Patient Zero_ A Joe Ledger Novel Part 2

"I'm not sure I like how you phrased that."

"It wasn't meant to be a comforting comment."

"And I suppose you want me to 'audition' next?"

"Yes."

"How does that play out? Bunch of mind games and psych tests?"

"No, we know enough about you from your current medical records and fifteen years of psych evaluations. We know that in the last couple of years you've suffered severe losses. First your mother died of cancer and then your ex-girlfriend committed suicide. We know that when you and she were teenagers you were attacked, and that some older teens beat you nearly to death and then held you down and made you watch as they raped her. We know about that. We know you went through a brief dissociative phase as a result, and that you've had some intermittent rage issues, which is one of the reasons you regularly see a therapist. It's fair to say you understand and can recognize the face of terror when you see it."

It would have felt pretty good to demonstrate the whole rage concept to him right then, but I guessed that's what he would be looking for. Instead I made my face look bored. "This is where I should get offended that you've invaded my privacy, et cetera?"

"It's a new world, Mr. Ledger. We do what we must. And yes, I know how that sounds." Nothing in his tone of voice sounded like an apology.

"So, what do I have to do?"'

"It's quite simple, really." He got up and walked around the table to the curtain that hung in front of the big picture window. With no attempt at drama he pulled back the curtain to reveal a similar room. One table, one chair, one occupant. A man sitting hunched forward, his back to the window, possibly asleep. "All you need to do is go in there, then cuff and restrain that prisoner."

"You kidding me?"

"Not in the least. Go in there, subdue the suspect, put him in cuffs, and attach the cuffs to the D-ring mounted on the table."

"What's the catch? That's one guy. Your goon squad could have-"

"I am aware what overwhelming force could do, Mr. Ledger. That's not the point of this exercise." He reached into his jacket pocket and produced a pair of handcuffs. "I want you to do it."

Chapter Five.

Easton, Maryland / Sat.u.r.day, June 27; 2:08 P.M.

THE FIRST THING I noticed when I opened the door to the interrogation room was the stink. Smelled like a treatment plant. The guy didn't stir. He was slim, probably shorter than me, dark-skinned-Hispanic or Middle Eastern. Black hair that was sweat-soaked and lank. He wore a standard orange prison jumpsuit and he seemed completely out of it, his head hanging almost down to his knees.

I stepped into the room, conscious of the big mirror on my left. Mr. Church would be watching me, probably eating another vanilla wafer. The door closed behind me and I turned to see Buckethead staring at me through the gla.s.s. For a second I thought he was smiling, and then his expression registered. It was more like a wince, a flinching twist of his face as if he expected a scorpion to jump out at him. Even behind a steel door the agent was spooked by this guy. Swell. I held my cuffs in my right hand and extended my left in a calm, a.s.sertive gesture, palm outward. It looks placating but it's right there in case you need to block, grab, or hit.

"Okay, pardner," I said calmly. "I need you to cooperate with me here." A beat. "Can you hear me, sir?

The man didn't move.

I angled around the table, coming up on his left. "Sir? I need you to stand up with your hands on your head. Sir Sir!"

Nothing.

I moved closer. "Sir, I need you to stand up-"

And he did. All at once his head snapped up and his eyes popped open as he shot to his feet and spun toward me. My heart skipped. I recognized the guy. The pale, sweaty face, the glazed pop-eyed stare. It was Javad-the terrorist I'd shot and killed back in Baltimore. He hissed like a cat and threw himself at me. He was maybe one-fifty, five seven, but he hit me in the chest like a cannonball, driving us both across the room so hard that my back crunched against the rear wall. I hit my head and sparks burst in my eyes. I jammed my forearm under his chin as Javad snapped at me like an animal, lunging forward over my arm, his teeth banging together with a weird porcelain clack. He grabbed my shirt with both hands, trying to pull us closer together.

The DVD player in my head kept running and rerunning the scene back at the warehouse where I'd shot him in the back. Granted, I wasn't the one who checked his vitals afterward, but I'd put two.45 slugs in him from fifteen feet. Pretty much does the trick. If it doesn't then your only logical ammunition upgrade is Kryptonite. But for a guy who should be dead, he was pretty d.a.m.n spry.

Even though this was all happening too fast I still had time to register the look in his eyes. Despite the twisted, ferociously hungry snarl of his face and the snapping of his teeth, his eyes were totally empty. No flicker of awareness, no trace of self-knowledge, not even the fire of hate. This wasn't the deadeye stare of a shark, nothing like that. This was freak-show stuff because there was nothing there; it was like looking into an empty room.

I think that terrified me more than the teeth that were biting the air an inch from my windpipe. Right then I knew why the other applicants had failed this audition. They'd probably been big men like me, strong men like me, and maybe they'd been able to hold him off this long-just long enough to look into those soulless eyes. I think that's when they failed. I don't know if Javad tore their throats out. I don't know if this was the point where they started screaming for help and Church sent Buckethead and his goon squad in with Tasers and riot sticks. What I did know was that looking into those eyes nearly took the soul out of me. I could actually feel my throat closing up, could feel an icy wire sending electricity down through my bowels.

I saw terror and hopelessness there. I saw death.

But here's the thing, you see, I'd seen those things before. I may not have been on any of the world's battlefields, but Church was right when he'd said that I've seen the face of terror. It went a lot deeper than that, though. It isn't just terror that I understood I knew the face of death. I'd been bedside when cervical cancer took my mom. I was the last thing she saw before she slipped into the big black nothing, and I saw the light and life go out of her; I saw her eyes change from living eyes to those of a dead person. You can never forget that; the image is burned onto the front of your brain. I was also the one who found Helen after she'd swallowed half a bottle of drain cleaner. She'd left a goodbye message on my voice mail and was already gone when I kicked in the door. I saw her dead eyes, too.

I've also looked into the dead eyes of men I've killed on the job. Two men in eight years, not counting the four at the warehouse.

So, I'd looked into dead eyes before, I know what I saw there. I saw death and terror and hopelessness. Not my mom's, not Helen's, not the criminals I've killed-no, the deadness I see is my own, reflected in eyes that have nothing of their own to show. You can't fake that dead look. A lot of warriors have that look because they are in harmony with death. Church probably knew all this. He knew everything else about me. He knew my psych file. That b.a.s.t.a.r.d knew.

Javad lunged forward again, his fingers tearing my shirt, his stink that of a carrion bird. No that wasn't right, that wasn't it. Javad's smell was that of carrion. He smelled like the dead. Because he was dead. This whole train of thought shot through my brain in a microsecond, its speed and clarity amplified by terror.

Terror's a funny thing, though. It can take your heart from you and bare your throat to the wolves; it can make you go all hot and crazy, which almost always gets you killed or it can make you go cold. That's what happens to warriors-real ones, the kind who are defined by conflict. Like me.

So I went cold. Time slammed to a halt and the whole room seemed to go quiet except for the m.u.f.fled hammering of my own heart. I stopped trying to get away from something I couldn't escape-I was jammed into a corner and Church wasn't sending the d.a.m.ned cavalry-so I did what Javad was doing. I attacked.

I swung my right hand around in a palm shot that turned his head so hard to the right that I heard his neck bones grind. It would have stopped anyone; it didn't stop him any more than the two slugs had stopped him. But it gave me a few seconds' escape from those teeth, and even as Javad started wrenching his face back toward me I hooked my leg around his and chopped at the back of his knee. Maybe he couldn't feel pain but a bent knee is a bent knee-it's a gravity thing. He canted to one side and I used his sagging weight to spin and drive him into the wall. I caught him by the back of the hair and slammed him face forward into the wall once, twice, again and again. His jaw disintegrated; but I grabbed what was left of his chin and twisted my fingers into his hair and then I pivoted my hips as hard and as fast as I could, taking his head with me. My body turned faster and farther than his neck could.

There was a huge wet snap!

And then Javad was gone. His body switched off like someone had kicked the plug out and he simply dropped. I stepped back and let him fall.

I could barely breathe; sweat poured down my face, stung my eyes. I heard a sound behind me-I wheeled around and Church was leaning against the frame of the open doorway.

"Welcome to the new face of global terrorism," he said.

Chapter Six.

Easton, Maryland / Sat.u.r.day, June 27; 2:36 P.M.

"WHAT WAS HE?"

We were back at the table. They'd let me clean up in a bathroom. I showered and dressed in borrowed gym clothes. The shakes had started in the shower. Adrenaline accounted for a lot of it, but it was more than that. After thirty minutes my hands were still trembling and I didn't care if Church saw it.

He shrugged. "We're still working on a name for his condition."

"Condition? That son of a b.i.t.c.h was dead!"

"From now on," Church said, "we may have to consider 'dead' a relative term."

I had to sit with that for a while. Church waited me out.

"That is the same guy I shot at the warehouse, right? I mean, I put him down hard. I saw blood and bone on the walls "

"Javad Mustapha, an Iraqi national," Church agreed, nodding. "Your shots were mortal but not immediately so; he was still alive when he was transported to the hospital where he was p.r.o.nounced DOA. He 'revived' shortly after arrival." He spread his hands. "We controlled that incident and you won't find specific mention of it in the papers or in any official report."

"Holy Christ are we talking zombies here?"

Church smiled faintly. "We're calling him a 'walker.' Short for 'Dead Man Walking.' The head of my science team has too much of a pop culture sensibility. And before you ask, it's not anything supernatural."

"How did this happen? Some kind of toxic spill a plague "

"We don't know. A prion disease, perhaps, or a parasite; maybe both, but certainly something that causes hyperactivity of the stem cells. True to the nature of parasites, the infected have a totality of purpose built around procreation. Not s.e.xually, of course, but through a bite that is apparently one hundred percent infectious. We've only begun to research it."

"Is it only his bite that's infectious?" I asked. It felt like ice-cold army ants were marching around in my gut.

"We've done a number of tests on sweat and other body fluids but the strongest concentration of the disease is in the saliva. The bite transmits the infection."

I looked at the bruise on my arm. "I'm not wearing Kevlar. If I'd been bitten in there "

He looked at me.

Anger was a white-hot furnace in my chest. "You're a total rat b.a.s.t.a.r.d, you know that?"

"As I said, Mr. Ledger, this is the new face of terrorism. A fierce, terrible bioweapon we don't yet understand. It may take us months to even construct a viable research protocol, which means that time is completely against us. We think that your friend Javad in there was the bioterrorist approximation of a suicide bomber, that he was the 'patient zero' for an intended plague directed at the U.S. The blue case recovered at the scene was some kind of climate-controlled containment system, quite possibly to protect the other cell members from their own weapon. None of the others at the warehouse showed any signs of infection." He paused. "We think we stopped them."

"You 'think'?" I heard how he leaned on the word.

"Yes, Mr. Ledger, but we don't know. And we have to know, just as we have to be ready in case this happens again. If Javad is the only plague vector then we'll scratch one up for our side and start looking for their next trick, or try to be ready for whenever they try this trick again. If, on the other hand, there are other teams out there ready to launch others like Javad well, that's part of the reason the DMS was formed."

"Then you'd sure as h.e.l.l better check with the task force commander because two panel trucks pulled out of that warehouse the night before we hit it. We tracked one and lost one "

"Yes. Losing one was sloppy."

I fought the urge to flip him the bird. "Who's behind this? Is this an Al Qaeda thing, because the task force was never able to pin that down?"

"That's still uncertain, though we have some suspicions. The other members of the cell were a mixed bunch. Al Qaeda, Shia extremists, two Sunni extremists, and even one from the Egyptian Islamic Jihad."

"Shia and Sunni working together?"

"Interesting, isn't it?" Church said dryly. "The name you picked up in your wiretap-El Mujahid-lends a little weight to the idea of collaboration. He's been known to work with several of the more extreme splinter groups."

"I a.s.sume you interrogated the surviving cell members?"

He said nothing.

"Well "

"They're all dead. Suicide."

"How? Didn't you search them for cyanide pills in their teeth and all that s.h.i.t?"

Church shook his head. "Something a bit cleverer than that. Each of them had been infected with a pathogen of a type as yet unidentified; they needed to take a drug every eight hours to keep the disease dormant. Without the drug the disease becomes active with incredible speed and immediately begins to erode vascular tissue. We didn't know this until they started bleeding internally, and even then we barely got enough information out of the last one to understand the shape of it. The control substance was hidden in ordinary aspirin tablets. We would never have known to look."

"Is this the same disease that my dancing partner in there had?"

"No. And as far as we can tell it's noncommunicable. I have some of the top scientists in the world working with the DMS, and so far they've been scratching their heads. Some of them are actually impressed."

"So am I. This is some pretty sophisticated stuff we're talking about."

"And yet simple; you wouldn't even need much in the way of guards and threats. One person with the pill bottle to control them all is all they'd need. Very easy to manage. This level of sophistication raises our opinion of this cell and makes their potential that much greater."

I said, "What happened to the other guys? The ones who auditioned before me? Did they get bitten?"

"One did, I'm sorry to say. Two others did not."

"Jesus Christ!"

It was an effort not to leap across the table and tear his throat out. I watched Church's face, saw the shift of his body language as the anger in my voice registered. If I'd gone across that table he'd have been ready for me. "What about the other two? You go rescue them?"

"No. They both managed to cuff the suspect."

"Then I don't understand."

"It isn't only the physical component of the test that matters, Mr. Ledger. Each of them faced the moment of truth, as you yourself are doing now, and each of them reacted " He paused, pursing his lips. "Inadequately."

"In what way?"

"In ways that identified them as unsuitable candidates." He waed his hand, dismissing that line of discussion.

"Why am I here?"

"Ah, the golden question. You're here, Mr. Ledger, because we are scouting for candidates to flesh out our DMS team. We're a new agency. We have lots of funding and we have a nicely vague set of parameters. Our intelligence division is hard at work to infiltrate and report on cells such as the one your team took down in Baltimore. We're surveilling the location where the first panel truck went, and we have high hopes of discovering the destination of the other."

"And you want me to sign up?"

He showed his teeth again. Kind of a smile. "No, Mr. Ledger, I want you to go to the FBI academy as planned."

"I don't-"

"Only now you'll have a clearer focus on which parts of that training to pay more attention to. Medical and management courses would be worthwhile. You can probably imagine which others would be of use."

We sat for a while with that comment hanging in the air.

"And when I'm done?"