Patient Zero_ A Joe Ledger Novel Part 31

"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 d.a.m.n 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 h.e.l.l 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."

And there it was again. The slightest fragment of hesitation before she said "we." It came close to breaking his heart.

"How is the shutdown process going?" he asked, changing tack again.

"It's going well." There it was again. d.a.m.n it. "We should be completely shut down by the end of the week."

"And the staff?"

"I'll take care of them."

It had always been their intention to gather all nonessential personnel together once El Mujahid's "heroic sacrifice" was under way, and to terminate them. The largest staff room was rigged to lockdown and flood with gas. Only certain key people would be spared and those few would form the nucleus of a new team that would start an entirely new line of research. All records of the Seif al Din pathogen and the years of lab work that had gone into its creation would be dumped to coded disks and then stored in one of Gault's most secure locations. Everything else would be deleted or destroyed, all computer memory wiped. That was Amirah's current task and she'd promised to do it, but there was something in her voice that troubled Gault.

"I'm glad you're taking care of things, my love. Do you want me to come and help you clean up the last details?"

"No," she said quickly. "I have everything under control. You have more important things to do."

"Yes, I suppose I have." He paused and said, softly, "I love you, Amirah."

There was a final pause, and then she murmured, "I love you, too."

After the line went dead Gault stood for a long while looking out the window at the plaza below. The erotic elation he'd felt when he had first heard her voice was completely gone. No, that was wrong-there was just enough of it left to make his heart hurt.

"Amirah " he whispered to the night. Grief was like a heavy stone around his neck. Gault was too practiced a deceiver to be deceived; Amirah, though clever, was far less skilled at guile. What was it the Americans were so fond of saying? Never bulls.h.i.t a bulls.h.i.tter. Her pauses had been too long and in all the wrong places; some of the inflections were brittle. He wondered if she was aware of it, and doubted it. She was sure of her s.e.xual control over him, Gault was certain of that, just as he was certain she was lying to him. About her lab and her staff. That could be a real problem and he knew that he would need to take a look, that he would need to go back to Afghanistan even though it was a poor security risk with so many things in motion. And she was certainly lying about El Mujahid. Her comment about his "sacrifice" was telling, and the things it implied broke his heart.

He went and built himself a gin and tonic, but as he tumbled ice into the gla.s.s he saw that his hands were shaking.

"G.o.d d.a.m.n her!" he roared and abruptly hurled the gla.s.s across the room with such savage force that it shattered into thousands of silvery fragments that fell glistening to the carpet.

He sagged back against the wet bar. "d.a.m.n you," he said again, and now his eyes burned with tears.

What should he infer from this and from the other hints he'd picked up over the last few weeks? Did Amirah really have feelings for her brute of a husband? Was that even possible? After all of the s.e.x, after all of the constant betrayal and the plotting behind the Fighter's back, could she haven fallen back in love with El Mujahid? Gault reached for another gla.s.s and mixed another drink, swallowed half of it down a dry throat, and poured more gin into it without adding any extra tonic.

Then something occurred to him that made his heart go still in his chest. He could hear his pulse throbbing in his ears as the new thought blossomed from a seed of suspicion into a fully realized belief. The gin in his stomach turned to sickness as he realized that all of the pieces of this puzzle did actually fit together but that the picture they made was one that he had never expected or foreseen.

What if Amirah had never stopped loving El Mujahid? What if this whole thing, from the very beginning before their clandestine meeting in Tikrit, what if everything she had done for him and with him and to him had been part of an older scheme, one that was not of his design? What if this had been something Amirah and El Mujahid had cooked up themselves, something they'd twisted so subtly that he thought he had recruited them? What if they'd suckered him into financing their scheme instead of the other way around? Toys had once suggested this as a possibility but Gault had dismissed it with a laugh.

But now what if it was all true?

"Good Christ," he said aloud, and now his hands were shaking so badly that gin sloshed out of his gla.s.s onto his shirtfront.

What if Amirah and El Mujahid were not helping him scam the U.S. government out of billions in research and production money? What if money was not even the point? Was that possible? he wondered, but the answer was so obvious. Toys had been right all along. The truth now burned in front of his mind's eye like a flare. There was only one thing more powerful than money, especially in this part of the world.

What if this was jihad?

Gault staggered backward and his back crashed against the wet bar. His legs turned to rubber and he sat down hard on the floor, the rest of his drink splashing onto his thighs. He didn't feel the wetness or the cold. All he could feel was a rising sense of terror as the realization that he had given the world's deadliest weapon to a wickedly clever a.s.sa.s.sin and insured-insured-that nothing could stop the release of the Seif al Din pathogen. El Mujahid was not carrying the weaker strain of the disease with him, Gault was certain of that now. The Fighter was taking with him Amirah's newest strain, Generation Seven. The unstoppable one. The one that infected too quickly for any kind of response. The Fighter would release it and the plague would sweep the Western Hemisphere. Did Amirah think that its spread could be held back by oceans? Or, in her religious madness did she no longer care?

He crawled across the floor to the table and grabbed his cell phone, hit speed dial and waited through four interminable rings before Toys answered with a musical, "h.e.l.lo-o-o!"

"Get back here!" Gault said in a hoa.r.s.e whisper.

"What's wrong?" Toys said sharply, his voice low and urgent.

"It's " Gault began, then a sob broke in his chest. "My G.o.d, Toys I think I've killed us all."

The phone fell from his hands as the black reality of apocalypse bloomed like a mushroom cloud.

Chapter Seventy-Nine.

Crisfield, Maryland / Thursday, July 2; 3:13 P.M.

I SPENT HALF the day with Jerry. Once I'd explained my theories we set about comparing them with what he'd deduced from his forensic walk-throughs. We were both on the same page. I told Jerry to round up all the forensics experts that had arrived while I'd been sleeping and I went off to find Church. Outside I ran into Rudy. He accompanied me to the computer van, where Church and Grace were using MindReader to search for Lester Bellmaker.

"Jerry Spencer's ready to give a preliminary forensics report," I said. "I think we should set that up sooner than later."

"You have something?" Grace asked, searching my face.

"Maybe, but I want you both to hear the forensics first and then we can play 'what-if.' "

Church made a call to set up the meeting.

Grace told us that MindReader had come up with two Lester Bellmakers in North America and six more in the U.K., but so far none of them appeared to have even the slightest connection to terrorists, diseases, or Baltimore. The closest hit had been a Richard Lester Bellmaker who served a tour in the Air Force from 1984 to 1987 and was discharged honorably. That was it. The guy managed a Chuck E. Cheese outside of Akron, Ohio, and no matter how deep Grace searched into his background the guy didn't ring a single d.a.m.n bell.

"We're getting nowhere," she said.

"And slowly," Church agreed.

"Could Aldin have been lying to us?" Grace asked, cutting a look at Rudy. "You watched the interrogation videos, and you read the telemetry feeds. What's your a.s.sessment?"

Rudy shrugged. "From what I could see that man was desperate to tell the truth. That much was in his voice. He was trying to make a dying declaration, and he wanted to go out with as clear a conscience as possible."

"So, he was telling the truth?" Grace asked.

Rudy pursed his lips. "It's probably fair to say that he was telling the truth as he knew it, but we can't discount the possibility that he may have been regurgitating disinformation fed to him by the guards."

"Too right," Grace agreed. "Which means we could be wasting time and resources on a wild-goose chase."

"So what do we do now?" Rudy asked.

"Keep looking," Church said.

Chapter Eighty.

Sebastian Gault / The Hotel Ishtar, Baghdad / July 2 THE DOOR to Gault's hotel room banged open and Toys came rushing in with a pistol in his hand. All affect was gone and in its place was a reptilian coldness as he swept the gun across the room. Seeing Gault on the floor, Toys kicked the door shut behind him and rushed to his employer's side.