Patient Zero_ A Joe Ledger Novel Part 19

Rudy nodded. "Prions, though extremely dangerous, are far from being short-term weapons and could at best represent a time-bomb effect. Whoever made this disease pioneered some new way to speed up the process of infection. Now it happens in minutes."

"Seconds," I corrected. "Like I said I saw it."

Hu said, "We're seeing all kinds of variations in terms of infection, time of death, and speed of reanimation. We're only just beginning to build models to study it but we're nowhere near understanding it. The pattern's funky, and I'll bet you my whole set of Evil Dead action figures that we've either got mutations or more than one strain. In either case we are seriously screwed."

Rudy said, "I think we can safely say that when the carrier and victim are in an agitated state, as we had in the hospital and in Delaware today, then the process happens very fast. Adrenaline and ambient temperature both accelerate the process."

"This is why this is such a major threat," Church interrupted quietly. "There has always been a lag factor with diseases, even weaponized diseases, and we don't have that here."

"Okay. Message understood. If any infected people get out we're screwed."

"And when in doubt, Captain," said Church, "shoot to kill."

"Dios mio," Rudy murmured, but I met Church's stare and gave him a microscopic nod.

"What about inoculation? Can you juice my team in case we get bit?"

"No way," Hu said. "Remember, the core of this thing is a prion and a prion is simply a misfolded normal protein. Any vaccine that would destroy the prion would destroy all forms of that protein. Once we identify all the parasites we might be able to kill that, and maybe that'll do some good. No, I think that your team has to consider prophylactic measures instead."

"Is this thing airborne? I mean, if all we have to do is protect against a bite, then we can suit up with Dragon Skin or Interceptor, or some other kind of body armor. There's plenty of stuff on the market."

"I don't think it's airborne," Hu said dubiously, "but it might be vapor borne, which means spit or sweat might carry it. In a tight room at high temperatures you might want a hazmat suit of some kind."

"Hard to fight in a hazmat," I pointed out.

Church held up a finger. "I can make a call and have Saratoga Hammer Suits here by morning." I guess all of us looked blank, so he added, "Permeable chemical warfare protective overgarments for domestic preparedness. It's a composite filter fabric based on highly activated and hard carbon spheres fixed onto textile carrier fabrics. It's tough, but light enough to permit agile movement as well as unarmed and armed combat. It's been out for a bit, but I can get the latest generation. I have a friend in the industry."

"You always have a friend in the industry," Hu said under his breath, which got a flicker of a smile from Grace. A DMS in-joke apparently.

Church stepped away and opened his cell phone. When he came back he said, "A helo will meet us at the staging area for the crab plant raid by six A.M. with fifty suits."

"I guess you do have a friend in the industry," Rudy said.

"And the big man scores," Hu said, and held up his hand for a high five but Church stared at him with calm, dark eyes. Hu coughed, lowered his hand, and turned to me. "If you go in with body armor and those suit thingees you should be okay. Unless "

"Unless what?"

"Unless there are a lot of them."

"Let's hope not."

"And unless there's more to this disease than we think."

"What are the chances of that, Doctor?"

He didn't answer, which was answer enough.

"d.a.m.n," I said.

Chapter Fifty.

Amirah / The Bunker / Tuesday, June 30 THE PHONE WOKE her and for a moment Amirah did not know where she was. A fragment of a dream flitted past the corner of her eye and though she could not quite define its shape or grasp its content, she had an impression of a man's face-maybe Gault, maybe El Mujahid-sweating, flushed with blood, eyes intense as he raised himself above her on two stiffened arms and grunted and thrust his hips forward. It was not a lovemaking dream. It had more of the vicious indifference of a rape, even in the fleeting half-remembrance of it. The most lasting part of the dream was not the image of the man-whichever man it had been-but from a deep and terrible coldness that entered her with each thrust, as if the man atop her was dead, without heat.

Amirah shook herself and stared at the phone on her desk that continued to ring. She glanced around her office-it was empty, though she could see workers in the lab on the other side of the one-way gla.s.s wall. She cleared her throat, picked up the phone, and said, "Yes?"

"Line?"

"It's clear." She said it automatically, but then pressed the b.u.t.ton on the scrambler. "It's clear now," she corrected.

"He's on his way." Gault's voice was soft and in those four words Amirah could hear the subtle layers of meaning that she always suspected filtered everything he said.

"How is he?"

"No longer pretty."

Amirah laughed. "He was never pretty."

"He's no longer handsome, then," Gault corrected.

"Is he in much pain?"

"Nothing he can't handle. He's very stoic, your husband. I think if he had a bullet in his chest he would shrug it off as inconsequential. Few men have his level of physical toughness."

"He's a brute," Amirah said, flavoring her voice with disgust.

There was a pause at the other end as if Gault was a.s.sessing her words, or perhaps her tone. Did he suspect? she wondered, and not for the first time.

"He'll have some time to rest while he travels. He needs to regain his strength. We provided him with plenty of drugs to keep the pain under control; and let's face it, stoicism only really works when people are watching. We don't want him to fall into despair while he's all alone in his cabin."

Amirah said nothing. She probably should have, she knew, but the image of the mighty El Mujahid sitting alone and in pain in a tiny interior cabin on some rusty old freighter was compelling.

Into the silence, and as if reading her mind, Gault said, "Don't fret, my love; I own the ship's surgeon as well as the captain."

"I'm not fretting, Sebastian. My concern is that his wounds not become infected. We need him to be in the best possible shape for the mission." She was careful to use the word "mission" now, having slipped once before when she called it the "cause." She wasn't sure Gault had noted the error, but he probably had. He was like that.

"Of course, of course," he said soothingly. "Everything is taken care of. He'll be fine and the plan will go off as we planned. Everything is perfect. Trust me."

"I do," she said, and she softened her voice. "I trust you completely."

"Do you love me?" he asked, a laugh in his voice.

"You know I do."

"And I," he said, "will always love you." With that he disconnected the call.

Amirah leaned back in her chair and stared thoughtfully at the phone, her lips compressed, the muscles at the sides of her jaw bunched tight. She waited five minutes, thinking things through, and then she opened the bottom drawer of her desk and removed the satellite phone. It was compact, expensive, and new. A gift from Gault. It had tremendous range and there were signal relays built into the ceiling of the laboratory bunker so that her call would reach up into s.p.a.ce and would from there be bounced anywhere on the planet. Even as far as a helicopter flying across the ocean to catch a freighter that was far out to sea.

Chapter Fifty-One.

The DMS Warehouse, Baltimore / Tuesday, June 30; 9:58 P.M.

RUDY AND I walked down the corridor together. Church had lingered to speak with Hu. I looked at my watch. "Hard to believe this is the same day, you know?"

But he didn't want to talk about it out in the corridor. I asked a guard where our rooms were and he led us to a pair of former offices across the hall from each other. My room was about the size of a decent hotel bedroom, though it had clearly been repurposed from an office or storeroom. No windows. Functional gray carpet. But the bed in the corner of the room was my own from my apartment. The computer workstation was mine, as was the big-screen TV and La-Z-Boy recliner. Three packed suitcases stood in a neat row by the closet. And on top of my bed, head laid on his paws, was Cobbler. He opened one eye, found me less interesting than whatever he was dreaming about, and went back to his meditations. We went inside and Rudy sat down on the recliner and put his face in his hands. I poked inside the small halffridge they'd provided and took out a couple of bottles of water, and tapped him on the shoulder with one. He looked at it and then set it down on the floor between his shoes. I opened my water, drank some, and sat on the floor with my back against one wall.

Rudy finally turned to me and I could see the hours of stress stamped into his face and the unnatural brightness of his eyes. "What the h.e.l.l have we gotten ourselves into here, cowboy?"

"I'm sorry you got dragged into this, Rude."

He shook his head to cut me off. "It's not that. Well, it's not all that. It's the whole "-he fished for the word-" reality of this. It's the fact that something like the DMS exists. That it has to. It isn't that we learned about some supersecret organization. h.e.l.l, Joe, there are probably dozens of those. Hundreds. I'm enough of a realist to accept that governments need secrets. They need spies and black ops and all of that. I'm a grown-up, so I can deal with it. I can even accept, however unwillingly, that we live in post-9/11 times, and that to some degree terrorism is a part of our daily lives. I mean, find me a stand-up comic who doesn't make jokes about it. It's become ordinary to us."

I sipped more water, letting him work through it.

"But today I've seen things and heard things that I know I know will forever alter my world. On 9/11 I said, as so many people did, that nothing would ever be the same again. No matter how much we all settled back into a day-to-day routine, no matter how indifferent we become to what color today's terror alert is, it's still true. That was a day like no other in my life. Today is. .h.i.tting me as hard as 9/11. Maybe harder. You know what I did? I spent ten minutes in a toilet stall crying my eyes out."

"Hey, you're human," I began, and again he cut me off.

"It's not that and you know it, Joe, so don't coddle me. You want to know why I cried? It wasn't cultural angst any more than it was grief for all those people who died at the hospital the other day or in Delaware this afternoon. Eight times as many people died in the earthquake in Malaysia last month. I didn't cry over that. Millions of people die every year. I can have sympathy but any grief-any genuine personal grief-would be borrowed. It is no more a true life-changing expression than the heightened sense of concern a community feels for a kid who falls down a well. Two months later no one can remember the kid's name. Your life doesn't pivot on that moment. It can't, because otherwise the process of making each human death personal would kill us all. But this this is truly a life-changing moment. That's not even a question. I've been marked by it. As you have. As everyone here at the DMS has. I don't know how many of these people you've met but I had the whole tour and I see it in everyone's eyes. Church and Major Courtland hide it better; but the others what I see in their eyes is going to be in my eyes when I look in the mirror. Not just for a while, but from now on. We're all marked."

"Yeah, I know, Rude, but it's not like we're talking the Mark of Cain here."

He gave me such a long withering look that I wanted to squirm. "No? Look, I'm not pointing a finger at any country, any faith, any political party. This is a failing in the whole species. We, the human race, have committed a terrible and unforgivable sin; and before you embarra.s.s us both by asking-no, I'm not having a Catholic moment. This is far more fundamental than church or state. This is ours to own because we know better. As a species, we know better. We really do understand right and wrong, same as we really do grasp all the subtle shades of gray. We have had thousands of years of religious leaders, philosophers, free thinkers, and political scientists explaining the cause and effect of destructive behavior. You'd think by now, at the point where we are this technologically advanced and where communication between all races is not only possible but globally instantaneous, that we'd have learned something, that we'd have benefited from all those previous mistakes. You'd think we'd have become more forward-thinking and farsighted. But we're not. With computer modeling we can virtually look into the future and see how things will go if we follow these courses, and yet we don't do a thing to change direction. Maybe the true human flaw is our inability to act as if the next generation matters. We never have. Individually maybe, but not as a nation, not as a species."

Rudy rubbed his eyes.

"Today," he said slowly, "I watched video proof of the criminal indifference of the human race. People who are certainly intelligent enough to know better have created a weapon so destructive that it could destroy the entire human race, and why? To further a religious or political view. If this was the act of a single person I'd say that we're dealing with psychosis, a fractured mind but this is a deliberate and careful plan. The people involved have had sufficient time to think it through, to grasp the implications. And yet they continue with the program. Today you saw them experimenting with children. Children." He sighed. "They know better and they still don't care. If there's a better description of the Mark of Cain I haven't heard it."

"That's them, Rudy. Not us."

"No, no," he conceded tiredly. "I know that. It's just that I don't trust that our government is any wiser. Or any government. We did, after all, invent the bomb; and we've experimented with bioweapons and germ warfare. No, cowboy, we all bear some trace of Cain's mark. All of us, whether we're directly involved at the policy level or not."

"Some of us are trying to do something about this s.h.i.t, Rudy. Let's not paint everyone with the same brush."

He sighed. "I'm tired, Joe and I'm not attacking you. I'm feeling my way through this." He looked at me for a long time. "But, you're marked, too. Not with guilt, but with the awareness of the beast that lives in all of us, in every human heart. The awareness is in your eyes. I've played poker with you; I know that you can hide it better than me, better than most. Better than Grace Courtland. Not as well as Church. Point is that you carry the same mark as everyone else here. As I do." He made a grimace that was his best attempt at a smile. "It's a bonding experience. We'll always be linked by this shared knowledge. All of us linked by the human race's most recent demonstration of its absolute b.l.o.o.d.y-minded determination to commit suicide."

"Like I said, not everyone's part of the problem, Rude. Some of us are trying our d.a.m.nedest to be part of the solution."

He gave me a bleak and weary smile. "I hope that's not bravado, cowboy. I sincerely hope you believe that."

"I do. I have to."

He closed his eyes and sat there for a long minute saying nothing, but every few seconds he let out another long sigh. "I haven't had near enough time to process this yet. If I'm going to be of any use I'm going to have to get my own ducks in a row. I mean I've been kidnapped, had a gun to my head, found out that terrorists have an actual doomsday weapon you'd be surprised how much of that we don't cover in medical school."

"Not even in shrink school?"

"Not even in shrink school."

We sat with that for a bit. "Church told me that you've signed on to the DMS. Why'd you go and do that?"

Rudy gave me a wan smile. "Because Church asked me to. Because of what happened at St. Michael's. Because of you. And because I know. Not only the secrets, Joe I know the truth of all of this. I'm marked. That makes me a part of this from now on. If I don't do something to contribute to the solution I think I'd go mad."

"Yeah," I said. "I hear you. But how do you feel about being on the 'team'?"

"That's too complex a question for a simple answer. On the surface I guess I appreciate the opportunity to do some good for the people who are in turn trying to save the world."

"And below the surface?"

"I know where your morals are, Joe. You're too reasonable to have a red state/blue state agenda. You're much more of a right and wrong personality, and that works for me. I think Church may be built along some of the same lines. So, I guess that one of the strongest rays of hope I see in this whole thing is the fact that what we have standing between us and a destroyed future are three people-Church, you, and Grace Courtland-who actually see the way the trend is going and are in the position to do something about it."

"That's a lot to put on our shoulders, brother."

"Yes," he said, "it is." He rubbed his eyes. "We all have so much to do. You have to be a hero. I have to get my act together so I can help everybody else keep their acts together. And Church and Courtland have to do whatever it is that they do." Rudy got up and patted me on the shoulder. He looked a little bit more like his old self, but I knew that there was a lot of road still to travel. "I'm going to try and get at least an hour's sleep. You should, too."

I said that I would but knew that I wouldn't. There was too much to do and the clock was ticking. I stood in my doorway and watched him shamble off to bed. I felt impossibly tired and was just turning to go back inside when a door banged open at the end of the hall and a white-faced Dr. Hu yelled two words that sent a chill of terror through me: "Room Twelve!"

Behind him I could hear the sudden staccato of automatic weapons fire.

Chapter Fifty-Two.

The DMS Warehouse, Baltimore / Tuesday, June 30; 10:21 P.M.

I TORE DOWN the hallway toward the open door. Gus Dietrich was coming out of his room dressed in boxer shorts and a beater. He saw me running and opened his mouth to say something but then I grabbed Hu and shoved him out of my way. Hu hit Dietrich and they fell together through Dietrich's open doorway. I ran into the hall and cut left. My quarters were pretty close to the loading bay and I got to the bay door before any of the armed guards. There was a knot of confused techs and staff milling around at the bay doorway and I bellowed at them to clear a path.

"Got your back," I heard Bunny say as he skidded into the bay right behind me. Top Sims was right behind him.

I turned to the crowd. "Everyone out-now! Close the door and kill that f.u.c.king alarm!"

They backed out of the room as the three of us hurried past rows of trailers. When we reached Room 12 what we saw stopped us in our tracks. The machine gun emplacement was deserted, the big gun still smoking, the floor littered with sh.e.l.l casings. I could only see one of the four guards-or, what was left of him. His body was bent backward over the low wall of sandbags surrounding the gun, his throat completely torn away. There were small pools of blood everywhere and spatters from what looked like arterial sprays. Whatever had happened here had happened fast and mean.

We moved up quick and quiet. Bunny scooped up an MP5.