Patient Zero

Chapter Forty-Seven

Hotel Ishtar, Baghdad / June 30

“WHO WAS ON the phone?” Gault asked as he came out of the bathroom, a plush crimson robe cinched around him. “Was it Amirah?”

Toys handed him a cup of coffee on a china saucer. “No, it was the Yank again.”

“What did he want? No-let me guess. The Americans finally raided the crab plant? Bloody well time, too-”

“No,” said Toys. “It seems they’ve raided the other facility. The one in Delaware. The meatpacking plant.” He overpronounced the word “meatpacking,” enjoying the implications of each syllable.

Gault gave a bemused grunt and sipped his coffee. “That’s unfortunate.” He sat and chewed his lip for a few seconds. “What about the other plant? They were supposed to locate and infiltrate that first.”

Toys sniffed. “Leave it to the U.S. government to always do the right thing at the wrong time. What’s that phrase you like so much?”

“ ‘Bass ackwards.’ ”

Toys giggled. He loved to make Gault say it.

Gault finished his coffee and held his cup out for more. Toys refilled it and they sat down; Gault in the overstuffed chair by the French windows, Toys perched on the edge of the couch with his saucer on his knees. An iPod in a Bose speaker dock played Andy Williams singing Steve Allen, with Alvy West on alto sax. Meet Me Where They Play the Blues. Toys had been converting all of Gault’s vast collection of historic big-band music to the iPod. Gault wondered where he found the time.

When the song ended, Toys said, “This alteration in the timetable is that going to change things? With El Musclehead, I mean.”

“I’ve been working that through in my head. The timing is tricky. It really would have been better if they hit the crab plant first, and I can’t understand why they didn’t.”

“Could they have decrypted the files from the warehouse? You said it was only a matter of time.”

“A matter of very precise time. I paid good money to make sure that those files would not be cracked this quickly. The flashdrive was deliberately and very precisely damaged and the programs corrupted just enough to have given us at least forty hours more, even if they used the best equipment.” He shook his head in frustration. “Dr. Renson and that other computer geek assured me that no technology exists to do it faster.”

“What about MindReader?”

Gault waved that away. “MindReader’s a myth. It’s Internet folklore cooked up in some hacker’s fantasies. They’ve been mythologizing about it since the nineties.”

Toys was insistent. “What if it’s real?”

Gault shrugged. “If it’s real and the DMS has it, then, yes, they could scramble the timetable. But so what? At this point nothing they do can stop the program.”

“You’re the boss,” Toys said in a wounded tone of voice that he knew needled Gault. “But it doesn’t answer the question of what to do about the crab plant and whether this will spoil the whole operation.”

“No,” Gault said after some consideration, “no, it won’t spoil the plan. Too many things are in motion now. But as far as the plant goes, it won’t be a total disaster.”

Toys studied his face and began to grin. “You’re making that face. I know that face, What have you got cooking over there?”

Gault gave him an enigmatic smile. “Expect another call from the Yank sometime soon.”

“Hm,” purred Toys, “I’ll be waiting with bated breath.”