Patient Zero

Chapter Five

Easton, Maryland / Saturday, June 27; 2:08 P.M.

THE FIRST THING I noticed when I opened the door to the interrogation room was the stink. Smelled like a treatment plant. The guy didn’t stir. He was slim, probably shorter than me, dark-skinned-Hispanic or Middle Eastern. Black hair that was sweat-soaked and lank. He wore a standard orange prison jumpsuit and he seemed completely out of it, his head hanging almost down to his knees.

I stepped into the room, conscious of the big mirror on my left. Mr. Church would be watching me, probably eating another vanilla wafer. The door closed behind me and I turned to see Buckethead staring at me through the glass. For a second I thought he was smiling, and then his expression registered. It was more like a wince, a flinching twist of his face as if he expected a scorpion to jump out at him. Even behind a steel door the agent was spooked by this guy. Swell. I held my cuffs in my right hand and extended my left in a calm, assertive gesture, palm outward. It looks placating but it’s right there in case you need to block, grab, or hit.

“Okay, pardner,” I said calmly. “I need you to cooperate with me here.” A beat. “Can you hear me, sir?

The man didn’t move.

I angled around the table, coming up on his left. “Sir? I need you to stand up with your hands on your head. Sir Sir!”

Nothing.

I moved closer. “Sir, I need you to stand up-”

And he did. All at once his head snapped up and his eyes popped open as he shot to his feet and spun toward me. My heart skipped. I recognized the guy. The pale, sweaty face, the glazed pop-eyed stare. It was Javad-the terrorist I’d shot and killed back in Baltimore. He hissed like a cat and threw himself at me. He was maybe one-fifty, five seven, but he hit me in the chest like a cannonball, driving us both across the room so hard that my back crunched against the rear wall. I hit my head and sparks burst in my eyes. I jammed my forearm under his chin as Javad snapped at me like an animal, lunging forward over my arm, his teeth banging together with a weird porcelain clack. He grabbed my shirt with both hands, trying to pull us closer together.

The DVD player in my head kept running and rerunning the scene back at the warehouse where I’d shot him in the back. Granted, I wasn’t the one who checked his vitals afterward, but I’d put two.45 slugs in him from fifteen feet. Pretty much does the trick. If it doesn’t then your only logical ammunition upgrade is Kryptonite. But for a guy who should be dead, he was pretty damn spry.

Even though this was all happening too fast I still had time to register the look in his eyes. Despite the twisted, ferociously hungry snarl of his face and the snapping of his teeth, his eyes were totally empty. No flicker of awareness, no trace of self-knowledge, not even the fire of hate. This wasn’t the deadeye stare of a shark, nothing like that. This was freak-show stuff because there was nothing there; it was like looking into an empty room.

I think that terrified me more than the teeth that were biting the air an inch from my windpipe. Right then I knew why the other applicants had failed this audition. They’d probably been big men like me, strong men like me, and maybe they’d been able to hold him off this long-just long enough to look into those soulless eyes. I think that’s when they failed. I don’t know if Javad tore their throats out. I don’t know if this was the point where they started screaming for help and Church sent Buckethead and his goon squad in with Tasers and riot sticks. What I did know was that looking into those eyes nearly took the soul out of me. I could actually feel my throat closing up, could feel an icy wire sending electricity down through my bowels.

I saw terror and hopelessness there. I saw death.

But here’s the thing, you see, I’d seen those things before. I may not have been on any of the world’s battlefields, but Church was right when he’d said that I’ve seen the face of terror. It went a lot deeper than that, though. It isn’t just terror that I understood I knew the face of death. I’d been bedside when cervical cancer took my mom. I was the last thing she saw before she slipped into the big black nothing, and I saw the light and life go out of her; I saw her eyes change from living eyes to those of a dead person. You can never forget that; the image is burned onto the front of your brain. I was also the one who found Helen after she’d swallowed half a bottle of drain cleaner. She’d left a goodbye message on my voice mail and was already gone when I kicked in the door. I saw her dead eyes, too.

I’ve also looked into the dead eyes of men I’ve killed on the job. Two men in eight years, not counting the four at the warehouse.

So, I’d looked into dead eyes before, I know what I saw there. I saw death and terror and hopelessness. Not my mom’s, not Helen’s, not the criminals I’ve killed-no, the deadness I see is my own, reflected in eyes that have nothing of their own to show. You can’t fake that dead look. A lot of warriors have that look because they are in harmony with death. Church probably knew all this. He knew everything else about me. He knew my psych file. That bastard knew.

Javad lunged forward again, his fingers tearing my shirt, his stink that of a carrion bird. No that wasn’t right, that wasn’t it. Javad’s smell was that of carrion. He smelled like the dead. Because he was dead. This whole train of thought shot through my brain in a microsecond, its speed and clarity amplified by terror.

Terror’s a funny thing, though. It can take your heart from you and bare your throat to the wolves; it can make you go all hot and crazy, which almost always gets you killed or it can make you go cold. That’s what happens to warriors-real ones, the kind who are defined by conflict. Like me.

So I went cold. Time slammed to a halt and the whole room seemed to go quiet except for the muffled hammering of my own heart. I stopped trying to get away from something I couldn’t escape-I was jammed into a corner and Church wasn’t sending the damned cavalry-so I did what Javad was doing. I attacked.

I swung my right hand around in a palm shot that turned his head so hard to the right that I heard his neck bones grind. It would have stopped anyone; it didn’t stop him any more than the two slugs had stopped him. But it gave me a few seconds’ escape from those teeth, and even as Javad started wrenching his face back toward me I hooked my leg around his and chopped at the back of his knee. Maybe he couldn’t feel pain but a bent knee is a bent knee-it’s a gravity thing. He canted to one side and I used his sagging weight to spin and drive him into the wall. I caught him by the back of the hair and slammed him face forward into the wall once, twice, again and again. His jaw disintegrated; but I grabbed what was left of his chin and twisted my fingers into his hair and then I pivoted my hips as hard and as fast as I could, taking his head with me. My body turned faster and farther than his neck could.

There was a huge wet snap!

And then Javad was gone. His body switched off like someone had kicked the plug out and he simply dropped. I stepped back and let him fall.

I could barely breathe; sweat poured down my face, stung my eyes. I heard a sound behind me-I wheeled around and Church was leaning against the frame of the open doorway.

“Welcome to the new face of global terrorism,” he said.