Patient Zero

Chapter Six

Easton, Maryland / Saturday, June 27; 2:36 P.M.

“WHAT WAS HE?”

We were back at the table. They’d let me clean up in a bathroom. I showered and dressed in borrowed gym clothes. The shakes had started in the shower. Adrenaline accounted for a lot of it, but it was more than that. After thirty minutes my hands were still trembling and I didn’t care if Church saw it.

He shrugged. “We’re still working on a name for his condition.”

“Condition? That son of a bitch was dead!”

“From now on,” Church said, “we may have to consider ‘dead’ a relative term.”

I had to sit with that for a while. Church waited me out.

“That is the same guy I shot at the warehouse, right? I mean, I put him down hard. I saw blood and bone on the walls ”

“Javad Mustapha, an Iraqi national,” Church agreed, nodding. “Your shots were mortal but not immediately so; he was still alive when he was transported to the hospital where he was pronounced DOA. He ‘revived’ shortly after arrival.” He spread his hands. “We controlled that incident and you won’t find specific mention of it in the papers or in any official report.”

“Holy Christ are we talking zombies here?”

Church smiled faintly. “We’re calling him a ‘walker.’ Short for ‘Dead Man Walking.’ The head of my science team has too much of a pop culture sensibility. And before you ask, it’s not anything supernatural.”

“How did this happen? Some kind of toxic spill a plague ”

“We don’t know. A prion disease, perhaps, or a parasite; maybe both, but certainly something that causes hyperactivity of the stem cells. True to the nature of parasites, the infected have a totality of purpose built around procreation. Not sexually, of course, but through a bite that is apparently one hundred percent infectious. We’ve only begun to research it.”

“Is it only his bite that’s infectious?” I asked. It felt like ice-cold army ants were marching around in my gut.

“We’ve done a number of tests on sweat and other body fluids but the strongest concentration of the disease is in the saliva. The bite transmits the infection.”

I looked at the bruise on my arm. “I’m not wearing Kevlar. If I’d been bitten in there ”

He looked at me.

Anger was a white-hot furnace in my chest. “You’re a total rat bastard, you know that?”

“As I said, Mr. Ledger, this is the new face of terrorism. A fierce, terrible bioweapon we don’t yet understand. It may take us months to even construct a viable research protocol, which means that time is completely against us. We think that your friend Javad in there was the bioterrorist approximation of a suicide bomber, that he was the ‘patient zero’ for an intended plague directed at the U.S. The blue case recovered at the scene was some kind of climate-controlled containment system, quite possibly to protect the other cell members from their own weapon. None of the others at the warehouse showed any signs of infection.” He paused. “We think we stopped them.”

“You ‘think’?” I heard how he leaned on the word.

“Yes, Mr. Ledger, but we don’t know. And we have to know, just as we have to be ready in case this happens again. If Javad is the only plague vector then we’ll scratch one up for our side and start looking for their next trick, or try to be ready for whenever they try this trick again. If, on the other hand, there are other teams out there ready to launch others like Javad well, that’s part of the reason the DMS was formed.”

“Then you’d sure as hell better check with the task force commander because two panel trucks pulled out of that warehouse the night before we hit it. We tracked one and lost one ”

“Yes. Losing one was sloppy.”

I fought the urge to flip him the bird. “Who’s behind this? Is this an Al Qaeda thing, because the task force was never able to pin that down?”

“That’s still uncertain, though we have some suspicions. The other members of the cell were a mixed bunch. Al Qaeda, Shia extremists, two Sunni extremists, and even one from the Egyptian Islamic Jihad.”

“Shia and Sunni working together?”

“Interesting, isn’t it?” Church said dryly. “The name you picked up in your wiretap-El Mujahid-lends a little weight to the idea of collaboration. He’s been known to work with several of the more extreme splinter groups.”

“I assume you interrogated the surviving cell members?”

He said nothing.

“Well ”

“They’re all dead. Suicide.”

“How? Didn’t you search them for cyanide pills in their teeth and all that shit?”

Church shook his head. “Something a bit cleverer than that. Each of them had been infected with a pathogen of a type as yet unidentified; they needed to take a drug every eight hours to keep the disease dormant. Without the drug the disease becomes active with incredible speed and immediately begins to erode vascular tissue. We didn’t know this until they started bleeding internally, and even then we barely got enough information out of the last one to understand the shape of it. The control substance was hidden in ordinary aspirin tablets. We would never have known to look.”

“Is this the same disease that my dancing partner in there had?”

“No. And as far as we can tell it’s noncommunicable. I have some of the top scientists in the world working with the DMS, and so far they’ve been scratching their heads. Some of them are actually impressed.”

“So am I. This is some pretty sophisticated stuff we’re talking about.”

“And yet simple; you wouldn’t even need much in the way of guards and threats. One person with the pill bottle to control them all is all they’d need. Very easy to manage. This level of sophistication raises our opinion of this cell and makes their potential that much greater.”

I said, “What happened to the other guys? The ones who auditioned before me? Did they get bitten?”

“One did, I’m sorry to say. Two others did not.”

“Jesus Christ!”

It was an effort not to leap across the table and tear his throat out. I watched Church’s face, saw the shift of his body language as the anger in my voice registered. If I’d gone across that table he’d have been ready for me. “What about the other two? You go rescue them?”

“No. They both managed to cuff the suspect.”

“Then I don’t understand.”

“It isn’t only the physical component of the test that matters, Mr. Ledger. Each of them faced the moment of truth, as you yourself are doing now, and each of them reacted ” He paused, pursing his lips. “Inadequately.”

“In what way?”

“In ways that identified them as unsuitable candidates.” He waed his hand, dismissing that line of discussion.

“Why am I here?”

“Ah, the golden question. You’re here, Mr. Ledger, because we are scouting for candidates to flesh out our DMS team. We’re a new agency. We have lots of funding and we have a nicely vague set of parameters. Our intelligence division is hard at work to infiltrate and report on cells such as the one your team took down in Baltimore. We’re surveilling the location where the first panel truck went, and we have high hopes of discovering the destination of the other.”

“And you want me to sign up?”

He showed his teeth again. Kind of a smile. “No, Mr. Ledger, I want you to go to the FBI academy as planned.”

“I don’t-”

“Only now you’ll have a clearer focus on which parts of that training to pay more attention to. Medical and management courses would be worthwhile. You can probably imagine which others would be of use.”

We sat for a while with that comment hanging in the air.

“And when I’m done?”

Church spread his hands. “If the threat is over-truly over-you may never hear from me again. If you look for proof of my existence, or of the existence of this organization, you’ll find nothing of any use; and I don’t advise trying. You will of course say nothing about what happened here. I make no threats, Mr. Ledger; I believe I can trust both your intelligence and common sense in this matter.”

“What if there are more of these things, these walkers?”

“In that eventuality I will very probably be in touch.”

“You have to know that this isn’t over. It can’t be. Nothing’s that simple.”

“I appreciate your cooperation today, Mr. Ledger.”

With that he stood and offered me his hand. I looked at it and then at him for maybe ten full seconds during which neither his hand nor his eyes wavered. Then I stood and shook his hand. As he left Buckethead and the others came for me and drove me back to my car. They didn’t say a word, though on the drive back each of them cut me wary glances every now and then.

As they drove off I memorized the license number. Then I got into my SUV and sat for maybe twenty minutes, staring through the window at the beach and the happy people playing in the sun. A second wave of the shakes hit me and I had to clamp my jaws shut to keep my teeth from chattering. It was like the way I felt after 9/11. The world had changed again. Just as “terror” had become a far more common word to us all then, terror was a much scarier word to me now.

What would I do if Church called me back?