Patient Zero

Chapter Fifty

Amirah / The Bunker / Tuesday, June 30

THE PHONE WOKE her and for a moment Amirah did not know where she was. A fragment of a dream flitted past the corner of her eye and though she could not quite define its shape or grasp its content, she had an impression of a man’s face-maybe Gault, maybe El Mujahid-sweating, flushed with blood, eyes intense as he raised himself above her on two stiffened arms and grunted and thrust his hips forward. It was not a lovemaking dream. It had more of the vicious indifference of a rape, even in the fleeting half-remembrance of it. The most lasting part of the dream was not the image of the man-whichever man it had been-but from a deep and terrible coldness that entered her with each thrust, as if the man atop her was dead, without heat.

Amirah shook herself and stared at the phone on her desk that continued to ring. She glanced around her office-it was empty, though she could see workers in the lab on the other side of the one-way glass wall. She cleared her throat, picked up the phone, and said, “Yes?”

“Line?”

“It’s clear.” She said it automatically, but then pressed the button on the scrambler. “It’s clear now,” she corrected.

“He’s on his way.” Gault’s voice was soft and in those four words Amirah could hear the subtle layers of meaning that she always suspected filtered everything he said.

“How is he?”

“No longer pretty.”

Amirah laughed. “He was never pretty.”

“He’s no longer handsome, then,” Gault corrected.

“Is he in much pain?”

“Nothing he can’t handle. He’s very stoic, your husband. I think if he had a bullet in his chest he would shrug it off as inconsequential. Few men have his level of physical toughness.”

“He’s a brute,” Amirah said, flavoring her voice with disgust.

There was a pause at the other end as if Gault was assessing her words, or perhaps her tone. Did he suspect? she wondered, and not for the first time.

“He’ll have some time to rest while he travels. He needs to regain his strength. We provided him with plenty of drugs to keep the pain under control; and let’s face it, stoicism only really works when people are watching. We don’t want him to fall into despair while he’s all alone in his cabin.”

Amirah said nothing. She probably should have, she knew, but the image of the mighty El Mujahid sitting alone and in pain in a tiny interior cabin on some rusty old freighter was compelling.

Into the silence, and as if reading her mind, Gault said, “Don’t fret, my love; I own the ship’s surgeon as well as the captain.”

“I’m not fretting, Sebastian. My concern is that his wounds not become infected. We need him to be in the best possible shape for the mission.” She was careful to use the word “mission” now, having slipped once before when she called it the “cause.” She wasn’t sure Gault had noted the error, but he probably had. He was like that.

“Of course, of course,” he said soothingly. “Everything is taken care of. He’ll be fine and the plan will go off as we planned. Everything is perfect. Trust me.”

“I do,” she said, and she softened her voice. “I trust you completely.”

“Do you love me?” he asked, a laugh in his voice.

“You know I do.”

“And I,” he said, “will always love you.” With that he disconnected the call.

Amirah leaned back in her chair and stared thoughtfully at the phone, her lips compressed, the muscles at the sides of her jaw bunched tight. She waited five minutes, thinking things through, and then she opened the bottom drawer of her desk and removed the satellite phone. It was compact, expensive, and new. A gift from Gault. It had tremendous range and there were signal relays built into the ceiling of the laboratory bunker so that her call would reach up into space and would from there be bounced anywhere on the planet. Even as far as a helicopter flying across the ocean to catch a freighter that was far out to sea.