Jonathan Maberry - Patient Zero

He didn’t have to explain that if there was a containment breach and my team was inside then we’d be flash-fried along with the hostiles. And even though that’s what I would order myself it didn’t make me feel any better about it.

“What’s going on with the prisoner? I thought you’d be interrogating him by now.”

“That would be nice,” he agreed, “but he has two bullets in his chest cavity. He’s in surgery. They’ll page me the moment he’s stabilized enough to answer questions.”

“And what if the control disease kicks in before then?”

“Then there will be that much more pressure on you to bring me another prisoner when you hit the crab plant.”

“Swell.” I finished my coffee. “Okay, take me to your mad scientists.”

The DMS Warehouse, Baltimore / Tuesday, June 30; 9:20 P.M.

AS HE LED me to the labs, Church said. “Dr. Sanchez has agreed, conditionally, to help us through the current crisis.”

“What are his conditions?”

“He’ll be here as long as you are. Apparently he thinks you need a minder.” He appeared amused. “Major Courtland is bringing him up to speed on everything.”

“Rudy’s not a fighter.”

“We all serve according to our nature, Captain. Besides, your friend may be tougher than you know.”

“I didn’t say he wasn’t tough. I just don’t want to see you put a gun in his hand.”

“Noted.”

We entered a huge loading dock that had been newly enclosed by cinderblock, and the smell of limestone and concrete hung thick in the damp air. There was a row of oversized trailer homes of the kind used as temporary offices on construction sites. As we passed each, Church threw out a single identifying word. Cryptography. Surveillance. Operations. Computers.

We passed one whose door was marked with a TWELVE in black block letters, and Church made no comment about this one. There were four armed guards outside, two facing out, two facing the unit’s only door, and a tripod-mounted .50 stood behind a half-circle of sandbags, its wicked black mouth pointing at the trailer door. I slowed for a moment, frowning, feeling the tension that was screaming in the air, and I felt a chill like an icy hand close around the back of my neck.

“Damn,” I breathed. “You have more of them in there?”

“Among other things, yes,” he said softly. “It’s also our surgical suite, and that’s where our prisoner is. But to answer your question, we have a total of six.”

“Like Javad?”

Church’s face seemed to harden as he said, “The six walkers were all from St. Michael’s. One doctor, three civilians, two DMS agents.”

“My… God!”

“This evening I’m having three of them sent to our Brooklyn facility for study. The others will remain here.”

“For study? But… you’re talking about your own people.”

“They’re dead, Captain.”

“Church, I—”

“They’re dead.”

Hotel Ishtar, Baghdad / June 30

“WHO WAS ON the phone?” Gault asked as he came out of the bathroom, a plush crimson robe cinched around him. “Was it Amirah?”

Toys handed him a cup of coffee on a china saucer. “No, it was the Yank again.”

“What did he want? No—let me guess. The Americans finally raided the crab plant? Bloody well time, too—”

“No,” said Toys. “It seems they’ve raided the other facility. The one in Delaware. The meatpacking plant.” He overpronounced the word “meatpacking,” enjoying the implications of each syllable.

Gault gave a bemused grunt and sipped his coffee. “That’s unfortunate.” He sat and chewed his lip for a few seconds. “What about the other plant? They were supposed to locate and infiltrate that first.”

Toys sniffed. “Leave it to the U.S. government to always do the right thing at the wrong time. What’s that phrase you like so much?”

“‘Bass ackwards.’”

Toys giggled. He loved to make Gault say it.

Gault finished his coffee and held his cup out for more. Toys refilled it and they sat down; Gault in the overstuffed chair by the French windows, Toys perched on the edge of the couch with his saucer on his knees. An iPod in a Bose speaker dock played Andy Williams singing Steve Allen, with Alvy West on alto sax. Meet Me Where They Play the Blues . Toys had been converting all of Gault’s vast collection of historic big-band music to the iPod. Gault wondered where he found the time.

When the song ended, Toys said, “This alteration in the timetable… is that going to change things? With El Musclehead, I mean.”

“I’ve been working that through in my head. The timing is tricky. It really would have been better if they hit the crab plant first, and I can’t understand why they didn’t.”

“Could they have decrypted the files from the warehouse? You said it was only a matter of time.”

“A matter of very precise time. I paid good money to make sure that those files would not be cracked this quickly. The flashdrive was deliberately and very precisely damaged and the programs corrupted just enough to have given us at least forty hours more, even if they used the best equipment.” He shook his head in frustration. “Dr. Renson and that other computer geek assured me that no technology exists to do it faster.”

“What about MindReader?”

Gault waved that away. “MindReader’s a myth. It’s Internet folklore cooked up in some hacker’s fantasies. They’ve been mythologizing about it since the nineties.”

Toys was insistent. “What if it’s real?”

Gault shrugged. “If it’s real and the DMS has it, then, yes, they could scramble the timetable. But so what? At this point nothing they do can stop the program.”

“You’re the boss,” Toys said in a wounded tone of voice that he knew needled Gault. “But it doesn’t answer the question of what to do about the crab plant… and whether this will spoil the whole operation.”

“No,” Gault said after some consideration, “no, it won’t spoil the plan. Too many things are in motion now. But as far as the plant goes, it won’t be a total disaster.”

Toys studied his face and began to grin. “You’re making that face. I know that face, What have you got cooking over there?”

Gault gave him an enigmatic smile. “Expect another call from the Yank sometime soon.”

“Hm,” purred Toys, “I’ll be waiting with bated breath.”

The DMS Warehouse, Baltimore / Tuesday, June 30; 9:24 P.M.

THE INTERIOR OF the lab was somewhere between a scientist’s wet dream and a god-awful mess, with heaps of books and spilled stacks of computer printouts, coffee cups everywhere and tables laden with every manner of diagnostic and forensics equipment. Gas chromatographs, portable DNA sequencers, and a lot of stuff I’d never seen before even at the State Crime Lab. Sci-fi stuff. Machines pinged and beeped and blipped and a dozen technicians in white lab coats pushed buttons and made notes on clipboards and exchanged grim looks. In the middle of all of this was one desk, bigger than all the others, that was a shrine to pop culture geekiness, and though I pride myself on seldom showing surprise I went a little slack-jawed at what I saw. In an astonishing display of either the blackest humor on record or spectacular bad taste, there were horror magazines, bobble-heads of zombies from half a dozen movies, at least fifty zombie novels with dog-eared pages, and the entire collection of resin action figures of Marvel superheroes as decaying zombies. Seated like a happy school kid in the middle of this oasis of poor taste was a sloppy thirty-something Chinese guy with a bad haircut and a Hawaiian shirt under his lab coat. Church stood beside the desk—but not too close—and his immaculate suit and air of command seemed like a statement by comparison.