Jonathan Maberry - Patient Zero

“Lester?” I said. He nodded. “Lester who?”

Aldin tried to answer, failed, shook his head. He turned and spat blood onto the floor.

“Aldin… who is this Lester? Give me a last name? Who is he? What does he do? Tell me something?”

“Find L-Lester—” he whispered, and struggled as the next wave of spasms tore through him. Blood was welling through his skin, erupting from his pores. It was like his whole body was disintegrating. With the last fragment of his will he shaped another word and I bent close to him to catch it. His voice was faint, a fading whisper. “B-Bell—Bellmaker…”

And then he was gone. He sagged down and lay utterly still.

Grace let out the breath she was holding and sat back, pushing a damp strand of hair out of her eyes. She looked at Aldin and then at me. “Lester Bellmaker,” she said. “Have you ever heard of him?”

I reached out and closed Aldin’s eyes. “No,” I said tiredly. “It doesn’t mean a thing to me.”

“Doesn’t ring a ‘bell,’ huh?” Hu said in an offhand tone, and I wheeled on him.

“You’re a half-step away from life on a ventilator, asshole.”

Hu recoiled. “Jeez, sorry. I was just trying to make a joke. It’s not like he was one of the good guys.”

“Shut up,” Church said, ever so softly. Hu flinched as if Church had slapped him and he got up and walked to the far end of the van and threw himself into a chair.

I stood as well and looked down at Aldin. “Did I lie to him, Church? Or did we really rescue his kids?”

Church got to his feet and peeled off his mask and gloves. “We were too late by about three days. The whole village was already gone. Someone let some walkers loose. All of the bodies were laid out for us to find. There was another tape. El Mujahid. It’s on my laptop.”

I punched a nearby cabinet and left a dent in it. “I can’t tell you how much I want to find this guy. You can keep my paycheck, Church; just promise me that when we find El Mujahid I get to be locked in a room with him. Him and me.”

“You’ll have to get in line,” snarled Grace.

“First things first,” advised Church. “We need to identify this Lester Bellmaker. If he’s a link to El Mujahid then we need to jump on it.”

“I’ll run it through MindReader,” offered Grace. “If his name is in anyone’s database we’ll find him.” She hurried out.

Church and I stood there, still looking down at Aldin.

“Did you get anything else out of him?” I asked.

“Bits and pieces. It looks like the crab plant was the hub of this whole operation. People were abducted, infected, and studied. Aldin said that there was no plan that he knew of to release them at the present time. Once a subject was completely transitioned—his word—they were simply stored. He said that his team was studying the varying rates of infection based on age, race, body weight, ethnic background, and so on. The children in Delaware were part of a new phase of the experiment, but he had few details. Sergeant Dietrich tells me that the blast did not destroy all of those computers you found, which means that we should be able to harvest some or all of fourteen months of their findings. Dr. Hu”—and here he cut a brief, hard look at his pet mad scientist—“thinks that it’ll shortcut the search for a cure.”

“Cure? I thought prion diseases couldn’t be cured.”

“Doctor?” Church beckoned to him. “If you please.”

Hu approached me the way a limping caribou approaches a cheetah. “Okay, true, you can’t cure a prion disease. The key is to stop the parasite that triggers the aggression and accelerates the rate of infection. We might be able to get a handle on that based on some things Aldin told us. Stop the parasite and you slow the rate of infection from minutes to months. If we can get ahead of the timetable we might be able to immunize against the parasite. It won’t save anyone who gets infected with the prion disease, of course, but it will give us time to isolate the carriers and they probably won’t become aggressive and try to bite people. They’ll just be sick people.”

“You’re saying you could inoculate ‘everyone’? There are over three hundred million Americans, plus travelers, tourists, illegal aliens… how could you produce and distribute enough antidote?”

“Well,” he said awkwardly, “we couldn’t. We’d have to bring in major pharmaceutical companies to help us. Maybe a lot of them, and it’ll be expensive. We’re talking billions of dollars in research and more than that in practical distribution. To inoculate everyone who lives in or might ever visit the U.S… . that’ll cost trillions.”

“Which might be the point of all of this,” Church said. “A crisis of this magnitude could easily shift the economic focus of the United States away from war and into preventive medicine. We couldn’t continue to fund our big-ticket war efforts overseas if we had to throw those kinds of resources into combating diseases. The Jihadists know that they can’t put a big enough army into the field to oppose the U.S., so it seems that they’ve picked a different kind of battlefield, one where our greater numbers work against us.”

I whistled. It was a horrible plan, but a damn smart one.

“And it’s not like we can choose whether to do it or not,” Hu said. “We have to because we know they still have the disease.”

I nodded. “And just because we know about it doesn’t mean they won’t try to release the virus anyway.”

“I think we should start considering which pharmaceutical companies to approach,” Hu said. “I mean… after you’ve talked to the President.”

“Mr. Church,” I said, “I sure as hell hope you have a few friends in this industry.”

He almost smiled. “One or two.”

Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 5:37 P.M.

AFTER I LEFT the interrogation van I went over to the communications center and asked for a secure line to Top Sims who had taken Echo Team back to the warehouse. He gave me a quick rundown and we talked staffing strategies for a few minutes. Then I spent a few hours with Jerry Spencer and gave him my step-by-step account of Echo Team’s actions.

With that out of the way I commandeered a DMS Crown Vic, chased the driver off with a grumpy mumble, and climbed in the back to try and grab a few hours of sleep. I felt more than spent; I felt like I’d been opened up, reamed out, and then beaten with hammers. I was no good to any part of this investigation the way I felt.

As I waited for sleep to take me I tried to organize the things that had happened and weigh them against what we’d learned. Now that the combat part of the day was over the cop part of my mind was in charge. I mentally laid out the evidence and let it speak to me the way a crime scene speaks to Jerry.

I drifted off to sleep, but the cop stood his watch.

I DIDN’T WAKE until after midnight, though the sounds outside were the same—shouts, portable generators, the whup-whup of helicopters, the buzz of indecipherable conversation.

I lay there and realized that I knew what was going on. With the plant, with the walkers… maybe all of it.

Sometimes it happens that way: you go to sleep with puzzle pieces scattered everywhere and somehow in the depths of sleep the puzzle pieces fall into place. When you wake up you can sometimes see with startling clarity.

I opened my eyes and stared at the shadow-darkened ceiling of the car. “Oh man…” I said aloud.

Five seconds later I was hurrying to find Jerry Spencer.

Sebastian Gault / The Hotel Ishtar, Baghdad / Thursday, July 2