorists come from oil-producing nations. It would take that kind of money for our Dr. Evil to do this sort of thing.”
“Got it. So has your supervillain actually managed to raise the dead?”
“No, look… these walkers are not actually dead… but they’re not alive, either.”
“I thought those were pretty much the only two choices.”
“Times change. You know that movie, Night of the Living Dead? Well, I think ‘living dead’ is a pretty good name for what we got here.” He took a Slinky off his desk and let it flow back and forth between his palms. “Here’s the thing, the body is designed by evolution to have natural redundancies, without which we’d never survive injury or illness. For example, you only really need about ten percent function of the liver, twenty percent function of one kidney, part of one lung. You can live with both arms and legs removed. There are millions of pages of research and case evaluation of patients who have continued to live well past the point where their bodies should have shut down. In some cases we can discover why, in some cases we’re still in the dark. With me so far?”
“Sure.”
“Now look at the walkers. If they were truly and completely dead then we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I’d still be in Brooklyn and you’d be doing whatever you were doing before Mr. Church shanghaied you. Why? Because the dead are dead. They have zero brain function, they don’t get up and chase people.”
“Javad Mustapha was dead,” I pointed out. “I killed him. Twice.”
Hu shook his head. “No, you killed him once, and that was during your second encounter with him. Mind you, when you shot him during that raid you gave him what should have been mortal wounds, and he would have died had it not been for the presence of this pathogen; but this little bastard of a disease did not allow Javad to die. You see, this disease shuts down any part of the body that is not directly related to the purpose of its existence.”
“Which is?”
“To spread the disease. These things are designed to be vectors. Very aggressive vectors. The disease simply shut off the areas damaged by your bullets. Don’t look at me like that; I know how weird this sounds, but someone cooked up something that nearly kills its victims but at the same time prevents them from dying as we previously understood death. Plus, they added a little of this and a little of that so that the host body—the walker—aggressively spreads the pathogen. It’s marvelous but it’s bizarre, because the disease is constantly trying to kill the host while working like a bastard to keep parts of it alive.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Sure it does, but not in the way you think; and to a degree that does fit with nature… sort of. When you have an infection the fever you get is the immune system’s attempt to burn it out of the bloodstream. Sometimes the fever does more harm than the disease. Psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis… they’re a couple of examples of the immune system doing harm because it’s trying to fix the wrong problem, or trying too hard to fix a minor problem. In nature there are plenty of examples,” he said, “but what we have here is someone who has taken that concept into a totally new direction. We have a fatal disease, several parasites, gene therapy, plus some other shit we haven’t sorted ou
t yet, all present in a molecular cluster unlike anything on record. If these guys weren’t trying to destroy America they could make billions off the patents alone.”
“Does this have anything to do with fatal familial insomnia?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Bonus points for even knowing that name. The answer to that is… yes and no. That’s the prion disease they used as a starter kit, but they’ve tricked it out with the other stuff. Even now it has some of the characteristics of a typical TSE.”
“‘TSE’?”
“Prions are neurodegenerative diseases called ‘transmissible spongiform encephalopathies,’ or TSEs,” he explained. “We still know very little about prion transmission and their pathogenesis. We do know that prions are proteins that have become folded and in that form act differently from normal proteins. These are strange little bastards… they have no DNA and yet they’re capable of self-replication. Usually sporadic cases strike about one person per million, and at the moment these account for, say, about eighty-five percent of all TSE cases. Then you have familial cases, which account for ten percent of TSEs, and which are passed down through bloodlines in ways not yet understood, since inherited traits are genetic and, like I said, prions have no DNA. The remaining five percent are iatrogenic cases, which result from the accidental transmission of the causative agent via contaminated surgical equipment, or sometimes you see it occurring as a result of cornea or dura mater transplants, or in the administration of human-derived pituitary growth hormones. Still with me?”
“Clinging on by my fingernails. How come these prions are making monsters instead of just killing people?”
“It’s a design requirement of this new disease cluster. Prions produce a lethal decline of cognitive and motor function, and that allows the parasite-driven aggression to cruise past conscious control. Somebody took the prion and attached it to these parasites. Don’t even ask how because we don’t know yet. It’ll be a new process, something they invented. They essentially turned a TSE into a fast-acting serum transfer pathogen, but with all sorts of extras, most notably aggression. The victim’s aggression is amped up in such a way as to closely imitate the rage response some PCP and meth addicts have on the downside of a strong high. Ever see the movie 28 Days Later? No? You should. The sequel rocks, too. Anyway, that movie dealt with a virus that stimulated the rage centers in the brain to the point that it was so dominant that all other brain functions were blocked out. The victims existed in total, unending, and ultimately unthinking rage. Very close to what we have here.”
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