Jonathan Maberry - Patient Zero

It wasn’t sex, either, because all a man could see of Amirah were her eyes, and in the Middle East there were millions of women with beautiful eyes. No, this went deeper than sex, deeper even than religious law. This was power. Real, palpable, earthshaking power; and it was there in Amirah’s eyes, as if her eyes were a window into the heart of a nuclear furnace.

The first time Gault had seen her was two months before the Americans invaded Iraq. They were two among thousands at an anti-Coalition rally in Tikrit. He had been there, quietly recruiting and waiting for contact that, his sources had told him, could bring him to El Mujahid. Gault had felt something touch him, almost like hot fingers scraping the skin of the back of his neck, and he’d turned to see this woman standing fifteen feet away, staring at him. He’d been at a loss for words for the first time in his life, totally riveted by the impact of those eyes and of the fierce, vast intelligence behind them. She had walked up to him, affecting the modest gait of a good Muslim woman, and while the crowd was entirely focused on Saddam, who was giving a rousing speech in which he promised to rebuff any U.S. attempt to set foot on Iraqi soil, the woman bent close and said: “I am Amirah. I can take you to paradise.”

In any other circumstances that line would have been cheap, a prostitute’s come-on; but to Gault it was the code phrase he’d been waiting to hear for many weeks. He was so taken aback, so startled that this was the messenger he’d come to Tikrit to find, that he almost flubbed the countersign, but after two or three stammering attempts he managed to say: “And what will I see there?”

She had said three magical words that filled Gault with great joy. Leaning a few inches closer Amirah had whispered, “Seif al Din.”

What will I see there?

Seif al Din. The Sword of the Faithful.

That moment flashed through Gault’s mind as Amirah stepped into the tent. He got to his feet, smiling, wanting to take her in his arms, to tear away that ridiculous black rag she wore. He saw his need mirrored in her eyes and she smiled. All he could see of her smile was the soft crow’s feet at the corners of those lustrous brown eyes; and he knew that her smile was as much a promise as it was an acknowledgment. They could do nothing, share nothing while they were here in El Mujahid’s tent. Two guards stood behind her, both giving him hard stares.

“Mr. Gault,” she said in a docile voice. “My husband has instructed me to share with you the results of our experiments. Will you please accompany me to the bunker?”

“I need to get going. I have to be in Baghdad by—”

“Please, Mr. Gault. This is my husband’s wish.” She put just enough juice in the word “wish” to make it clear that it meant “order.” Jolly well done, he thought as he saw the guards behind her stiffen and harden their stares. It was all drama, nicely staged for effect.

“Oh, very well,” Gault said with an affect of bad grace and stood up with a sigh.

Amirah backed out of the tent and the two guards took position so that one was between her and Gault and the other between Gault and any chance of flight. El Mujahid was a careful individual, and that worked well for Gault, too. He followed Amirah to another tent that was set very close to a rock wall. Inside the tent were ornate wall hangings, and a third guard stood with his back to one of these, an AK-47 at port arms, his face as hard as a fist. At a word from Amirah, he stepped back and allowed her to push the heavy brocade aside. Behind it was the mouth of a shallow cave. Amirah, Gault, and two of the guards entered it, walked ten feet, and then turned with the cave’s natural bend. Around the corner, out of sight of the entrance, was a blank wall of rough gray-brown rock hung with desiccated moss. The guards told Gault to turn around and face the mouth of the cave, but Gault knew what was happening behind him. Amirah would reach into the moss and pull a slender piece of wire—something that would never be caught in any but the most scrupulous search of the cave—and there were a lot of caves in Afghanistan. She would pull the wire twice, wait four seconds and then pull it three more times. At that point a piece of the uneven wall would fold down to reveal a computer keypad. Amirah would then tap in a code, a randomly selected set of numbers and letters that changed daily, and once the code was accepted she would place her hand on the geography scanner. As far as El Mujahid knew only two people on earth knew that code—he and his wife; but Gault also knew it. Gault knew everything about the cave, the keypad, and the bunker that lay behind this wall. He had paid for it and had built dozens of computer trapdoors into the system.

He also knew how to destroy that bunker and its contents so that not one piece of useful data could be recovered. Granted, a large portion of Afghanistan would be sterilized as well, but those—as the Americans were so fond of saying—were the breaks. All he had to do was enter a code on his laptop. And if that didn’t work, Gault always had a backup plan ready; and if he disappeared his assistant, Toys, could initiate one of several retributive plans.

Gault heard the hiss of hydraulics and the guard grunted at him, indicating that he was allowed to turn. The whole back end of the cave had swung out to reveal an airlock as sophisticated as anything NASA had ever used.

“Please,” Amirah said, gesturing that he enter. One of the two guards remained in the cave while the other stepped into the airlock with Gault and the Princess. The massive door hissed shut and there was a series of complex sounds as various locks and safeguards engaged. A red light flicked on above the door and they turned to face the exit door as a green light came on above it. Amirah went through another code procedure, but this time the guard did not order Gault to look away. Now the guard grinned at Gault, who gave him a wink.

“How are the kids, Khalid?”

“Very well, sir. Little Mohammad is walking now. He is all over the place.”

“Ah, they grow up so fast. Give them a kiss for me.”

“Thank you, Mr. Gault.”

The second door opened and a wash of refrigerated air filled the chamber. “Ready?” Amirah asked.

“Say, Khalid… why don’t you go into the office and watch some videos. Give us a couple of hours.”

“Happy to, sir.”

They stepped out of the airlock and into the bunker that was as different from the camp outside as a diamond was from a lump of coal. There was a big central room packed with state-of-the-art research equipment and intelligence-processing hardware including satellite downlinks, high-speed Internet cable hard lines, plasma display screens on nearly every surface, and a dozen computer terminals. Surrounding the central lab were glassed offices, the supercooled chamber for the bank of Blue Gene/L supercomputers, and the five clean rooms with their isolated air and biohazard control systems. Down one corridor was the staff wing, with bedrooms for the eighty technicians and the twenty support staff.

The setup had cost a fortune. Fifty-eight million pounds, all routed through convoluted banking threads that would require an army of forensic accountants to follow. Nothing could be tied directly to him or to Gen2000. It was Gault’s belief that this was not only the most sophisticated private research facility in the world, but also the most productive and diverse. Genetics, pharmacology, molecular biology, bacteriology, virology, parasitology, pathology, and over a dozen other related sciences merged into one compact but incredibly productive factory floor that had paid for itself four times over with patents filed under the names of over seventy doctors who were on his payroll through one university or another, not the least of which was the first reliable drug for treating the rare blood cancers, new-onset sarcoidosis, and asbestos-related diseases that have cropped up in survivors of the World Trade Center collapse. The irony of that made Gault want to laugh out loud considering he’d advised bin Laden about the likely and potentially useful postcol-lapse health hazards before the Al Qaeda operatives had even enrolled in flight school.