Patient Zero

Chapter Eleven

Grace Courtland and Mr. Church / Easton, Maryland; 6:22 P.M.

MR. CHURCH SAT in the interrogation room and waited. There was a discreet tap on the door and a woman entered. She was medium height, slender, and had looks that Church had once heard referred to as “disturbingly pretty.” She wore a tailored gray suit and skirt, low-heeled pumps and coral blouse. Short dark hair, brown eyes with gold flecks. No rings, no jewelry. She looked like a Hollywood accountant or an executive at one of the snootier ad agencies.

“You saw?” Church asked.

She closed the door and glanced at the laptop Church had on the table before him, the screen lowered to hide its contents. “Yes. And I’m not happy with losing the walker.” Her voice was low and throaty with a London accent. “I know we have other subjects, but-”

Church dismissed that with a little movement of his head. “Grace, give me an assessment of his capabilities based on what just happened.”

She sat. “On the plus side he’s tough, resourceful, and vicious, but we already knew that from the warehouse videos. He’s tougher than any of the other candidates.”

“What’s on the minus side?”

“Sloppy police work. Two lorries left the warehouse the night before his task force raided it, one was tracked, one wasn’t. Ledger was involved.”

“I think that when we acquire all of the records from the task force things might look different where Ledger’s involvement is concerned.”

Grace looked dubious.

“What else is in the minus column?” Church asked.

“I don’t think he’s emotionally stable.”

“Have you read his psych profile?”

“Yes.”

“Then you already knew that.”

She pursed her lips. “He’s no yes man. He’d be hard to control.”

“As a team player, sure; but what if he was a team leader?”

Grace snorted. “He was a sergeant in the army with no combat experience. He was the lowest-ranking member of the joint task force. I hardly think ” Grace stopped, sat back in her chair and cocked an eyebrow. “You like this bloke, don’t you?”

“Liking him is irrelevant, Grace.”

“You really see him as management material?”

“Still to be determined.”

“But you’re impressed?”

“Aren’t you?”

Grace turned and looked at the window to the other room. Two agents in hazmat suits were strapping Javad’s corpse to a gurney. She turned back to Church. “What would you have done if he’d been bitten?”

“Put him in Room Twelve with the others.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

She turned away for a moment, not wanting Church to see the contempt and horror in her eyes. Her face reflected the horror, shock, and grief she-and so many others in the DMS-felt. It had been a dreadful week. The worst of Grace’s life.

“Your assessment,” he prompted.

“I don’t know. I think I’d need to see him in a few other situations before I would want to see him wearing officer’s rank. After what happened at the hospital we can’t afford to have anything less than first chair when it comes to team leadership.”

“If it was your choice to make, would you invite him into the unit?”

She drummed her fingers on the table. “Maybe.”

He pushed the plate toward her. “Have a cookie.”

She saw that the plate held Oreos and vanilla wafers. She declined with a polite shake of her head.

Church raised the screen of the laptop and turned it so they could both see it. “Watch,” he said and pressed the play button. A high-resolution image appeared of a group of men in black combat fatigues moving rapidly through an office hallway.

“The warehouse?” she asked. “I’ve seen this already.”

“You haven’t seen this part.” On the screen Joe Ledger stepped into shot about twenty yards ahead of the agent whose camera had provided the footage. Ledger spotted two task force officers taking fire from three hostiles who were shooting from a secure position behind a stack of heavy crates. Bullets tore chunks from the paltry cover behind which the agents crouched. Ledger came up on their seven o’clock, well out of their line of sight; he had his pistol in his hand but to open fire from that distance would have been suicide. He might get one or two but the other would turn and chop him up. There was no cover at all between Ledger and the hostiles, but he hugged the wall, running on cat feet, making no noise that could have been heard above the din of the gunfire.

When Ledger was ten feet out he opened fire. His first shot caught one of the hostiles in the back of the neck and the impact slammed him into the crates. As the other two turned Ledger closed to zero distance and fired one more shot and the second hostile staggered back, but then the slide on Ledger’s gun locked open. There was no time to change magazines. The third hostile instantly lunged at him, swinging his rifle barrel to bear. Ledger parried it with his pistol and then everything turned into a blur. All three hostiles were down.

Grace frowned but declined to comment as the file repeated in slow motion, leaning forward at the point where the slide locked back on Ledger’s gun. The slow-mo even caught the elegance of the ejected brass arching through the air. Ledger had the pistol held out in front of him so it was obvious that he recognized the predicament of the empty magazine but he did not visibly react to it. His hands separated and while he was still in full stride he used the empty gun to check the swing of the hostile’s rifle while simultaneously jabbing forward with his left hand, fingers folded in half and stiffened so that the secondary line of knuckles drove into the attacker’s windpipe. As this was happening Joe’s left foot changed from a regular running step into a longer lunge and the tip of his combat boot crunched into the cartilage under the hostile’s kneecap; and a fraction of a second later Ledger’s gun hand came up and jabbed the exposed barrel of the pistol into the hostile’s left eye socket.

The attacker flew backward as if he’d been hit by a shotgun blast. Ledger completed his step and was smoothly reaching to his belt for a fresh magazine when the footage ended.

“Bloody hell!” Grace gasped. It came out before she could stop the words.

“Elapsed time from the slide locking back to completed kill is 0.031 seconds,” said Church. “Tell me why I want him for the DMS.”

She hated when he did this to her. It was like being in school, but she kept her annoyance off her face. “He showed absolutely no hesitation. He didn’t even flinch when his gun locked open, he simply went into a different form of attack. It’s so smooth, like he’d practiced that one set of moves for years.”

“In light of that video and your assessment would you consider him a likely candidate for us?”

“I don’t know. His psych evals read like a horror novel.”

“Past tense. His dissociative behavior was directly related to a specific traumatic event that happened when he was a teenager. His service record since then doesn’t show an unstable personality.”

She shook her head. “That trauma happened during a crucial phase of his life. It informed the rest of his development. It’s why he began studying martial arts. It’s why he joined the army, and it’s why he became a policeman. He keeps looking for ways to channel his rage.”

“It seems to me that he’s found ways to channel it. Very useful ways, Grace. If he was lost in rage then his pathology would be different. A rageaholic would have taken up something confrontational; instead he’s refined his abilities through an art known for its lack of flamboyance.”

“Which could be interpreted as someone desperate to maintain control.”

“That’s one view. Another is that he’s found control, and it’s saved him.”

Grace drummed her fingers on the table. “I still don’t like those old psych evaluations. I think there’s a ticking bomb there.”

“You should read your own, Grace. The recent ones,” Church said mildly, and she shot him a withering look. “Tell me, Grace-if he’d been with Bravo or Charlie teams at St. Michael’s do you think things would have gone differently?”

Grace’s jaw tightened. “That’s impossible to say.”

“No it isn’t. You know why things went south at the hospital, and you saw this tape. My question stands.”

“I don’t know. I think we would need to observe him a lot more.”

“Okay,” he said. “Then go and observe him.”

With that he got up and left the room.