Jonathan Maberry - Patient Zero

“And unless there’s more to this disease than we think.”

“What are the chances of that, Doctor?”

He didn’t answer, which was answer enough.

“Damn,” I said.

Amirah / The Bunker / Tuesday, June 30

THE PHONE WOKE her and for a moment Amirah did not know where she was. A fragment of a dream flitted past the corner of her eye and though she could not quite define its shape or grasp its content, she had an impression of a man’s face—maybe Gault, maybe El Mujahid—sweating, flushed with blood, eyes intense as he raised himself above her on two stiffened arms and grunted and thrust his hips forward. It was not a lovemaking dream. It had more of the vicious indifference of a rape, even in the fleeting half-remembrance of it. The most lasting part of the dream was not the image of the man—whichever man it had been—but from a deep and terrible coldness that entered her with each thrust, as if the man atop her was dead, without heat.

Amirah shook herself and stared at the phone on her desk that continued to ring. She glanced around her office—it was empty, though she could see workers in the lab on the other side of the one-way glass wall. She cleared her throat, picked up the phone, and said, “Yes?”

“Line?”

“It’s clear.” She said it automatically, but then pressed the button on the scrambler. “It’s clear now,” she corrected.

“He’s on his way.” Gault’s voice was soft and in those four words Amirah could hear the subtle layers of meaning that she always suspected filtered everything he said.

“How is he?”

“No longer pretty.”

Amirah laughed. “He was never pretty.”

“He’s no longer handsome, then,” Gault corrected.

“Is… he in much pain?”

“Nothing he can’t handle. He’s very stoic, your husband. I think if he had a bullet in his chest he would shrug it off as inconsequential. Few men have his level of physical toughness.”

“He’s a brute,” Amirah said, flavoring her voice with disgust.

There was a pause at the other end as if Gault was assessing her words, or perhaps her tone. Did he suspect? she wondered, and not for the first time.

“He’ll have some time to rest while he travels. He needs to regain his strength. We provided him with plenty of drugs to keep the pain under control; and let’s face it, stoicism only really works when people are watching. We don’t want him to fall into despair while he’s all alone in his cabin.”

Amirah said nothing. She probably should have, she knew, but the image of the mighty El Mujahid sitting alone and in pain in a tiny interior cabin on some rusty old freighter was compelling.

Into the silence, and as if reading her mind, Gault said, “Don’t fret, my love; I own the ship’s surgeon as well as the captain.”

“I’m not fretting, Sebastian. My concern is that his wounds not become infected. We need him to be in the best possible shape for the mission.” She was careful to use the word “mission” now, having slipped once before when she called it the “cause.” She wasn’t sure Gault had noted the error, but he probably had. He was like that.

“Of course, of course,” he said soothingly. “Everything is taken care of. He’ll be fine and the plan will go off as we planned. Everything is perfect. Trust me.”

“I do,” she said, and she softened her voice. “I trust you completely.”

“Do you love me?” he asked, a laugh in his voice.

“You know I do.”

“And I,” he said, “will always love you.” With that he disconnected the call.

Amirah leaned back in her chair and stared thoughtfully at the phone, her lips compressed, the muscles at the sides of her jaw bunched tight. She waited five minutes, thinking things through, and then she opened the bottom drawer of her desk and removed the satellite phone. It was compact, expensive, and new. A gift from Gault. It had tremendous range and there were signal relays built into the ceiling of the laboratory bunker so that her call would reach up into space and would from there be bounced anywhere on the planet. Even as far as a helicopter flying across the ocean to catch a freighter that was far out to sea.

The DMS Warehouse, Baltimore / Tuesday, June 30; 9:58 P.M.

RUDY AND I walked down the corridor together. Church had lingered to speak with Hu. I looked at my watch. “Hard to believe this is the same day, you know?”

But he didn’t want to talk about it out in the corridor. I asked a guard where our rooms were and he led us to a pair of former offices across the hall from each other. My room was about the size of a decent hotel bedroom, though it had clearly been repurposed from an office or storeroom. No windows. Functional gray carpet. But the bed in the corner of the room was my own from my apartment. The computer workstation was mine, as was the big-screen TV and La-Z-Boy recliner. Three packed suitcases stood in a neat row by the closet. And on top of my bed, head laid on his paws, was Cobbler. He opened one eye, found me less interesting than whatever he was dreaming about, and went back to his meditations. We went inside and Rudy sat down on the recliner and put his face in his hands. I poked inside the small halffridge they’d provided and took out a couple of bottles of water, and tapped him on the shoulder with one. He looked at it and then set it down on the floor between his shoes. I opened my water, drank some, and sat on the floor with my back against one wall.

Rudy finally turned to me and I could see the hours of stress stamped into his face and the unnatural brightness of his eyes. “What the hell have we gotten ourselves into here, cowboy?”

“I’m sorry you got dragged into this, Rude.”

He shook his head to cut me off. “It’s not that. Well, it’s not all that. It’s the whole…”—he fished for the word—“ reality of this. It’s the fact that something like the DMS exists. That it has to. It isn’t that we learned about some supersecret organization. Hell, Joe, there are probably dozens of those. Hundreds. I’m enough of a realist to accept that governments need secrets. They need spies and black ops and all of that. I’m a grown-up, so I can deal with it. I can even accept, however unwillingly, that we live in post-9/11 times, and that to some degree terrorism is a part of our daily lives. I mean, find me a stand-up comic who doesn’t make jokes about it. It’s become ordinary to us.”

I sipped more water, letting him work through it.

“But today I’ve seen things and heard things that I know… I know … will forever alter my world. On 9/11 I said, as so many people did, that nothing would ever be the same again. No matter how much we all settled back into a day-to-day routine, no matter how indifferent we become to what color today’s terror alert is, it’s still true. That was a day like no other in my life. Today is hitting me as hard as 9/11. Maybe harder. You know what I did? I spent ten minutes in a toilet stall crying my eyes out.”

“Hey, you’re human,” I began, and again he cut me off.

“It’s not that and you know it, Joe, so don’t coddle me. You want to know why I cried? It wasn’t cultural angst any more than it was grief for all those people who died at the hospital the other day or in Delaware this afternoon. Eight times as many people died in the earthquake in Malaysia last month. I didn’t cry over that. Millions of people die every year. I can have sympathy but any grief—any genuine personal grief—would be borrowed. It is no more a true life-changing expression than the heightened sense of concern a community feels for a kid who falls down a well. Two months later no one can remember the kid’s name. Your life doesn’t pivot on that moment. It can’t, because otherwise the process of making each human death personal would kill us all. But this… this is truly a life-changing moment. That’s not even a question. I’ve been marked by it. As you have. As everyone here at the DMS has. I don’t know how many of these people you’ve met but I had the whole tour and I see it in everyone’s eyes. Church and Major Courtland hide it better; but the others… what I see in their eyes is going to be in my eyes when I look in the mirror. Not just for a while, but from now on. We’re all marked.”