Patient Zero

Chapter Twenty

Baltimore, Maryland / Monday, June 29; 9:17 A.M.

I DECIDED TO come at this from a different route, so I called Jerry Spencer, my friend from DCPD who’d gotten his sternum cracked at the warehouse. Jerry was thirty years on the job and was the best forensics man I ever met. If anyone had caught a whiff of this DMS thing it’d be him.

He answered on the fifth ring.

“Jerry. Hey, man, how’s the chest?”

“Joe,” he said. No inflection.

“How are you? You still out on medical or-”

He cut me off. “What do you need, Joe?”

His tone was matter-of-fact, so I decided to be straight with him. “Jerry, have you ever heard of a federal agency called the DMS?”

There was a long silence on the line, and then Jerry said, “No, I haven’t, Joe and neither have you.”

Before I could work out a response to that he hung up.

“Uh-oh,” I murmured, and for the next ten minutes all I did was sit there and stare at the phone. Jerry had been gotten to; a blind man could see that. It strained my head to imagine how much force it would take to spook a guy like Jerry enough to have him blow me off like that.

Cobbler jumped into my lap and I stroked his silky fur while I chewed on the problem.

Until now I’d hesitated doing a direct search on the DMS for fear of that acronym, or the words “Department of Military Sciences,” setting off some kind of alarms. For a while now the government has used different software packages to locate certain combinations of words in e-mail or Net searches. Type in something like “bomb” and “school” and it’s supposed to raise a red flag. Doing this kind of search could land my ass in a sling. On the other hand how could I just leave this be? How could Church expect me to forget it? Even if Church was right and the whole Javad/prion/walking dead thing was over-a one-shot fluke that we lucked into and solved before it got out of the box-that still didn’t alter the fact that the incident changed my whole world. Now I know how those folks feel who see a UFO or Bigfoot-not the nutcases, but the ones who are absolutely sure they’ve seen something outside of normal reality, and have nowhere to go with it.

What would happen if I did that search? I mean what would Church really do as a result? I met the man, and even though I could see him feeding a busload of orphans and nuns to hungry wolves if it furthered his aims, I didn’t take him for petty vindictiveness.

So, what would he do if I did a search on “Department of Military Sciences”?

“Kiss my ass, Church,” I said, and hit the enter key.

I got a few hits for college ROTC programs under that name, but in terms of national security or secret agencies, absolutely nothing came up on the search. A waste of time? Maybe. Or maybe I had lobbed a serve into Church’s court.