Patient Zero

Chapter Seventy-Eight

Sebastian Gault / The Hotel Ishtar, Baghdad / Thursday, July 2

“LINE?”

“Clear as a bell, my sweet.”

“Sebastian ” The way Amirah said it made Gault feel warm everywhere. “I’ve missed you so.”

“Me, too.” His voice was husky and it nearly cracked. He covered the mouthpiece and cleared his throat. “I want you,” he murmured.

“I need you,” she replied, and Gault could feel the sweat popping out on his forehead.

Gault opened his eyes and looked around the hotel room. It seemed so drab, so overtly empty. Toys had gone shopping in the bazaar with a female rock star who was in town to entertain the troops. Gault wished he were back in Afghanistan. With her. He shook his head and made himself change the subject.

“A lot’s happened,” he said, his voice suddenly brisk and businesslike. He told her about the raid on the crab plant.

“You let them have the computers?” Her voice sounded shocked, almost frightened.

“I let them have some of the computers. All of it was old data, nothing past Generation Three, though they won’t be able to tell that from the time-coding. They’ll think this is all recent research data.”

“You’re sure?”

“Quite sure. They’ll have more than they need to understand the earlier generations of the pathogen. Scientists will be queuing up to get federal grant money to study it.”

“What are you saying? That we’re done? That we should call off the operation?”

“Good Lord, no! Your loving husband and his merry little prank is going to be the icing on this cake. Without him the Yanks might lapse into one of those periods of red tape where everything gets talked about in committees but nothing actually gets done. No, dear heart, we need them frightened, terrified so terrified, in fact, that they are too scared not to act. Once El Mujahid has pulled off his stunt then they will be in full gear, no doubt about it.”

“ ‘Stunt’?” Amirah said, and Gault could hear the change in her voice, which had suddenly dropped to one degree above freezing. “I would hardly call a heroic sacrifice a ‘stunt’ or a ‘prank.’ ”

“I’m sorry,” he said with a purr, “I don’t mean to disparage his sacrifice. Have I offended you?” He listened very closely to her as she replied, and he noted the hesitation-small though it was-before she spoke.

“Oh, of course not.” Her voice sounded light. “But I think we should maintain some respect. After all, he is a freedom fighter. He believes in his cause, even if we do not.”

And there it was again. The slightest fragment of hesitation before she said “we.” It came close to breaking his heart.

“How is the shutdown process going?” he asked, changing tack again.

“It’s going well.” There it was again. Damn it. “We should be completely shut down by the end of the week.”

“And the staff?”

“I’ll take care of them.”

It had always been their intention to gather all nonessential personnel together once El Mujahid’s “heroic sacrifice” was under way, and to terminate them. The largest staff room was rigged to lockdown and flood with gas. Only certain key people would be spared and those few would form the nucleus of a new team that would start an entirely new line of research. All records of the Seif al Din pathogen and the years of lab work that had gone into its creation would be dumped to coded disks and then stored in one of Gault’s most secure locations. Everything else would be deleted or destroyed, all computer memory wiped. That was Amirah’s current task and she’d promised to do it, but there was something in her voice that troubled Gault.

“I’m glad you’re taking care of things, my love. Do you want me to come and help you clean up the last details?”

“No,” she said quickly. “I have everything under control. You have more important things to do.”

“Yes, I suppose I have.” He paused and said, softly, “I love you, Amirah.”

There was a final pause, and then she murmured, “I love you, too.”

After the line went dead Gault stood for a long while looking out the window at the plaza below. The erotic elation he’d felt when he had first heard her voice was completely gone. No, that was wrong-there was just enough of it left to make his heart hurt.

“Amirah ” he whispered to the night. Grief was like a heavy stone around his neck. Gault was too practiced a deceiver to be deceived; Amirah, though clever, was far less skilled at guile. What was it the Americans were so fond of saying? Never bullshit a bullshitter. Her pauses had been too long and in all the wrong places; some of the inflections were brittle. He wondered if she was aware of it, and doubted it. She was sure of her sexual control over him, Gault was certain of that, just as he was certain she was lying to him. About her lab and her staff. That could be a real problem and he knew that he would need to take a look, that he would need to go back to Afghanistan even though it was a poor security risk with so many things in motion. And she was certainly lying about El Mujahid. Her comment about his “sacrifice” was telling, and the things it implied broke his heart.

He went and built himself a gin and tonic, but as he tumbled ice into the glass he saw that his hands were shaking.

“God damn her!” he roared and abruptly hurled the glass across the room with such savage force that it shattered into thousands of silvery fragments that fell glistening to the carpet.

He sagged back against the wet bar. “Damn you,” he said again, and now his eyes burned with tears.

What should he infer from this and from the other hints he’d picked up over the last few weeks? Did Amirah really have feelings for her brute of a husband? Was that even possible? After all of the sex, after all of the constant betrayal and the plotting behind the Fighter’s back, could she haven fallen back in love with El Mujahid? Gault reached for another glass and mixed another drink, swallowed half of it down a dry throat, and poured more gin into it without adding any extra tonic.

Then something occurred to him that made his heart go still in his chest. He could hear his pulse throbbing in his ears as the new thought blossomed from a seed of suspicion into a fully realized belief. The gin in his stomach turned to sickness as he realized that all of the pieces of this puzzle did actually fit together but that the picture they made was one that he had never expected or foreseen.

What if Amirah had never stopped loving El Mujahid? What if this whole thing, from the very beginning before their clandestine meeting in Tikrit, what if everything she had done for him and with him and to him had been part of an older scheme, one that was not of his design? What if this had been something Amirah and El Mujahid had cooked up themselves, something they’d twisted so subtly that he thought he had recruited them? What if they’d suckered him into financing their scheme instead of the other way around? Toys had once suggested this as a possibility but Gault had dismissed it with a laugh.

But now what if it was all true?

“Good Christ,” he said aloud, and now his hands were shaking so badly that gin sloshed out of his glass onto his shirtfront.

What if Amirah and El Mujahid were not helping him scam the U.S. government out of billions in research and production money? What if money was not even the point? Was that possible? he wondered, but the answer was so obvious. Toys had been right all along. The truth now burned in front of his mind’s eye like a flare. There was only one thing more powerful than money, especially in this part of the world.

What if this was jihad?

Gault staggered backward and his back crashed against the wet bar. His legs turned to rubber and he sat down hard on the floor, the rest of his drink splashing onto his thighs. He didn’t feel the wetness or the cold. All he could feel was a rising sense of terror as the realization that he had given the world’s deadliest weapon to a wickedly clever assassin and insured-insured-that nothing could stop the release of the Seif al Din pathogen. El Mujahid was not carrying the weaker strain of the disease with him, Gault was certain of that now. The Fighter was taking with him Amirah’s newest strain, Generation Seven. The unstoppable one. The one that infected too quickly for any kind of response. The Fighter would release it and the plague would sweep the Western Hemisphere. Did Amirah think that its spread could be held back by oceans? Or, in her religious madness did she no longer care?

He crawled across the floor to the table and grabbed his cell phone, hit speed dial and waited through four interminable rings before Toys answered with a musical, “Hello-o-o!”

“Get back here!” Gault said in a hoarse whisper.

“What’s wrong?” Toys said sharply, his voice low and urgent.

“It’s ” Gault began, then a sob broke in his chest. “My God, Toys I think I’ve killed us all.”

The phone fell from his hands as the black reality of apocalypse bloomed like a mushroom cloud.