Jonathan Maberry - Patient Zero

“Is it the Brits? You think Barrier is—”

He shook his head. “No, not Barrier. Something the Yanks have cooked up, but as I said—I’m not sure who yet. I have feelers out through Homeland, the FBI, a few other agencies. If I’m right then they’ll show their hands soon enough.”

“You should put your pet monkey on it. He’s tenacious.”

Gault smiled. “His name is Toys… and yes, he is tenacious.” In fact, Gault thought, he’d love to cook you over a slow fire.

“So… what are you going to do about the plant?”

“I rather think I’m going to let them raid it. I can’t think of a better way of inspiring useful fear than letting me break in and see what’s going on in that place. It’ll do us worlds of good.”

“But what about El Mujahid? He’s the master of creating fear, and his mission is already in the works. If you allow the raid on the warehouse does that mean you’ll use that instead of what my husband is—”

“Hardly,” Gault assured her. “I’m relying on the Fighter to deliver the master stroke; but a raid on the plant will surely set the atmosphere… after which everything will go exactly as we want.”

She frowned at him, chewing a lip as she considered this. He knew that she was sorting through the possible outcomes based on what she knew—what he’d allowed her to know. She would come to very logical conclusions, and on the whole they would be right; but they would be incomplete. Which was fine.

“Don’t worry, my princess,” Gault said, and turned onto his side so he could stroke her hair and brush the back of his hand against her cheek. “This is going very, very well for us. We need the Yanks to think they’re containing the situation. If they have a new special operations group, then it will help focus attention in the right direction for us. The best manipulations are always those in which the mark thinks he is in charge.”

Amirah kissed him. “You have the mind of a scorpion, my love.”

“Now, what do you have to show me?”

Her eyes lit up. “If creating great fear is what you want, then you’ll be very happy with what we’ve done since the last time you were here.”

“As good as Javad?”

“Oh no… this is much, much better.”

He almost said “I love you.” Instead he kissed her deeply and passionately and then whispered in her ear: “Show me.”

Baltimore, Maryland / Monday, June 29; 6:03 A.M.

NEXT MORNING I called a friend who worked early shift at DMV records and asked her to run Buckethead’s plates, but that went nowhere. No such plates existed. Big surprise.

I logged back onto the department server to reread the task force report on the warehouse; it was gone. Completely gone. No file name, no incident folders, nothing.

“You bastard,” I said aloud. Church had impressed me before, but now he was beginning to scare me. He threw enough weight to be able to locate and remove the official records of Homeland Security’s Interjurisdictional Counterterrorism Task Force. That meant accessing local, state, and federal computer mainframes. Holy shit.

There was a hard copy of the report in my desk at the squad room, but I had doubts that it would still be there if I went in to get it. This wasn’t helping my feelings of paranoia. I turned and looked around my apartment. How aggressive would these guys be? Surely they wouldn’t…

One second later I was searching my apartment from top to bottom looking for microphones, phone bugs, fiber-optic surveillance threads. I looked hard and I looked everywhere. I found nothing. That didn’t mean there was nothing to find, though; Homeland and that whole crew had a lot of very sneaky toys that were designed not to be found. All the search resulted in was a two-degree drop in my paranoia and an itchy spot between my shoulder blades like someone had a laser sight on me.

Cursing under my breath I headed into the bedroom to put on a suit in preparation for the OIS hearing, but as I was picking out a tie the phone rang. I snatched it up thinking it was Rudy.

“Detective Ledger? This is Keisha Johnson.”

I recognized her voice. She was the lieutenant overseeing the Officer Involved Shooting investigation for the Task force raid. I thought about the searches and calls I’d made despite Church’s warning to stay away from this and had a brief panic attack.

“Yes…?” I said cautiously, heart in my throat.

“In your absence we reviewed all of the videotapes from the raid last Tuesday, and after several discussions with your commanding officer and the supervisors for the task force, we’ve concluded that your shooting was in keeping with the best policies and practices of the Baltimore Police Department and no further hearings or actions will be required at this time.”

I said something clever like: “Um… what?”

“Thank you for your willingness to cooperate, and good luck at Quantico. We’ll be sorry to lose such a fine officer.” And with that she hung up.

I stared at the phone in total shock. There was no way that an OIS hearing would be handled like this. Not ever, not even if everyone involved agreed that the shooting was completely righteous. Department policy mandated a hearing, token or not. This was weird and I didn’t like it one damn bit. The paranoia was back stronger than ever. But the logic was all twisted. If I’d somehow rattled Church’s cage by trying to find some answers, why would he smooth the way for me by canceling the hearing? I couldn’t see the advantage to him in it.

I sat back down at my computer and pulled up the list of URLs Rudy had sent on prion diseases. Maybe that would give me a direction to follow, and I spent hours buried in science that was beyond me, but not so far beyond that it couldn’t scare me. I learned that prion diseases are still very rare, about one case out of a million people worldwide, and only about three hundred cases here in the States. It was rare but seriously dangerous, and the mysteries surrounding the little buggers often led to panic reactions. The whole mad cow thing was prion disease at its worst, and the haste with which tens of thousands of cattle were slaughtered showed the degree of fear associated with the threat. Not that any of this helped. I’m pretty darn sure Javad didn’t get the way he was from eating a bad McBurger. Then I clicked on another of Rudy’s URLs which took me to an article on a prion-based disease called “fatal familial insomnia” in which a small group of patients worldwide suffered increasing insomnia resulting in panic attacks, the development of odd phobias, hallucinations, and other dissociative symptoms. The whole process takes months and the victim generally dies as a result of total sleep deprivation, exhaustion, and stress. I searched all around the topic and though there was no connection at all to a state resembling living death the concept stuck in my head. Unending wakefulness. No sleep. No rest. No dreams.

“Jesus…” It was a horrifying thought, and what a terrible way to die.

Could Church have been wrong? Was Javad actually suffering from a disease whose symptoms led the doctors to believe he was dead when maybe he was really in a coma? His coming back from the dead could have been nothing more sinister than waking up from a cataleptic coma. Some part of that felt right to me, but as I read on I hit another speed bump. Several of the sites said that the victims could not be put to sleep, not even through artificial means. They didn’t lapse into a terminal coma at the end of their suffering. They died, and apparently stayed dead. Besides, even if Javad had been in some kind of walking catatonia it didn’t explain how he’d shrugged off the two .45s I’d put in his back. Clearly there was too much of the picture that I couldn’t see, and it was maddening.