“You think that’s what this is all about?”
“Isn’t it? You called me in here, you make me wait here for an hour before you come in, and then you sit there giving me the look. What else could it be about? Or… are you going to give me shit about what happened during the firefight?” I said nothing, so he made a face. “Shit. Look… sir… this zombie stuff may not bother you but it’s scaring the living shit out of me. We were losing in there and I started thinking about what was going to happen. I could see myself being bitten. After seeing those kids yesterday I can’t get it out of my head. So, yeah, I get a case of the shakes. My hands are still shaking. I saw one of those walkers coming up fast and I took the shot. You moved right as I fired and the bullet passed close. Things were getting pretty hairy in there and I was scared out of my fricking mind. There, I admit it. You happy now?”
No, I thought; I wasn’t. This wasn’t where I expected this conversation to go.
“Tell me again how you got taken.”
“I told you twice. I told Dr. Sanchez four times, and I told Sergeant Dietrich five times. The story isn’t going to change because there isn’t enough of the story to change. I felt a burn on the back of my neck and next thing I know I wake up strapped to a chair and some towelhead asshole is smacking the crap out of me. Then you, Top, and Bunny come in and you know the rest.”
I waited for another few seconds, but Ollie didn’t seem like he was about to start sweating anytime soon. If this was all an act then it was a good one.
What I said was, “Room Twelve.”
A bad actor would have jumped to his feet, knocked his chair over, and started shouting bloody murder right about then. Ollie cocked his head to one side of me and gave me a look like I’d asked him to explain his involvement in the sack of Rome.
“Ah,” he said softly, half smiling. “So that’s it.”
“That’s it.”
He sat back and folded his arms across his chest. “No,” he said, and he didn’t say another word.
Chapter Seventy-Five
Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 12:44 P.M.
SKIP LOOKED JUMPY from what had happened in the plant. He’d been pelted pretty good by the falling debris from Dietrich’s rescue and had bruises and butterfly stitches on his face. While he waited for me to speak his fingers kept lacing and unlacing on the tabletop.
“That was some shit, wasn’t it?” he asked, giving me a nervous laugh.
“It was memorable,” I agreed, and then I gave him another dose of the long silent treatment. His reaction was the exact opposite of Ollie’s; Skip was younger and more high-strung. His hands and eyes never stopped moving. He was so jittery that it was hard to get any read at all on him. So far he’d been the least “warriorlike” of the team, though admittedly during both battles with the walkers he’d been quick and efficient. Grace said that he’d been half-crazed when Alpha Team found him, and maybe that’s what I was seeing here: the aftereffects of fighting solo against those monsters. I remembered my own reactions after I fought Javad. I freaked, I threw up, and I had the shakes.
On the other hand, he—like Ollie—had told us that he’d been taken off guard at the crab plant. I studied his face. There was no way to know if the mole was even on my team, let alone whether it was Ollie Brown or Skip Tyler. But of the two choices I found it hardest to believe it of Skip. Maybe that was his shtick or maybe he was as innocent as he seemed. I was too exhausted to trust my own judgment.
“Our forensics guy figured out how you got taken,” I said after a moment.
He came to point like a bird dog. “What the hell did happen? Secret door?”
“Secret door,” I agreed.
“Son of a bitch.”
I nodded. Skip looked at the tabletop for a long time and when he raised his head his eyes were wet.
“I’m sorry, sir.”
I waited.
“I should have checked.”
“You’re lucky you weren’t killed.”
He looked away for a moment while he took a steadying breath. “Sir… after what I saw in there yesterday and today, after what I did…”
“What you did?”
“I… shot women. And kids. Old ladies. People. I killed a lot of people,” he said in a whisper. His mouth trembled and he put his face in his hands and he began to weep.
I sat back in my chair and watched him. His grief was everywhere. It filled the room.
I wondered what Rudy was thinking about all of this. The DMS had cameras that no one could spot, and Rudy was in the adjoining room watching it all.
Chapter Seventy-Six
Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 1:18 P.M.
AFTER I DISMISSED Skip my phone buzzed. It was Grace.
“Joe!” she said urgently. “It’s Aldin… hurry!”
I ran out of the room and sprinted across the parking lot and into the interrogation van where I saw Aldin lying on the floor. Dr. Hu and two nurses were working frantically over him and the little prisoner was shuddering with convulsions. Everyone was wearing surgical masks and latex gloves. I snatched a set off the table and pulled them on.
“We’re losing him,” Hu hissed desperately.
“What’s happening?” I asked, dropping down beside Grace, who was holding Aldin’s feet.
“It’s the control disease. It’s activated… he’s dying.”
I shot a look at Church. “I thought you said that you gave him the antidote.”
“We did,” Church said. “It’s not working.”
“I think it’s a different disease,” Hu said as he worked. “This one’s much more aggressive. Maybe a different strain, I don’t know.”
I placed my hands on Aldin’s chest to try and keep his body from thrashing, but I was pissed. “Oh, come on, Doc… two different control viruses? That’s bullshit.”
As if to contradict me Aldin went into full-blown convulsions, every muscle in his body seeming to seize and clutch at once. It was so sudden and so powerful that it nearly threw us off him.
“My—my—” Aldin tried to talk past clenched teeth.
“Clear his mouth,” I snapped.
Hu hesitated, looking to Church, who nodded. “The captain gave you an order, Doctor.”
With great reluctance Hu removed the air tube. Aldin coughed and gagged. “My—children?” he gasped. “Are they—safe?”
“Yes,” I said, not knowing if it was true or not. “We got to them in time. They’re safe.”
He closed his eyes and the violence of the tremors seemed to diminish as relief flooded his face. “Thank you. Thank… Allah.”
I put my hand on his shoulder and gave him a little squeeze. He settled back against the floor, the convulsions fading for the moment. “Tell us how to help you?”
Aldin shook his head. “I don’t know. The pills always… worked before.”
Hu looked at me. “We don’t have your pills. We’re using what we found at the first two sites.”
Aldin suddenly went into another fit and when it passed he looked considerably weaker, more dead than alive. He tried to say something but his voice was barely a whisper. I leaned close, strained to hear. “Save—them—”
“Your children are safe,” I assured him, but he shook his head.
“No. Save them. Save… all of them. There—is still—time. Save them!”
“Who? Who do you want us to save?”
“L—L—” He couldn’t form the word. Blood seeped from his nose. He closed his eyes and a tear of watery blood fell from his left eye. When he opened his eyes one pupil was massive, a clear sign of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was fighting to hold on with everything he had, and I felt myself admiring him for the ferocity of his struggle—and, truth be told, for the lengths he had been willing to go to protect his children; but this was a fight he couldn’t win. He knew it, too. We all did. He forced his mouth to shape the word slowly. “L—Lester—”
“Lester?” I said. He nodded. “Lester who?�
�
Aldin tried to answer, failed, shook his head. He turned and spat blood onto the floor.
“Aldin… who is this Lester? Give me a last name? Who is he? What does he do? Tell me something?”
“Find L-Lester—” he whispered, and struggled as the next wave of spasms tore through him. Blood was welling through his skin, erupting from his pores. It was like his whole body was disintegrating. With the last fragment of his will he shaped another word and I bent close to him to catch it. His voice was faint, a fading whisper. “B-Bell—Bellmaker…”
And then he was gone. He sagged down and lay utterly still.
Grace let out the breath she was holding and sat back, pushing a damp strand of hair out of her eyes. She looked at Aldin and then at me. “Lester Bellmaker,” she said. “Have you ever heard of him?”
I reached out and closed Aldin’s eyes. “No,” I said tiredly. “It doesn’t mean a thing to me.”
“Doesn’t ring a ‘bell,’ huh?” Hu said in an offhand tone, and I wheeled on him.
“You’re a half-step away from life on a ventilator, asshole.”
Hu recoiled. “Jeez, sorry. I was just trying to make a joke. It’s not like he was one of the good guys.”
“Shut up,” Church said, ever so softly. Hu flinched as if Church had slapped him and he got up and walked to the far end of the van and threw himself into a chair.
I stood as well and looked down at Aldin. “Did I lie to him, Church? Or did we really rescue his kids?”
Church got to his feet and peeled off his mask and gloves. “We were too late by about three days. The whole village was already gone. Someone let some walkers loose. All of the bodies were laid out for us to find. There was another tape. El Mujahid. It’s on my laptop.”
I punched a nearby cabinet and left a dent in it. “I can’t tell you how much I want to find this guy. You can keep my paycheck, Church; just promise me that when we find El Mujahid I get to be locked in a room with him. Him and me.”
“You’ll have to get in line,” snarled Grace.
“First things first,” advised Church. “We need to identify this Lester Bellmaker. If he’s a link to El Mujahid then we need to jump on it.”
“I’ll run it through MindReader,” offered Grace. “If his name is in anyone’s database we’ll find him.” She hurried out.
Church and I stood there, still looking down at Aldin.
“Did you get anything else out of him?” I asked.
“Bits and pieces. It looks like the crab plant was the hub of this whole operation. People were abducted, infected, and studied. Aldin said that there was no plan that he knew of to release them at the present time. Once a subject was completely transitioned—his word—they were simply stored. He said that his team was studying the varying rates of infection based on age, race, body weight, ethnic background, and so on. The children in Delaware were part of a new phase of the experiment, but he had few details. Sergeant Dietrich tells me that the blast did not destroy all of those computers you found, which means that we should be able to harvest some or all of fourteen months of their findings. Dr. Hu”—and here he cut a brief, hard look at his pet mad scientist—“thinks that it’ll shortcut the search for a cure.”
“Cure? I thought prion diseases couldn’t be cured.”
“Doctor?” Church beckoned to him. “If you please.”
Hu approached me the way a limping caribou approaches a cheetah. “Okay, true, you can’t cure a prion disease. The key is to stop the parasite that triggers the aggression and accelerates the rate of infection. We might be able to get a handle on that based on some things Aldin told us. Stop the parasite and you slow the rate of infection from minutes to months. If we can get ahead of the timetable we might be able to immunize against the parasite. It won’t save anyone who gets infected with the prion disease, of course, but it will give us time to isolate the carriers and they probably won’t become aggressive and try to bite people. They’ll just be sick people.”
“You’re saying you could inoculate ‘everyone’? There are over three hundred million Americans, plus travelers, tourists, illegal aliens… how could you produce and distribute enough antidote?”
“Well,” he said awkwardly, “we couldn’t. We’d have to bring in major pharmaceutical companies to help us. Maybe a lot of them, and it’ll be expensive. We’re talking billions of dollars in research and more than that in practical distribution. To inoculate everyone who lives in or might ever visit the U.S… . that’ll cost trillions.”
“Which might be the point of all of this,” Church said. “A crisis of this magnitude could easily shift the economic focus of the United States away from war and into preventive medicine. We couldn’t continue to fund our big-ticket war efforts overseas if we had to throw those kinds of resources into combating diseases. The Jihadists know that they can’t put a big enough army into the field to oppose the U.S., so it seems that they’ve picked a different kind of battlefield, one where our greater numbers work against us.”
I whistled. It was a horrible plan, but a damn smart one.
“And it’s not like we can choose whether to do it or not,” Hu said. “We have to because we know they still have the disease.”
I nodded. “And just because we know about it doesn’t mean they won’t try to release the virus anyway.”
“I think we should start considering which pharmaceutical companies to approach,” Hu said. “I mean… after you’ve talked to the President.”
“Mr. Church,” I said, “I sure as hell hope you have a few friends in this industry.”
He almost smiled. “One or two.”
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 5:37 P.M.
AFTER I LEFT the interrogation van I went over to the communications center and asked for a secure line to Top Sims who had taken Echo Team back to the warehouse. He gave me a quick rundown and we talked staffing strategies for a few minutes. Then I spent a few hours with Jerry Spencer and gave him my step-by-step account of Echo Team’s actions.
With that out of the way I commandeered a DMS Crown Vic, chased the driver off with a grumpy mumble, and climbed in the back to try and grab a few hours of sleep. I felt more than spent; I felt like I’d been opened up, reamed out, and then beaten with hammers. I was no good to any part of this investigation the way I felt.
As I waited for sleep to take me I tried to organize the things that had happened and weigh them against what we’d learned. Now that the combat part of the day was over the cop part of my mind was in charge. I mentally laid out the evidence and let it speak to me the way a crime scene speaks to Jerry.
I drifted off to sleep, but the cop stood his watch.
I DIDN’T WAKE until after midnight, though the sounds outside were the same—shouts, portable generators, the whup-whup of helicopters, the buzz of indecipherable conversation.
I lay there and realized that I knew what was going on. With the plant, with the walkers… maybe all of it.
Sometimes it happens that way: you go to sleep with puzzle pieces scattered everywhere and somehow in the depths of sleep the puzzle pieces fall into place. When you wake up you can sometimes see with startling clarity.
I opened my eyes and stared at the shadow-darkened ceiling of the car. “Oh man…” I said aloud.
Five seconds later I was hurrying to find Jerry Spencer.
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Sebastian Gault / The Hotel Ishtar, Baghdad / Thursday, July 2
“LINE?”
“Clear as a bell, my sweet.”
“Sebastian…” The way Amirah said it made Gault feel warm everywhere. “I’ve missed you so.”
“Me, too.” His voice was husky and it nearly cracked. He covered the mouthpiece and cleared his throat. “I want you,” he murmured.
“I need you,” she replied, and Gault could feel the sweat popping out on his forehead.
Gault opened his eyes and looked around the hotel room
. It seemed so drab, so overtly empty. Toys had gone shopping in the bazaar with a female rock star who was in town to entertain the troops. Gault wished he were back in Afghanistan. With her. He shook his head and made himself change the subject.
“A lot’s happened,” he said, his voice suddenly brisk and businesslike. He told her about the raid on the crab plant.
“You let them have the computers?” Her voice sounded shocked, almost frightened.
“I let them have some of the computers. All of it was old data, nothing past Generation Three, though they won’t be able to tell that from the time-coding. They’ll think this is all recent research data.”
“You’re sure?”
“Quite sure. They’ll have more than they need to understand the earlier generations of the pathogen. Scientists will be queuing up to get federal grant money to study it.”
“What are you saying? That we’re done? That we should call off the operation?”
“Good Lord, no! Your loving husband and his merry little prank is going to be the icing on this cake. Without him the Yanks might lapse into one of those periods of red tape where everything gets talked about in committees but nothing actually gets done. No, dear heart, we need them frightened, terrified… so terrified, in fact, that they are too scared not to act. Once El Mujahid has pulled off his stunt then they will be in full gear, no doubt about it.”
“‘Stunt’?” Amirah said, and Gault could hear the change in her voice, which had suddenly dropped to one degree above freezing. “I would hardly call a heroic sacrifice a ‘stunt’ or a ‘prank.’”
“I’m sorry,” he said with a purr, “I don’t mean to disparage his sacrifice. Have I offended you?” He listened very closely to her as she replied, and he noted the hesitation—small though it was—before she spoke.
“Oh, of course not.” Her voice sounded light. “But I think we should maintain some respect. After all, he is… a freedom fighter. He believes in his cause, even if we do not.”
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