Authors: Jonathan Maberry
Grace Courtland and Mr. Church / Easton, Maryland; 6:22 P.M.
MR. CHURCH SAT in the interrogation room and waited. There was a discreet tap on the door and a woman entered. She was medium height, slender, and had looks that Church had once heard referred to as “disturbingly pretty.” She wore a tailored gray suit and skirt, low-heeled pumps and coral blouse. Short dark hair, brown eyes with gold flecks. No rings, no jewelry. She looked like a Hollywood accountant or an executive at one of the snootier ad agencies.
“You saw?” Church asked.
She closed the door and glanced at the laptop Church had on the table before him, the screen lowered to hide its contents. “Yes. And I’m not happy with losing the walker.” Her voice was low and throaty with a London accent. “I know we have other subjects, but—”
Church dismissed that with a little movement of his head. “Grace, give me an assessment of his capabilities based on what just happened.”
She sat. “On the plus side he’s tough, resourceful, and vicious, but we already knew that from the warehouse videos. He’s tougher than any of the other candidates.”
“What’s on the minus side?”
“Sloppy police work. Two lorries left the warehouse the night before his task force raided it, one was tracked, one wasn’t. Ledger was involved.”
“I think that when we acquire all of the records from the task force things might look different where Ledger’s involvement is concerned.”
Grace looked dubious.
“What else is in the minus column?” Church asked.
“I don’t think he’s emotionally stable.”
“Have you read his psych profile?”
“Yes.”
“Then you already knew that.”
She pursed her lips. “He’s no yes man. He’d be hard to control.”
“As a team player, sure; but what if he was a team leader?”
Grace snorted. “He was a sergeant in the army with no combat experience. He was the lowest-ranking member of the joint task force. I hardly think ” Grace stopped, sat back in her chair and cocked an eyebrow. “You like this bloke, don’t you?”
“Liking him is irrelevant, Grace.”
“You really see him as management material?”
“Still to be determined.”
“But you’re impressed?”
“Aren’t you?”
Grace turned and looked at the window to the other room. Two agents in hazmat suits were strapping Javad’s corpse to a gurney. She turned back to Church. “What would you have done if he’d been bitten?”
“Put him in Room Twelve with the others.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
She turned away for a moment, not wanting Church to see the contempt and horror in her eyes. Her face reflected the horror, shock, and grief she—and so many others in the DMS—felt. It had been a dreadful week. The worst of Grace’s life.
“Your assessment,” he prompted.
“I don’t know. I think I’d need to see him in a few other situations before I would want to see him wearing officer’s rank. After what happened at the hospital we can’t afford to have anything less than first chair when it comes to team leadership.”
“If it was your choice to make, would you invite him into the unit?”
She drummed her fingers on the table. “Maybe.”
He pushed the plate toward her. “Have a cookie.”
She saw that the plate held Oreos and vanilla wafers. She declined with a polite shake of her head.
Church raised the screen of the laptop and turned it so they could both see it. “Watch,” he said and pressed the play button. A high-resolution image appeared of a group of men in black combat fatigues moving rapidly through an office hallway.
“The warehouse?” she asked. “I’ve seen this already.”
“You haven’t seen this part.” On the screen Joe Ledger stepped into shot about twenty yards ahead of the agent whose camera had provided the footage. Ledger spotted two task force officers taking fire from three hostiles who were shooting from a secure position behind a stack of heavy crates. Bullets tore chunks from the paltry cover behind which the agents crouched. Ledger came up on their seven o’clock, well out of their line of sight; he had his pistol in his hand but to open fire from that distance would have been suicide. He might get one or two but the other would turn and chop him up. There was no cover at all between Ledger and the hostiles, but he hugged the wall, running on cat feet, making no noise that could have been heard above the din of the gunfire.
When Ledger was ten feet out he opened fire. His first shot caught one of the hostiles in the back of the neck and the impact slammed him into the crates. As the other two turned Ledger closed to zero distance and fired one more shot and the second hostile staggered back, but then the slide on Ledger’s gun locked open. There was no time to change magazines. The third hostile instantly lunged at him, swinging his rifle barrel to bear. Ledger parried it with his pistol and then everything turned into a blur. All three hostiles were down.
Grace frowned but declined to comment as the file repeated in slow motion, leaning forward at the point where the slide locked back on Ledger’s gun. The slow-mo even caught the elegance of the ejected brass arching through the air. Ledger had the pistol held out in front of him so it was obvious that he recognized the predicament of the empty magazine but he did not visibly react to it. His hands separated and while he was still in full stride he used the empty gun to check the swing of the hostile’s rifle while simultaneously jabbing forward with his left hand, fingers folded in half and stiffened so that the secondary line of knuckles drove into the attacker’s windpipe. As this was happening Joe’s left foot changed from a regular running step into a longer lunge and the tip of his combat boot crunched into the cartilage under the hostile’s kneecap; and a fraction of a second later Ledger’s gun hand came up and jabbed the exposed barrel of the pistol into the hostile’s left eye socket.
The attacker flew backward as if he’d been hit by a shotgun blast. Ledger completed his step and was smoothly reaching to his belt for a fresh magazine when the footage ended.
“Bloody hell!” Grace gasped. It came out before she could stop the words.
“Elapsed time from the slide locking back to completed kill is 0.031 seconds,” said Church. “Tell me why I want him for the DMS.”
She hated when he did this to her. It was like being in school, but she kept her annoyance off her face. “He showed absolutely no hesitation. He didn’t even flinch when his gun locked open, he simply went into a different form of attack. It’s so smooth, like he’d practiced that one set of moves for years.”
“In light of that video and your assessment would you consider him a likely candidate for us?”
“I don’t know. His psych evals read like a horror novel.”
“Past tense. His dissociative behavior was directly related to a specific traumatic event that happened when he was a teenager. His service record since then doesn’t show an unstable personality.”
She shook her head. “That trauma happened during a crucial phase of his life. It informed the rest of his development. It’s why he began studying martial arts. It’s why he joined the army, and it’s why he became a policeman. He keeps looking for ways to channel his rage.”
“It seems to me that he’s found ways to channel it. Very useful ways, Grace. If he was lost in rage then his pathology would be different. A rageaholic would have taken up something confrontational; instead he’s refined his abilities through an art known for its lack of flamboyance.”
“Which could be interpreted as someone desperate to maintain control.”
“That’s one view. Another is that he’s found control, and it’s saved him.”
Grace drummed her fingers on the table. “I still don’t like those old psych evaluations. I think there’s a ticking bomb there.”
“You should read your own, Grace. The recent ones,” Church said mildly, and she shot him a withering look. “Tell me, Grace—if he’d been with Bravo or Charlie teams at St. Michael’s do you think things would have gone differently?”
Grace’s jaw tightened. “That’s impossible to say.”
“No it isn’t. You know why things went south at the hospital, and you saw this tape. My question stands.”
“I don’t know. I think we would need to observe him a lot more.”
“Okay,” he said. “Then go and observe him.”
With that he got up and left the room.
Baltimore, Maryland / Saturday, June 27; 6:54 P.M.
RUDY GOT QUIET as we walked back to my SUV. I undid the locks but he lingered outside, touching the door handle. “This
cabrón
Church what’s your take on him?”
“Car could be bugged, Rude.”
“Fuck it. Answer the question. Do you think Church is a good guy or a bad guy?”
“Hard to say. I certainly don’t think he’s a
nice
guy.”
“Given what he has to do, how nice should he be?”
“Good point,” I said. I reached in and keyed the ignition, then turned the radio up loud. If the car was bugged that might help, though I suspected it no longer mattered.
“He’s asking you to take a lot on faith. Secret government organizations, zombies do you feel that he was trying to trick you in some way?”
“No,” I said, “I don’t think he was lying about that. Even so I can’t seem to wrap my head around all this. It’s impossible. It doesn’t fit, it’s all too ” I couldn’t put it into words, so I stared at the day around us. Birds sang in the trees, crickets chirped, kids laughed on the swings.
Rudy followed my gaze. “You find it hard to believe in those things when you can stand here and see this?”
I nodded. “I mean I know it was real because I was there, but even so I don’t
want
it to be real.” He said nothing and after a moment I hit him with another bomb. “Church said he’d read my psych evaluations.”
Rudy looked like I’d slapped him. “He didn’t get them from me.”
“How do you know? If he’s on the same level as Homeland you could be bugged and monitored out the wazoo.”
“If I get so much as a whiff of violation—”
“You’ll what? Raise a stink? File a lawsuit? Most people never do. Not since 9/11. Homeland counts on it.”
“Patriot Act,” he said the way people say “hemorrhoids.”
“Terrorism’s a tough thing to fight without elbow room.”
He gave me an evil glare. “Are you defending an intrusion into civil liberties?”
“Not as such, but look at it from the law enforcement perspective. Terrorists are fully aware of constitutional protections, and they use that to hide. No, don’t give me that look. I’m just saying.”
“Saying what?”
“That everyone thinks this is an either/or situation and it’s more complicated than that.”
“Patient records are sacred, amigo.” He only ever calls me that when he’s pissed.
“Hey, don’t jump on me. I’m on
your
side. But maybe you should consider the other side’s point of view.”
“The other side can kiss my—”
“Careful, bro, this whole car could be bugged.”
Rudy leaned close to the car and said, loudly and distinctly, “Mr. Church can kiss my ass.” He repeated it slowly in Spanish.
“¡Besa mi culo!”
“Fine, fine, but if you get disappeared don’t blame me.”
He leaned back and gave me a considering look. “I’m going to do three things today. First, I’m going to go over every square inch of my office and if I find
anything
out of place, any hint of violation, I’m going to call the police, my lawyer, and my congressmen.”
“Good luck with that.” I climbed in and pulled the door shut.
“The second thing I’m going to do is see what I can find out about prions, something that indicates whether they can somehow reactivate the central nervous system. Maybe there have been some studies, some papers.”
“What’s the third thing?”
He opened the door. “I’m going to go to evening mass and light a candle.”
“For Helen?”
“For you, cowboy, and for me and for the whole damn human race.” He got in and closed the door.
We didn’t speak at all on the drive back.
Gault and Amirah / The Bunker / Six days ago
WITH EL MUJAHID and his soldiers gone that left only six people in the camp besides Gault. Four guards, a servant, and Amirah, who was both the wife of El Mujahid and the head of Gault’s covert research division here in the Middle East. She was a gorgeous woman and a freakishly brilliant scientist whose insight into disease pathogens bordered on the mystical.
While he waited for her he switched on his PDA and accessed the files the American had sent, most of which were official reports on the task force raid. Most of it had gone exactly as arranged—although the American did not know that. There were a lot of things Gault chose not to share with the nervous Yank. He did wonder, however, why the crab processing plant had not yet been raided. He made a note to ask Toys to look into that.
The tent flaps opened. He turned to see
her
standing there, and for a moment all thoughts of raids and schemes evaporated from his head.
Amirah was slim, average height, dressed in the black
chadri
that showed only her eyes, and she might have gone unnoticed in a bazaar or on a crowded street. Unless, of course, any sane man made eye contact with her, then the anonymity would disintegrate like a sand sculpture in the face of a zephyr. This woman could stop traffic with her eyes. Gault had seen her do it. Conversations always faltered when she entered a room, men actually walked into walls. It was the strangest of reactions because it was so contrary to Muslim tradition. To catch a woman’s eye once is okay, to do so twice was
haram,
a social and religious gaffe of serious consequence, especially in the traditional circles in which this woman and El Mujahid traveled. And yet no one—not one man Gault had seen—had ever looked into her eyes and not been affected.
It wasn’t sex, either, because all a man could see of Amirah were her eyes, and in the Middle East there were millions of women with beautiful eyes. No, this went deeper than sex, deeper even than religious law. This was power. Real, palpable, earthshaking power; and it was there in Amirah’s eyes, as if her eyes were a window into the heart of a nuclear furnace.
The first time Gault had seen her was two months before the Americans invaded Iraq. They were two among thousands at an anti-Coalition rally in Tikrit. He had been there, quietly recruiting and waiting for contact that, his sources had told him, could bring him to El Mujahid. Gault had felt something touch him, almost like hot fingers scraping the skin of the back of his neck, and he’d turned to see this woman standing fifteen feet away, staring at him. He’d been at a loss for words for the first time in his life, totally riveted by the impact of those eyes and of the fierce, vast intelligence behind them. She had walked up to him, affecting the modest gait of a good Muslim woman, and while the crowd was entirely focused on Saddam, who was giving a rousing speech in which he promised to rebuff any U.S. attempt to set foot on Iraqi soil, the woman bent close and said: “I am Amirah. I can take you to paradise.”
In any other circumstances that line would have been cheap, a prostitute’s come-on; but to Gault it was the code phrase he’d been waiting to hear for many weeks. He was so taken aback, so startled that this was the messenger he’d come to Tikrit to find, that he almost flubbed the countersign, but after two or three stammering attempts he managed to say: “And what will I see there?”
She had said three magical words that filled Gault with great joy. Leaning a few inches closer Amirah had whispered,
“Seif al Din.”
What will I see there?
Seif al Din.
The Sword of the Faithful.
That moment flashed through Gault’s mind as Amirah stepped into the tent. He got to his feet, smiling, wanting to take her in his arms, to tear away that ridiculous black rag she wore. He saw his need mirrored in her eyes and she smiled. All he could see of her smile was the soft crow’s feet at the corners of those lustrous brown eyes; and he knew that her smile was as much a promise as it was an acknowledgment. They could do nothing, share nothing while they were here in El Mujahid’s tent. Two guards stood behind her, both giving him hard stares.
“Mr. Gault,” she said in a docile voice. “My husband has instructed me to share with you the results of our experiments. Will you please accompany me to the bunker?”
“I need to get going. I have to be in Baghdad by—”
“Please, Mr. Gault. This is my husband’s wish.” She put just enough juice in the word “wish” to make it clear that it meant “order.”
Jolly well done,
he thought as he saw the guards behind her stiffen and harden their stares. It was all drama, nicely staged for effect.
“Oh, very well,” Gault said with an affect of bad grace and stood up with a sigh.
Amirah backed out of the tent and the two guards took position so that one was between her and Gault and the other between Gault and any chance of flight. El Mujahid was a careful individual, and that worked well for Gault, too. He followed Amirah to another tent that was set very close to a rock wall. Inside the tent were ornate wall hangings, and a third guard stood with his back to one of these, an AK-47 at port arms, his face as hard as a fist. At a word from Amirah, he stepped back and allowed her to push the heavy brocade aside. Behind it was the mouth of a shallow cave. Amirah, Gault, and two of the guards entered it, walked ten feet, and then turned with the cave’s natural bend. Around the corner, out of sight of the entrance, was a blank wall of rough gray-brown rock hung with desiccated moss. The guards told Gault to turn around and face the mouth of the cave, but Gault knew what was happening behind him. Amirah would reach into the moss and pull a slender piece of wire—something that would never be caught in any but the most scrupulous search of the cave—and there were a lot of caves in Afghanistan. She would pull the wire twice, wait four seconds and then pull it three more times. At that point a piece of the uneven wall would fold down to reveal a computer keypad. Amirah would then tap in a code, a randomly selected set of numbers and letters that changed daily, and once the code was accepted she would place her hand on the geography scanner. As far as El Mujahid knew only two people on earth knew that code—he and his wife; but Gault also knew it. Gault knew everything about the cave, the keypad, and the bunker that lay behind this wall. He had paid for it and had built dozens of computer trapdoors into the system.
He also knew how to destroy that bunker and its contents so that not one piece of useful data could be recovered. Granted, a large portion of Afghanistan would be sterilized as well, but those—as the Americans were so fond of saying—were the breaks. All he had to do was enter a code on his laptop. And if that didn’t work, Gault always had a backup plan ready; and if he disappeared his assistant, Toys, could initiate one of several retributive plans.
Gault heard the hiss of hydraulics and the guard grunted at him, indicating that he was allowed to turn. The whole back end of the cave had swung out to reveal an airlock as sophisticated as anything NASA had ever used.
“Please,” Amirah said, gesturing that he enter. One of the two guards remained in the cave while the other stepped into the airlock with Gault and the Princess. The massive door hissed shut and there was a series of complex sounds as various locks and safeguards engaged. A red light flicked on above the door and they turned to face the exit door as a green light came on above it. Amirah went through another code procedure, but this time the guard did not order Gault to look away. Now the guard grinned at Gault, who gave him a wink.
“How are the kids, Khalid?”
“Very well, sir. Little Mohammad is walking now. He is all over the place.”
“Ah, they grow up so fast. Give them a kiss for me.”
“Thank you, Mr. Gault.”
The second door opened and a wash of refrigerated air filled the chamber. “Ready?” Amirah asked.
“Say, Khalid why don’t you go into the office and watch some videos. Give us a couple of hours.”
“Happy to, sir.”
They stepped out of the airlock and into the bunker that was as different from the camp outside as a diamond was from a lump of coal. There was a big central room packed with state-of-the-art research equipment and intelligence-processing hardware including satellite downlinks, high-speed Internet cable hard lines, plasma display screens on nearly every surface, and a dozen computer terminals. Surrounding the central lab were glassed offices, the supercooled chamber for the bank of Blue Gene/L supercomputers, and the five clean rooms with their isolated air and biohazard control systems. Down one corridor was the staff wing, with bedrooms for the eighty technicians and the twenty support staff.
The setup had cost a fortune. Fifty-eight million pounds, all routed through convoluted banking threads that would require an army of forensic accountants to follow. Nothing could be tied directly to him or to Gen2000. It was Gault’s belief that this was not only the most sophisticated private research facility in the world, but also the most productive and diverse. Genetics, pharmacology, molecular biology, bacteriology, virology, parasitology, pathology, and over a dozen other related sciences merged into one compact but incredibly productive factory floor that had paid for itself four times over with patents filed under the names of over seventy doctors who were on his payroll through one university or another, not the least of which was the first reliable drug for treating the rare blood cancers, new-onset sarcoidosis, and asbestos-related diseases that have cropped up in survivors of the World Trade Center collapse. The irony of that made Gault want to laugh out loud considering he’d advised bin Laden about the likely and potentially useful postcol-lapse health hazards before the Al Qaeda operatives had even enrolled in flight school.
Amirah led the way past the rows of technicians, still playing her role as the dutiful wife of the great leader even though these people were
hers,
every last one of them. Only Abdul, her husband’s lieutenant, and a small squad of his personal guard were currently beyond her control, and they were outside. And even that sense of loyalty would change in time. Everything was going to change.
She led Gault into the conference room, then closed the door and engaged the lock, an action that turned on a red security light outside. The room had no windows. Just a big table and a lot of chairs.
Amirah turned away from the door, tore away her
chadri,
and attacked Gault.
She was fast, savage,
hungry.
She pushed him back, forcing him down on the table, tearing at his clothes, biting at each bit of exposed flesh; and he grabbed her and clawed her skirts up over her legs. He knew that she would be naked underneath. They had planned this moment,
needed
it. He was as ready as she was and as he used his heels to slide farther onto the table she climbed over him, swung a leg across his hips, and as he pulled her toward him she thrust down onto him. It was hot and hard, painful and sloppy, but it was so intense. Their bodies ground into one another. Love was lost in the avalanche of need, buried beneath the immediacy of their hungers.
El Mujahid was sometimes as brutal and intense, but he was always quick, and Amirah could endure and outlast any man. Almost any man. With Gault it was different. Instead of a gallop to the precipice and then that quick plunge into unsatisfactory disappointment, they raced on and on, their bodies running with sweat, their hearts hammering like primitive drums, their breath burning into each other’s mouths.
When they came, they both screamed. The conference room was soundproof. He’d made sure of that.