Jonathan Maberry: Patient Zero

“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?

Sebastian Gault / Helmand Province, Afghanistan / Six days ago

HIS NAME WAS El Mujahid, and it meant “fighter of the way of Allah.” Farm life had made him strong; his devotion to the Koran had given him focus. His love for the woman Amirah had given him purpose and very probably driven him mad, though from the profiles he’d paid to have done on this man, Sebastian Gault thought that the Fighter was already a bit twitchy before Amirah screwed his brains out.

That made Gault smile. More kingdoms have risen and collapsed, more causes fought and died for over sex—or its teasing promise—than for all the political ideologies and religious hatred that ever existed. And as far as Amirah went, Gault could certainly sympathize with the brutish El Mujahid. Amirah was a ball-twisting vixen of truly historic dimensions, a true Guinevere—she could inspire great heroics, could stand by and support the rise of well-intentioned kingdoms, but at the same time she drove kings and champions to mad deeds.

Gault poured himself a glass of water and settled into his chair. It was a battered plastic folding chair by a rust-eaten card table set inside a canvas tent that smelled of camel dung, gasoline, and gunpowder. Add the coppery stink of blood and you’d have the perfume of fanaticism, which Gault had smelled in a hundred places over the last twenty-five years. In the end it always smelled like money to him. And money, he knew, was the only force in the universe more powerful than sex.