Patient Zero

Chapter Four

Easton, Maryland / Saturday, June 27; 11:58 A.M.

THEY PUT ME in a room that had a table, two chairs, and a big picture window with a drawn curtain. An interrogation room, though the sign outside had read Baylor Records Storage. We were somewhere in Easton off Route 50, more than seventy miles from where they’d picked me up. Buckethead told me to sit.

“Can I have a drink of water?”

He ignored me and left, locking the door.

It was nearly two hours before anyone came in. I didn’t kick up a fuss. I knew this routine. Park someone in an empty room and leave them to stew. Doubt and a guilty conscience can do a lot when you’re alone. I didn’t have a guilty conscience and no doubts at all. I simply lacked information, so after I did a visual on the room I went into my own head and waited, reviewing the number of thong bikinis I’d seen. I was pretty sure the count was twenty-two, and of those at least eighteen had a legal and moral right to wear a thong. It was a good day at the beach.

The guy who finally came in was big, very well dressed, maybe sixty but there was no trace of middle-age soft about him. Not that he looked especially hard, not like a muscle freak or a career DI. No, he just looked capable. You pay attention to guys like him.

He took a seat opposite me. He wore a dark blue suit, red tie, white shirt, and tinted glasses that made it hard to read his eyes. Probably on purpose. He had short hair, big hands, and no expression at all.

Buckethead came in with a cork restaurant tray on which was a pitcher of water, two glasses, two napkins, and a dish of cookies. It was the cookies that weirded me out. You generally don’t get cookies in situations like this and it had to be some kind of mind trick.

When Buckethead left, the guy in the suit said, “My name is Mr. Church.”

“Okay,” I said.

“You are Detective Joseph Edwin Ledger, Baltimore Police, age thirty-two, unmarried.”

“You trying to fix me up with your daughter?”

“You served forty-five months with the army, honorably discharged. During your time in service you were involved in no significant military actions or operations.”

“Nothing was happening while I was in the service, at least not in my part of the world.”

“And yet your commanding officers and particularly your sergeant in basic wrote glowingly of you. Why is that?” He wasn’t reading out of a folder. He had no papers with him at all. His shaded eyes were fixed on me as he poured a glass of water for each of us.

“Maybe I suck up nicely.”

“No,” he said, “you don’t. Have a cookie.” He nudged the plate my way. “There are also several notes in your file suggesting that you are a world-class smartass.”

“Really? You mean I made it through the nationals?”

“And you apparently think you’re hilarious.”

“You’re saying I’m not?”

“Jury’s still out on that.” He took a cookie-a vanilla wafer-and bit off an edge. “Your father is stepping down as police commissioner to make a run for mayor.”

“I sure hope we can count on your vote.”

“Your brother is also Baltimore PD and is a detective two with homicide. He’s a year younger and he outranks you. He stayed home while you played soldier.”

“Why I am here, Mr. Church?”

“You’re here because I wanted to meet you face-to-face.”

“We could have done that at the precinct on Monday.”

“No, we couldn’t.”

“You could have called me and asked me to meet you somewhere neutral. They have cookies at Starbucks, you know.”

“Too big and too soft.” He took another bite of the wafer. “Besides, here is more convenient.”

“For ”

Instead of answering he said, “After your discharge you enrolled in the police academy, graduated third in your class. Not first?”

“It was a big class.”

“It’s my understanding that you could have been first had you wanted to.”

I took a cookie-Oreo for me-and screwed off the top.

He said, “You spent several nights of the last few weeks before your finals helping three other officers prepare for the test. As a result two of them did better and you didn’t do as well as you should have.”

I ate the top. I like it in layers. Cookie, cream, cookie.

“So what?”

“Just noting it. You received early promotion to plainclothes and even earlier promotion to detective. Outstanding letters and commendations.”

“Yes, I’m wonderful. Crowds cheer as I go by.”

“And there are more notes about your smart mouth.”

I grinned with Oreo gunk on my teeth.

“You’ve been recruited by the FBI and are scheduled to start your training in twenty days.”

“Do you know my shoe size?”

He finished his cookie and took another vanilla wafer. I’m not sure I could trust a man who would bypass an Oreo in favor of vanilla wafers. It’s a fundamental character flaw, possibly a sign of true evil.

“Your superiors at Baltimore PD say they’re sorry to see you go, and the FBI has high hopes.”

“Again, whyn’t you call me instead of sending the goon squad?”

“To make a point.”

“About ”

Mr. Church considered me for a moment. “On what not to become. What’s your opinion of the agents you met today?”

I shrugged. “A bit stiff, no sense of humor. But they braced me pretty well. Good approach, kept the heat down, good manners.”

“Could you have escaped?”

“Not easily. They had guns, I didn’t.”

“Could you have escaped?” He asked it slower this time.

“Maybe.”

“Mr. Ledger ”

“Okay, yes. I could have escaped had I wanted to.”

“How?”

“I don’t know, it didn’t come to that.”

He seemed satisfied with that answer. “The pickup at the beach was intended as something of a window to the future. Agents Simchek, Andrews, and McNeill are top-of-the-line, make no mistake. They are the very best the Bureau has to offer.”

“So I’m supposed to be impressed. If I didn’t think the FBI was a good next step I wouldn’t have taken your offer.”

“Not my offer, Mr. Ledger. I’m not with the Bureau.”

“Let me guess the ‘Company’?”

He showed his teeth. It might have been a smile. “Try again.”

“Homeland?”

“Right league, wrong team.”

“No point in me guessing then. Is this one of those ‘we’re so secret we don’t have a name’ things?”

Church sighed. “We do have a name, but it’s functional and boring.”

“Can you tell me?”

“What would you say if I said ‘but then I’d have to kill you’?”

“I’d say drive me back to my car.” When he didn’t move, I added, “Look, I was army for four and Baltimore PD for eight, the last eighteen months of which I’ve been a gopher for the CT task force. I know that there are levels upon levels of need-to-know. Well, guess what, Sparky: I don’t need to know. If you have a point then get to it, otherwise kiss my ass.”

“DMS,” he said.

I waited.

“Department of Military Sciences.”

I swallowed the last of my cookie. “Never heard of it.”

“Of course not.” Matter-of-fact, no mockery.

“So is this going to turn out to be some kind of cornball Men in Black thing? Thin ties, black suits, and a little flashy thing that’ll make me forget all this shit?”

He almost smiled. “No MIB, nothing retroengineered from crashed UFOs, no rayguns. The name, as I said, is functional. Department of Military Sciences.”

“A bunch of science geeks playing in the same league as Homeland?”

“More or less.”

“No aliens?”

“No aliens.”

“I’m no longer in the military, Mr. Church.”

“Mm-hm.”

“And I’m not a scientist.”

“I know.”

“So why am I here?”

Church looked at me for almost a minute. “For someone who is supposed to have rage issues you don’t anger very easily, Mr. Ledger. Most people would be yelling by this point in an interview of this kind.”

“Would yelling get me back to the beach any sooner?”

“It might. You also haven’t asked for us to call your father. You haven’t threatened me with his juice as commissioner.”

I ate another cookie. He watched me dismantle it and go through the entire time-honored Oreo ritual. When I was done he slid my glass of water closer to me.

“Mr. Ledger, the reason I wanted you to meet the FBI agents today was because I need to know if that’s what you want to be?”

“Meaning?”

“When you look inside your own head, when you look at your own future, do you see yourself in a humorless grind of following bank accounts and sorting through computer records in hopes of bagging one bad guy every four months?”

“Pays better than the cops.”

“You could open up a karate school and make three times more money.”

“Jujutsu.”

He smiled as if somehow he’d scored a point and I realized that he’d tricked me into correcting him out of pride. Sneaky bastard.

“So, tell me honestly, is that the kind of agent you want to be?”

“If this is leading up to some kind of alternative suggestion, stop jerking me off and get to it.”

“Fair enough, Mr. Ledger.” He sipped his water. “The DMS is considering offering you a job.”

“Um hello? Not military? Not a scientist?”

“Doesn’t matter. We have plenty of scientists. The military connection is merely for convenience. No, this would be something along the lines of what you do well. Investigation, apprehension, and some field work like at the warehouse.”

“You’re a Fed, so are we talking counterterrorism?”

He sat back and folded his big hands in his lap. “ ‘Terrorism’ is an interesting word. Terror ” He tasted the word. “Mr. Ledger, we are very much in the business of stopping terror. There are threats against this country greater than anything that has so far made the papers.”

“ ‘So far.’ ”

“We-and when I say ‘we’ I embrace my colleagues in the more clandestine agencies-have stopped fifty times as many threats as you would believe, ranging from suitcase nukes to radical bioweapon technologies.”

“Yay for the home team.”

“We’ve also worked to refine our definition of terrorism. Religious fundamentalism and political idealism actually play a far less important role, in a big-picture sense, than most people-including heads of state, friendly and not-would have the general public believe.” He looked at me for a moment. “What would you say is the most significant underlying motive for all world strife-terrorism, war, intolerance the works?”

I shrugged. “Ask any cop and he’ll tell you that,” I said. “In the end it’s always about the money.”

He said nothing but I could sense a shift in his attitude toward me. There was the faintest whisper of a smile on his mouth.

I said, “All of this seems to be a long way from Baltimore. Why’d you bring me here? What’s so special about me?”

“Oh, don’t flatter yourself, Mr. Ledger, there have been other interviews like this.”

“So, where are those guys? You let them go back to the beach?”

“No, Mr. Ledger, not as such. They didn’t pass the audition.”

“I’m not sure I like how you phrased that.”

“It wasn’t meant to be a comforting comment.”

“And I suppose you want me to ‘audition’ next?”

“Yes.”

“How does that play out? Bunch of mind games and psych tests?”

“No, we know enough about you from your current medical records and fifteen years of psych evaluations. We know that in the last couple of years you’ve suffered severe losses. First your mother died of cancer and then your ex-girlfriend committed suicide. We know that when you and she were teenagers you were attacked, and that some older teens beat you nearly to death and then held you down and made you watch as they raped her. We know about that. We know you went through a brief dissociative phase as a result, and that you’ve had some intermittent rage issues, which is one of the reasons you regularly see a therapist. It’s fair to say you understand and can recognize the face of terror when you see it.”

It would have felt pretty good to demonstrate the whole rage concept to him right then, but I guessed that’s what he would be looking for. Instead I made my face look bored. “This is where I should get offended that you’ve invaded my privacy, et cetera?”

“It’s a new world, Mr. Ledger. We do what we must. And yes, I know how that sounds.” Nothing in his tone of voice sounded like an apology.

“So, what do I have to do?”‘

“It’s quite simple, really.” He got up and walked around the table to the curtain that hung in front of the big picture window. With no attempt at drama he pulled back the curtain to reveal a similar room. One table, one chair, one occupant. A man sitting hunched forward, his back to the window, possibly asleep. “All you need to do is go in there, then cuff and restrain that prisoner.”

“You kidding me?”

“Not in the least. Go in there, subdue the suspect, put him in cuffs, and attach the cuffs to the D-ring mounted on the table.”

“What’s the catch? That’s one guy. Your goon squad could have-”

“I am aware what overwhelming force could do, Mr. Ledger. That’s not the point of this exercise.” He reached into his jacket pocket and produced a pair of handcuffs. “I want you to do it.”