Patient Zero

Chapter Seventy-Two

Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 6:50 A.M.

RUDY WENT BACK into one of the trailers to conduct some postevent sessions with the remnants of Alpha Team. I spotted Grace standing at the aid station and headed over. Her eyes were red-rimmed but for now her tears were done. Maybe she’d cried herself dry, the magazine empty. I hoped Rudy would take some time for her soon.

As I approached she looked up, and in the space of a few seconds several emotions crossed her face. Grief, of course; but also pleasure and a little surprise, maybe as she realized that she was smiling at seeing me. Just as I was smiling to see her, and the sight of her was sending a warm and tingly wave through my stomach. The realization gave me a little jab of surprise, too. I felt it down deep. Understand, I’ve always held office romances in some degree of contempt, regarding the lovers as perpetrators of bad judgment, but as I became aware of feelings for Grace-however new and unformed they were-I couldn’t work up the slightest flicker of self-contempt. The angel on my right shoulder was getting his ass handed to him by the devil on my left.

“How are you,” I asked. “Or is that the single stupidest question ever asked since Nero asked his friends if they’d like to hear a little music?”

“I’ll get by,” she answered, handing me a cardboard cup of coffee. “I’m not going to let myself think too much about it about my team.” She sniffed and tried to smile. “I plan to have a complete breakdown when this is all over.”

“If you want company for that, let me know.”

She gave me a penetrating look and nodded. “I may take you up on that.” She changed tack. “Your friend Detective Spencer’s been asking for you. Or, to be precise, he’s been asking where the effing hell you are and what do you think you’re playing at having him dragged out by a goon squad while he’s on medical leave. Words to that effect. He’s not the mildest of men.”

“Jerry’s okay. Good cop.”

“You must know that we interviewed him.” She paused. “That’s why Mr. Church and I were at the hospital. At St. Michael’s. We’d had our eye on Spencer since he first joined the task force, and after he was shot we followed his ambulance to the hospital and ‘borrowed’ him once he was free of the ER doctors.” She shuddered. “I don’t like to think what would have happened if Mr. Church hadn’t been on site when the infection began spreading through the hospital.”

“You think it could have been worse?”

“I know it would have been.” She gave me a strange smile. “It’s funny, but in all the time I’ve known him, in all that the DMS has done since I’ve been seconded here from Barrier, it’s the only time I’ve ever seen Church take direct action.”

“I get the feeling that he’d be pretty effective. He has the look. What was he, Special Forces?”

“I truly don’t know what his background is, and I’ve covertly tried to find out. I think he’s used his MindReader system to erase his past. No fingerprints, no DNA on file, no voice-print patterns, nothing. He’s a ghost and these days no one’s a ghost.” She shook her head. “When the walkers came flooding down the halls heading toward the lobby Church didn’t get angry, didn’t even show the shock he had to be feeling. He simply took action. I was outside by then, establishing a perimeter, so I only had glimpses of him through the big glass doors in the lobby. He didn’t seem to do much, but as the walkers reached him they fell, one after the other. I’ve only ever seen one person move with that kind of ruthless efficiency.”

“Oh? Who’s that? Maybe we should recruit him.”

“We did,” she said, locking my eyes with hers.

“Ah,” I said, feeling enormously uncomfortable. “I guess I need to add ‘ruthless efficiency’ to my résumé.”

“You know what I mean. You don’t hesitate. It doesn’t seem to affect you.”

The image popped into my head of the walkers in the hallway climbing over each other to get to me and how my hands almost slipped as I slapped a magazine into my gun. And then a second and more terrible picture began flashing on the big movie screen in my head: my hands reaching out to Grace in the lab and the moment of hesitation I felt as I worked up the nerve to break her neck to spare her from becoming a zombie.

“Believe me, Grace, it does. Really and truly. I nearly lost it a couple of times over the last day. No joke.”

Grace shook her head. “ ‘Nearly’ doesn’t count. But even so Church is different, colder. He’s less ” She tried to put a word to it and couldn’t.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I saw a little bit of that today.” I told her about the interrogation, but like Rudy Grace seemed unmoved.

“What did you learn?” she asked.

“Not a lot, though Church is still working on him. The code name for the walker plague is Seif al Din. Translates as ‘the Sword of the Faithful’; but it has a second connection, and that may be the biggest tidbit we got out of Aldin. He confirmed that El Mujahid sometimes takes the name of Seif al Din. Kind of like Carlos being the Jackal.”

She nodded. “El Mujahid is a clever bastard. There are a lot of blokes in counterterrorism who would love to hang him very slowly from a tall tree.”

“I’ll buy the rope. But I’m not sure how fast we should label El Mujahid as our supervillain here, Grace. I read the Homeland profile on him when I was with the task force and I don’t recall anything that said he has a background in science. Explosives, maybe, but not medicine. He’s more of a field general than a lab rat.”

“Then he’s hired lab rats. Bin Laden isn’t an airline pilot but his people still flew planes into the towers.”

“Mm,” I said noncommittally. “Well, I’d better get inside before Jerry has kittens.”

She took my hand and gave it a hard, quick squeeze and started to turn away, then paused, doubt on her face. “Joe We have the plant, the army of walkers they were making, the computers. Did Aldin mention anything about any other sites? Any cells we’ve missed?”

“No. He said he’d overheard the guards talking about possible locations for another site but he didn’t think they’d settled on a spot yet. This plant here is the main site. The factory floor, so to speak; and a lot of the stuff that was stored here was intended for use with future cells. He said the Delaware meatpacking plant was relatively new. A tiny lab, no computers, just a bunch of stored walkers. He didn’t even know about the captured kids or the experiments planned for them.”

“Do you think he was lying?”

I shook my head. “You weren’t in the room. Once he started talking he kept on talking. Hu got enough information to begin working on a research protocol.”

“Even so, what’s your intuition tell you? Have we stopped the immediate threat? Do we have time now to rebuild our teams? Or is the clock still ticking?”

“I don’t know, Grace,” I told her honestly. She nodded glumly and headed off and I went to find Jerry Spencer.