Patient Zero_ A Joe Ledger Novel Part 11

Baltimore, Maryland / Tuesday, June 30; 2:46 P.M.

AFTER MAJOR COURTLAND called in the medical team she joined me in the hallway and I could tell she was reevaluating me. Her eyes roved over my face like a scanner and I could almost hear the relays click in her head. Across the hall was a men's room and I started toward it but she stopped me with a touch on my arm.

"Ledger what made you think Mr. Church wanted you to do that?"

I shrugged. "He said time was short."

"That's not the same thing as telling you to go in there and start kicking everyone's a.s.s."

"You have a problem with it?"

She smiled again, a nice smile. It transformed her from a cobra to something a h.e.l.l of a lot more appealing: an actual human being. "Not at all. As much as I hate to say it I'm rather impressed."

" 'Hate to say it'?" I echoed.

"You are a very hard person to like, Mr. Ledger."

"Call me Joe. And no, I'm not. Lots of people like me."

She didn't comment on that. "Let me put it another way you're a very hard man to trust. Especially in an operation of this kind."

"Grace-may I call you Grace?"

"You may call me Major Courtland."

"Okay, Major Courtland," I said, "it isn't my goal in life to get you to trust me. You jokers pulled me into this. I didn't submit a resume. I'm not military. So if you have issues about trust or anything else up to and including liking me, then, seriously, please go and screw yourself. Major."

She blinked once.

"I did not and do not want my life tied up in cloak-and-dagger bulls.h.i.+t, dead guys, or p.i.s.sing contests with either the testosterone crowd in there or some prissy-a.s.sed Earl Grey-drinking, scone-munching major who isn't even my freaking boss. I don't know you and I don't give a rat's a.s.s if you trust me."

"Mr. Ledger-"

"I have to take a p.i.s.s." I headed down the hall to the bathroom.

I USED THE toilet and then washed my face first with hot water and then cold, dabbed it dry with a fistful of paper towels, and then leaned on the edge of the sink, staring at my face in the mirror. My skin was flushed and my eyes had the jumpy look you usually see in junkies. My hair stuck out in all directions.

"Well," I said to my reflection, "aren't you a picture?"

I didn't have a comb so I used wet fingers to plaster down my hair, and as I stood there the full weight and enormity of what was going on hit me like a freight train. I bowed over the sink, tasting bile, ready to throw up but my trembling stomach held. I raised my head again and looked into my eyes and saw fear in there, the naked realization of what all this meant.

There were more of them out there. More walkers. And I was being asked to step up and be what? Some kind of Captain Heroism who would lead the boys in the Red, White, and Blue to victory? What was I getting myself into? This wasn't task force duty, this wasn't even SWAT-team level. I'd never even smelled anything this big before and now I was expected to train and lead a black ops team? How frigging insane was this? Why were they asking me? I'm just a cop. Where are the guys who actually do this for a living? How come none of them were here? Where's James Bond and Jack Bauer? Why me, of all people?

My reflection stared back, looking dazed and a little stupid.

Working the task force had not prepared me for this. After eighteen months of that-and the years since the World Trade Center-I'd come to share the more or less common view that the terrorists had fired their worst shots and were now hiding in caves and reevaluating the wisdom of having overplayed their hand. Now Church tells me that they hold the key to a global pandemic.

By raising the actual dead?

G.o.d Almighty. Flying planes into buildings is bad enough. Chemical weapons, anthrax, nerve gas, suicide bombers that stuff has collectively been the definition of terrorism to the global consciousness for years, and that's been more than bad enough. This was so much worse I didn't know if I could put it into any reasonable perspective. If they were trying to spread Ebola it wouldn't be this bad because Ebola doesn't chase and try to bite you. Whoever was behind this was one sick son of a b.i.t.c.h. Smart, sure, but sick. This went beyond religious fundamentalism or political extremism. Right at that moment I was sure we were looking at something born out of a mind that was truly and genuinely evil.

I don't think I clearly understood Church until that moment. If I were in his place, looking into that same future, how would I handle it? How ruthless would I be? How ruthless could I be?

"I think you already answered that question, boyo," I murmured, thinking about the five men in that room.

Church may act like a Vulcan but he had to be feeling all this stuff, too. If so, then the strain of holding back all of his emotions, all of his humanity, must be terrible. If I were going to work for him, then I'd have to look for signs of that pressure, look for cracks. Not only in me, but in him, too. On the other hand Church could be a monster himself just one on our side. There were guys like that. h.e.l.l, after World War II our own government hired a bunch of n.a.z.i scientists. Better the devil you know. More to the point, there was the comment FDR supposedly made about Somoza. Something like, "He's a son of a b.i.t.c.h, but he's our son of a b.i.t.c.h."

Great. I'm going to work for a monster in order to fight other monsters. So what did that make me?

The bathroom floor seemed to tilt a bit as I headed for the door.

Chapter Thirty.

El Mujahid / Near Najaf, Iraq / Five days ago "THEY'RE COMING," SAID Abdul, El Mujahid's lieutenant. "Two British Apache attack helicopters. Four minutes."

"Excellent," the Fighter murmured. He took one last look around and then handed a bundle of clothes to Abdul. "There is nothing of value here. Burn them."

The half-track sat askew in the middle of an intersection of two lonely roads, thirty-six kilometers from Najaf. Smoke still curled up from beneath the cha.s.sis. Additional smoke rose from a dozen corpses. There was blood everywhere, muted by sand to the color of dusty roses. Two cars were in flames-an old Ford Falcon and a Chinese Ben Ben-both with registration numbers that would tie them to Jihadist sympathizers. The entire picture was perfect: a battle fought to a tragic victory. A half-track crippled by a roadside bomb; a few British soldiers, outnumbered by insurgents, taking heavy casualties as they bravely fought through an ambush. All of the hostiles dead. Of the seven Brits in the truck, four were dead-badly mangled and burned-and three clung to life.

"Go, go, go," whispered El Mujahid, and his lieutenant melted away and slipped down into a rat hole hidden by a spring trapdoor covered with coa.r.s.e dry bushes. In the stillness nothing moved, and the only sound apart from the whup- whup- whup of the helo rotors were the piteous moans of the wounded.

"Allah akbar!" said El Mujahid, and then used his thumb to test the edge of the piece of jagged metal debris he had selected. He laced the tip of the metal against his forehead, right at the hairline; he drew a breath, held it, and then exhaled sharply as he ripped the metal through his skin, tearing down from upper left to lower right, through his eyebrow, across the bridge of his nose, along his cheek all the way to his jawline. Pain exploded in his face and blood surged from the cut. He could feel tears in his eyes and he had to bite down against the white-hot agony of the wound. It was worse-far worse-than he expected and it nearly tore the cry from his throat.

The helicopters were nearly overhead. With a gasp he flung the metal from him and slumped back into the wreckage, deliberately snorting blood out of his nose and mouth, making sure that the droplets touched everything. By the time the first helicopter landed he was perfectly placed, his torn face transformed into a mask of bright blood, his clothing soaked. His heart raced and he could feel blood flow from the wound with each pulse beat.

He closed his eyes and as he heard the first footfalls as the soldiers leaped from the helicopter he raised one gory hand and reached toward them, and now he let out the scream. It was a wet gargling cry, inarticulate and savagely hurt.

"Here!" he heard a voice yell, and then the half-track rocked as men clambered inside. There were hands on him, touching him, probing him, feeling for his pulse.

"This one's alive. Get the medics!"

Fingers scrabbled around his throat, feeling for the little dogtag chain, pulling it free. "Sergeant Henderson," a voice said, reading the name. "One hundred third armored."

"Clear the way, let me get to him," said a different voice; and then there was a compress against his face as the medics worked to save the lives of the British wounded.

It took every ounce of strength that the Fighter possessed not to smile.

Chapter Thirty-One.

Baltimore, Maryland / Tuesday, June 30; 2:51 P.M.

WE WERE IN Courtland's office, just the two of us. Everything was still not unpacked and I had to sit on a plastic folding chair. We were both drinking bottled spring water. One wall of the office was a big picture window that looked out onto the harbor. The afternoon suns.h.i.+ne made everything look peaceful, but the lie buried within the illusion was appalling. I turned away from the window and looked at Courtland.

"I'd prefer to have given you the complete version of this, but as Mr. Church pointed out, we don't have the time, so the learning curve will be more of a straight line." She sat back and crossed her legs. Even in the fatigue pants I could tell she had nice legs. Except for her personality, which so far was somewhere between a cranky alligator and a defensive moray eel, most things about her were nice. I even liked her husky voice and thick British accent. I just didn't particularly like her.

"Fire away," I said.

"After 9/11 your government formed Homeland Security and Great Britain created a similar and rather more secret organization, code name of Barrier. You won't have heard of it. MI5 and MI6 get most of the press, which is as it should be. Barrier was given a lot of power and freedom of action and was therefore able to stop several major threats against my country that would have been, to us, as devastating as the World Trade Center attack was on you. As I was involved in some of those operations I was loaned out to your government when the DMS was formed."

"Did you help create the DMS?"

"No," she said, "that was Mr. Church's doing, but there were some similarities in both structure and agenda between the DMS and Barrier, and the lines of communication, at least where ant.i.terrorism is concerned, are wide open between the White House and Whitehall. As you probably know there are many such task forces around the country, and all of their intel pa.s.ses in one way or another through DMS hands. Church is wired in everywhere. When your wiretap flagged the name El Mujahid it rang a bell at the DMS and Church ordered an immediate infiltration of the task force. By the time the team was formed we had three agents in place."

"Really? Then you do have a working field team?"

"Did," she said as a shadow pa.s.sed across her face. "But we'll get to that. First I need to tell you about the cell your task force took down. After the raid our computer specialists were able to salvage several laptops and we've been systematically decrypting their coded records. We haven't learned as much as we'd like but we are making some headway. So far we've decoded what amounts to s.h.i.+pping manifests for weapons, medical supplies, research equipment, and even human cargo."

"You mean agents they've smuggled in?"

She shook her head. "No actual human cargo. Like Javad. Brought into this country in temperature-controlled containers like the one you found here."

"How many others?"

"We've only found references to three, including Javad."

"s.h.i.+t," I said.

"The import records indicate that the other walkers were brought into the country less than twenty-four hours before your task force raided the place. The other two must have been s.h.i.+pped out late the previous day; and there's a high probability they were in those two lorries."

"That's why you took all of the files from the task force, isn't it? You wanted the surveillance logs for traffic in and out of this place and you want all of it off the record."

Again she gave me that appraising look, as if her idiot nephew had learned to tie his own shoelaces. "Yes," she admitted.

"So where did the other containers go?"

It took her a few seconds to decide whether to tell me.

"Look, Major," I said, "either you level with me on everything or we're done here. I don't know why you have a bug up your a.s.s about me, and I frankly don't care, but you are wasting my time hemming and hawing." I started to get to my feet but she waved me back down.

"All right, all right," she snapped, "sit down, dammit." She opened a folder, removed a sheet of paper and slapped it down on the desk. "This is the log for the night before the raid. Two lorries left the warehouse lot. One eight minutes after midnight, the other at oh-three-thirty. Task force agents were a.s.signed to follow both and report their destinations. One was tracked to a crab-processing plant near Crisfield, Maryland. The other was 'lost' in traffic." She stabbed an entry with a forefinger. "You were tailing the one that got lost in traffic."

I plucked the paper off the desk, glanced at it, and then tossed it down. "Good G.o.d, Major, if this is any indication of the precision of your intel then I'm going to grab my loved ones and make a run for the hills."

"You're denying that you were a.s.signed to the tail?"

"No, I was definitely a.s.signed to tail the truck, Major, but I didn't do that tail. Four blocks into the follow I was pulled and replaced by another officer. My lieutenant called on the task force's secure channel and had me report back to the surveillance van because there was more cell phone chatter and I was the only guy on s.h.i.+ft who understands Farsi. I spent twenty minutes listening to one of the hostiles talk to an Iraqi woman living in Philadelphia. Mostly they talked about b.l.o.w. .j.o.bs and how much he wished she'd give him one. Really cutting-edge espionage stuff. You can believe me when I tell you, sister, that when I tail someone I don't lose them."

She leaned back in her chair and we stared at each other like a pair of gunslingers for maybe ten, fifteen seconds. There were a lot of ways she could have handled her response, and what she said would probably set the tone for whatever professional relations.h.i.+p we were going to have. "b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l," she said with a sigh. "Will you accept my apology?"

"Will you stop trying to frighten me to death with your icy glare?"

Her smile was tentative at first, still caught on some of the thorns of her earlier misconceptions, but then it blossomed full and radiant. She stood up and reached across the desk. "Truce," she said.

I stood and took her hand, which was small, warm, and strong. "We have enough enemies, Major, it's better if we're at each other's backs rather than each other's throats."

She gave my hand a little squeeze, then let it go and sat back down. "That's very gracious of you." She cleared her throat. "Since we, um, lost that one lorry we have an investigative operation going to locate it. That's a major priority."

I said, "What do we know of the cell itself?"

"Bits and pieces. We know that they're using a higher level of technology than we've seen before from the terrorist community; and it's just this sort of thing that justifies the existence of the DMS. Understand, the DMS was proposed at the same time as Homeland but was rejected as being too expensive and unnecessary; the belief at that time being that terrorists may be capable of hijacking planes but were incapable of constructing advanced bioweapons." She sounded disgusted. "It's racist thinking, of course. To a very great degree the moguls in London and Was.h.i.+ngton still think that everyone in the Middle East is undereducated and out of touch with the twenty-first century."

"Which is bulls.h.i.+t," I said.

"Which is bulls.h.i.+t," she agreed. "What changed their thinking was something called MindReader, which is a piece of software that Mr. Church either procured or invented. I don't know which and he won't tell me. Point is that MindReader is a cascading a.n.a.lysis package that no other agency has, not even Barrier or Homeland. It looks for patterns through covert links to all intelligence-gathering databases. The tricky part is taking into account different operating systems, different languages-both computer and human-different cultures, time zones, currency rates, units of measure, routes of transport, and so on. MindReader cuts through all of that. It's also what we're using to try and decrypt the damaged files."

"Nice toy."

"Indeed. We began to see indications of the acquisition of materials, equipment, and personnel suggesting the creation of a bioweapons laboratory of considerable sophistication. A lab capable of both creating and weaponizing a biological agent."

"I thought those materials were monitored? How'd they swing all that?"

She gave me a calculating look. "How would you have done it?"

"What country are we talking?"

"Terrorism is an ideology not a nationality. Let's say you're a small group living under cover in a Middle Eastern country, not necessarily with the blessing of your resident state. Your group is composed of separatists from a number of the more extreme factions."

I thought about it. "Okay first I'd have to know that most of what I would need for a conventional bioweapon would be on that list of monitored items. I can't go to the corner drugstore and buy a vial of anthrax; I'd need to buy my materials in small quant.i.ties through several layers of middlemen so that no red flags go up. That takes time and it's expensive. Secrecy has to be bought. I'd buy some stuff in one country, other stuff elsewhere, spreading it around. I'd buy used stuff if I could, or buy parts piecemeal and a.s.semble them-especially hardware. I'd have them s.h.i.+pped to different ports, places where the watchdogs aren't as alert, and then go through some dummy corporations to res.h.i.+p them and res.h.i.+p them again. So, this would take both time and money."

She gave me an approving smile. "Keep going."

"I'd need lab s.p.a.ce, testing facilities, a production floor preferably someplace where I could dig in. Stuff like this isn't pick up and carry, so I don't want to work on the run. I need a nest. Once I'm set and I've spent whatever time it takes to make my weapon I'd have to sort out the problem of getting my weapon from my lab to the intended target. And if we're doing advanced medical stuff like plagues and new kinds of parasites, like the c.r.a.p we're dealing with here, then that's harder because you need access to supercomputers, ultrasterile lab conditions, and a lot of medical equipment."

"Spot on," Courtland said. "Mr. Church would probably give you a biscuit for that a.s.sessment. MindReader caught a whiff of biological research equipment being bought, as you say, piecemeal. Very carefully, you understand, and in small quant.i.ties to avoid ringing the kinds of alarms that have in fact been rung. It took a while for any of this to be noticed because it wasn't precisely the sort of thing we were expecting to find, and without MindReader we would never have spotted it at all. These materials were being ordered by firms located within nations that had been hit by crop blight, livestock disease, or similar natural calamity. Anyone who didn't have a suspicious mind would think that these countries were scrambling to find cures for the diseases that were creating famine and starvation affecting their own people."

"Like mad cow disease," I suggested.

"Top marks. Except for India and a handful of others, virtually every nation on earth depends on beef production and that disease was responsible for millions of cattle deaths and billions of pounds of economic loss. It would be natural for such countries to do anything they could to find a cure."

"Seems to me that you guys should have hit that plant already." I saw her eyes s.h.i.+ft away for a moment. "If the DMS has a combat team then they should have been deployed. You keep dodging my questions about what happened to the rest of your team, Major."

"They died, Mr. Ledger." It was Church's voice and d.a.m.n if I didn't hear him approach. Few people can sneak up on me. I turned quickly to see Church standing in the doorway, his face dour. He came into the room and leaned against the wall by the window.

"Died how?"