Patient Zero

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 sunshine 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 antiterrorism 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 passes 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 passed 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 shipping 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.”

“Shit,” 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 shipped 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 ass 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 assigned 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 God, 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 assigned to the tail?”

“No, I was definitely assigned 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 shift 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 blow jobs 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 relationship we were going to have. “Bloody hell,” 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 Washington still think that everyone in the Middle East is undereducated and out of touch with the twenty-first century.”

“Which is bullshit,” I said.

“Which is bullshit,” 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 analysis 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 quantities 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 assemble them-especially hardware. I’d have them shipped to different ports, places where the watchdogs aren’t as alert, and then go through some dummy corporations to reship them and reship them again. So, this would take both time and money.”

She gave me an approving smile. “Keep going.”

“I’d need lab space, 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 crap 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 assessment. MindReader caught a whiff of biological research equipment being bought, as you say, piecemeal. Very carefully, you understand, and in small quantities 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 shift 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 damn 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?”

Courtland looked at Church, but he was looking at me. He said, “Javad.”

“I killed Javad-”

“Twice, yes; but the first time you encountered him he was still technically alive. Infected, sure; dying, to be certain but alive. He was being transported to a hospital for a postmortem.”

“Yeah, and-?”

“He woke up on the way to the morgue.”

“God ”

Courtland said, “The bite of a walker is one hundred percent infectious ”

“So you both said.”

“If a person receives a fatal bite then shortly after clinical death the disease reactivates the central nervous system and, to a limited degree, some organ functions, and the victim rises as a new carrier. If a person receives even a mild bite the infection will kill them in about seventy hours, which at best gives us three days to locate any victims and contain them.”

“I’m not sure I like the word ‘contain,’ ” I said.

“No one will like that word if it comes to that,” Church said.

“Bite victims begin to lose cognitive functions quickly,” Courtland continued, “and even before clinical death they become dissociative, delusional, and uncontrollably aggressive. In both the predeath and postreanimation phase the carriers have a cannibalistic compulsion.”

Church said, “This is all information we learned after the fact.”

I looked at them. “What the hell happened?”

Church’s face was as ice. “We didn’t know what Javad was at first. How could we? The learning process for us was very awkward.”

“What does that mean?”

“You read about the fire at St. Michael’s Hospital? The night of the task force hit?”

I sat there, not wanting to hear this. Grace looked away but Church stared back at me with a dreadful intensity.

“Javad woke up hungry, Mr. Ledger. Only two DMS agents accompanied the body to the morgue. We lost contact with them shortly after arrival. Major Courtland and I were actually at the hospital but were conducting an interview in another wing. When the alert came in we called in all available teams, but by the time they arrived on the scene the infection had spread to an entire wing of the hospital. Major Courtland’s Alpha Team had perimeter duty and Bravo and Charlie teams entered the hospital to try and contain the situation.”

“We thought there had been an attempt by other terrorists to recover the bodies of their fallen comrades,” Courtland said. “But it was only Javad. By the time the teams were inside the infection was completely out of control. Javad had gotten all the way down to the lobby and was attacking people in the waiting area. Mr. Church was able to subdue him-and before you ask, no, we didn’t know what Javad was at that point. He was a suspected terrorist, albeit one we thought had been killed. Our agents were confused because the attackers appeared to be patients, doctors, nurses. Our men hesitated. They were overwhelmed.”

“How many of them did you lose?”

“All of them, Mr. Ledger,” Church said. “Two teams; twenty-two men and women. Plus the two agents who had been in the ambulance. Some of the finest and most capable tactical field operatives in the world. Torn to pieces by old women, children, ordinary civilians and ultimately by each other.”

“What did you do?”

“You read the newspapers. The situation needed to be contained.”

I leaped to my feet. “Jesus Christ! Are you telling me that you deliberately burned down the entire fucking hospital What kind of sick son of a bitch are you?”

Without turning he said, “Earlier, when I told you that if this plague gets out, there will be no way to stop it, I was not exaggerating. Everyone would die, Mr. Ledger. Everyone. We are talking the actual apocalypse here. Counting Javad, our patient zero, we have a loss of life totaling one hundred and eighty-eight civilians and twenty-four DMS operatives. Two hundred and ten deaths as a result of one carrier. Friends of mine are dead. People I knew and trusted-and all of this spread from a single source that was, more or less, contained. We lucked out in that the attack was inside a building that had reinforced windows and heavy-duty doors we could lock. And, to a small degree we were on the alert, though not for something like this. If no security had accompanied his body to the hospital well, it’s doubtful we’d be here having this conversation. Same goes if the terrorist cell had followed through with its plan. Had Javad been turned loose, say, in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, or South Central L.A. on a Saturday afternoon, or at the rededication of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia this coming weekend, we would never have been able to contain it. Never. Now we are reasonably sure that there are more strike cells, each one likely to have one or more walkers. We know where one is and we have that under heavy surveillance. If there are others we need to find and neutralize them. We have to do everything we can to locate and destroy these other carriers. If we don’t then we will have failed all of humanity. We may already be too late.” He turned toward me, and his face was filled with a terrible and savage sadness. “To stop this thing I’d burn down heaven itself.”

I stood there, stunned and sick. “Why the hell did you drag me into this shit?”

“I brought you here because you have qualities I need. You are an experienced investigator with an understanding of politics. You can speak several useful languages. You have extensive martial arts training. You are tough and you are ruthless when it comes down to it. You’ve demonstrated that you lack hesitation in a crisis. Hesitation got our other teams killed. You’re here because I can use you. I want you to lead my new team because my existing agents are being slaughtered and I need it to damn well stop!”

“But why now? Why didn’t you tell me this the other day when I auditioned for you?”

“Things have gotten worse,” said Courtland. “The other day we thought we had this under control, that we really had gotten the jump on it. We were wrong. We programmed MindReader to search all available databases for anything that might be related. One of the things we programmed it to find were cases of attacks involving biting.”

“Oh crap ”

Church said, “So far there have been three cases. All isolated, all in the Middle East. Two in very remote spots in Afghanistan and one in northern Iraq.”

“When you say ‘isolated’ ” I began.

“All three were identical: small villages in remote areas that have natural barriers-mountains in two cases, a river and a cliff wall in the other. Each village was totally wiped out. Every single man, woman, and child was killed. Every body showed signs of human bites.”

“And, what, the villagers were all walkers now?”

“No,” said Courtland. “Every person in each village had been shot repeatedly in the head. No other bodies were found.”

“What does that tell you?” Church asked.

“God Almighty,” I breathed. “The isolation, the cleanup afterward it sounds like someone’s been taking the walkers out for test-drives.”

“The most recent one was five days ago,” Courtland said.

“Okay,” I said softly. “Okay.”

“This time they left a calling card,” Church said, “a video of the slaughter and a message from a hooded man. We’re running voice recognition on it but my guess is that it will be El Mujahid or one of his lieutenants.”

“The attack took place in a small mountain village called Bitar in northern Afghanistan,” said Courtland quietly. “Military authorities were tipped off to the attack but arrived hours after it was over. They found a tape that had been left for them on one of the bodies of the dead. Barrier intercepted it and was only fortunate enough to keep it from being generally released. We’re lucky it wasn’t posted on YouTube.”

“If you’re in,” Church said, “then as soon as possible I want you to lead Echo Team in a quiet infiltration of the crab plant in Crisfield. That will put you and the members of your team in terrible danger. I make no apologies about it I brought you here because I need a weapon. A thinking weapon. Something I can launch against the kind of people who would use something like Javad against the American people.” He paused for a moment. “The only people who have ever faced a walker and lived are in this room. So let me ask you, Mr. Ledger,” he said softly, “are you in or not?”

I wanted to kill him. Courtland, too. I could feel my lips curling back and past the stricture in my throat. With a hiss in my voice I said, “I’m in.”

Church closed his eyes and sighed. He stood with his head bowed for a moment. When he opened his eyes he looked ten years older but far, far more dangerous.

“Then let’s get to work.”