Patient Zero

Chapter One

WHEN YOU HAVE to kill the same terrorist twice in one week, then there’s either something wrong with your skills or something wrong with your world.

And there’s nothing wrong with my skills.

Chapter Two

Ocean City, Maryland / Saturday, June 27; 10:22 A.M.

THEY CAME FOR me at the beach. Nice and slick, two in front, one big cover man behind in a three-point close while I was reaching for my car door. Nothing flashy, just three big guys in off-the-rack gray, all of them sweating in the Ocean City heat.

The point man held up his hands in a no-problem gesture. It was a hot Saturday morning and I was in swim trunks and a Hawaiian shirt with mermaids on it over a Tom Petty T-shirt. Flip-flops and Wayfarers. My piece was in a locked toolbox in the trunk, with a trigger guard clamped on it. I was at the beach to look at this year’s crop of sunbunnies and I’d been off the clock since the shooting pending a Monday-morning officer-involved discussion with the OIS team. It had been a bad scene at the warehouse and they’d put me on administrative leave to give me time to get my head straight about the shootings. I wasn’t expecting trouble, there shouldn’t have been trouble, and the smooth way these guys boxed me was designed to keep everyone’s emotions in neutral. I couldn’t have done it better myself.

“Mr. Ledger…?”

“Detective Ledger,” I said to be pissy.

No trace of a smile on the point guy’s face, only a millimeter of a nod. He had a head like a bucket.

“We’d like you to come with us,” he said.

“Badge me or buzz off.”

Buckethead gave me the look, but he pulled out an FBI identification case and held it up. I stopped reading after the initials.

“What’s this about?”

“Would you come with us, please?”

“I’m off the clock, guys, what’s this about?”

No answer.

“Are you aware that I’m scheduled to start at Quantico in three weeks?”

No answer.

“You want me to follow you in my car?” Not that I wanted to try and give these fellows the slip, but my cell was in the glove box of the SUV and it would be nice to check in with the lieutenant on this one. It had a weird feel to it. Not exactly threatening, just weird.

“No, sir, we’ll bring you back here after.”

“After what?”

No answer.

I looked at him and then the guy next to him. I could feel the cover man behind me. They were big, they were nicely set—even with peripheral vision I could see that Buckethead had his weight on the balls of his feet and evenly balanced. The other front man was shifted to his right. He had big knuckles but his hands weren’t scarred. Probably boxing rather than martial arts; boxers wear gloves.

They were doing almost everything right except that they were a little too close to me. You should never get that close.

But they looked like the real deal. It’s hard to fake the FBI look.

“Okay,” I said.

Chapter Three

Ocean City, Maryland / Saturday, June 27; 10:31 A.M.

BUCKETHEAD SAT BESIDE me in the back and the other two sat up front, the cover man driving the big government Crown Vic. For all the conversation going on the others might have been mimes. The air conditioner was turned up and the radio was turned off. Exciting.

“I hope we’re not going all the way the hell back to Baltimore.” That was more than a three-hour ride and I had sand in my shorts.

“No.” That was the only word Buckethead said on the ride. I settled back to wait.

I could tell that he was a leftie from the bulge his shoulder rig made. He kept me on his right side, which meant that his coat flap would impede me grabbing his piece and he could use his right hand as a block to fend me off while he drew. It was professional and well thought out. I’d have done almost the same thing. What I wouldn’t have done, though, was hold on to the leather handstrap by the door like he was doing. It was the second small mistake he made and I had to wonder if he was testing me or whether there was a little gap between his training and his instincts.

I settled back and tried to understand this pickup. If this had something to do with the action last week on the docks, if I was somehow in trouble for something related to that, then I sure as hell planned to lawyer up when we got wherever we were going. And I wanted a union rep there, too. No way this was SOP. Unless it was some Homeland thing, in which case I’d lawyer up and call my congressman. That warehouse thing was righteous and I wasn’t going to let anyone say different.

For the last eighteen months I’d been attached to one of those interjurisdictional task forces that have popped up everywhere post 9/11. A few of us from Baltimore PD, some Philly and D.C. guys, and a mixed bag of Feds: FBI, NSA, ATF, and a few letter combinations I hadn’t seen before. Nobody really doing much but everyone wanting a finger in the pie in case something juicy happened, and by juicy I mean career beneficial.

I kind of got drafted into it. Ever since I’d gotten my gold shield a few years ago I’d been lucky enough to close a higher-than-average number of cases, including two that had loose ties to suspected terrorist organizations. I also had four years in the army and I know a little bit of Arabic and some Farsi. I know a little bit of a lot of languages. Languages were easy for me, and that made me a first-round draft pick for the surveillance van. Most of the people we wiretapped jumped back and forth between English and a variety of Middle Eastern languages.

The task force seemed like it would be pretty cool but the reality of it was that they put me on wiretap in a van and for most of the last year and a half I drank too much Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and felt my ass grow flat.

Supposedly a group of suspected low-level terrorists with tenuous links to fundamentalist Shias were planning on smuggling something in that we were told was a potential bioweapon. No details provided, of course, which makes surveillance a bitch and largely a waste of time. When we (meaning us cops) tried to ask them (meaning the big shots from Homeland) what we were looking for, we were stonewalled. Need-to-know basis. That sort of thing tells you everything about why we’re not all that safe. Truth is that if they tell us then we might play too significant a role in the arrest, which means they get less credit. It’s what got us into trouble with 9/11, and as far as I can tell it really hasn’t gotten much better since.

Then this past Monday I caught a little back and forth from a cell phone we were spooking. One name popped up—a Yemen national named El Mujahid, who was a pretty big fish in the terrorist pond and was on Homeland’s must-have list—and the guy talking about him spoke as if El Mujahid was somehow involved in whatever the crew in the warehouse were cooking. El Mujahid’s name was on all of the DHS lists and in that van I had nothing to do but read, so I’d read those lists over and over.

Because I rang the bell I got to play when the takedown was scheduled for Tuesday morning. Thirty of us in black BDUs with Kevlar body and limb pads, helmet cams and full SWAT kit. The whole unit was split into four-man teams: two guys with MP5s, a point man with a ballistic shield and a Glock .40, and one guy with a Remington 870 pump. I was the shotgun guy on my team and we hit this portside warehouse hard and fast, coming in every door and window in the place. Flashbangs, snipers on the surrounding buildings, multiple entry points, and a whole lot of yelling. Domestic shock and awe, and the idea is to startle and overpower so that everyone inside would be too dazed and confused to offer violent resistance. Last thing anyone wanted was an O.K. Corral.

My team had the back door, the one that led out to a small boat dock. There was a tidy little Cigarette boat there. Not new, but sweet. While we waited for the go/no-go, the guy next to me—my buddy Jerry Spencer from DCPD—kept looking at the boat. I bent close and hummed the Miami Vice theme and he grinned. He was about to retire and that boat probably looked like a ticket to paradise.

The “go” came down and everything suddenly got loud and fast. We blew the steel dead bolt on the back door and went in, yelling for everyone to freeze, to lay down their weapons. I’ve been on maybe fifteen, eighteen, of these things in my time with Baltimore PD and only twice was anyone stupid enough to draw a gun on us. Cops don’t hotdog it and generally neither do the bad guys. It’s not about who has the biggest balls, it’s about overwhelming force so that no shots are ever fired. I remember when I went through the tac-team training, the commander had a quote from the movie Silverado made into a plaque and hung up in the training hall: “I don’t want to kill you and you don’t want to be dead.” I think Danny Glover said that. That’s pretty much the motto.

So, usually the bad guys stand around looking freaked out and everyone bleats about how innocent they are, yada yada.

This wasn’t one of those times.

Jerry, who was the oldest man on the task force, was point man and I was right behind him with two guys at my back when we kicked the door, hustled down a short corridor lined with framed inspection certificates, and then broke left into a big conference room. Big oak table with at least a dozen laptops on it. Just inside the door was a big blue phone-booth–sized container standing against the wall. Eight guys in business suits seated around the table.

“Freeze!” I yelled. “Put your hands above your heads and—”

That was as far as I got because all eight guys suddenly threw themselves out of their chairs and pulled guns. O.K. Corral, no doubt about it.

When IAD asked me to recollect how many shots I fired and who exactly I fired them at, I laughed. Twelve guys in a room and everyone’s shooting. If they’re not dressed like your buddies—and you can, to a reasonable degree of certainty, determine that they’re not civilian bystanders—you shoot and duck for cover. I fired the Remington dry then dropped it so I could pull my Glock. I know the .40 is standard but I’ve always found the .45 to be more persuasive.

They say I dropped four hostiles. I don’t notch my gun, so I’ll take their word for it. I bring it up, though, because one of them was the thirteenth man in the room.

Yeah, I know I said that there were eight of them and four of us, but during the firefight I caught movement to my right and saw the door to the big blue case hanging loose, its lock ripped up by gunfire. The door swung open and a man staggered out. He wasn’t armed so I didn’t fire on him; instead I concentrated on the guy behind him who was tearing up the room with a QBZ-95 Chinese assault rifle, something I’d only ever seen in magazines. Why he had it and where the hell he found ammunition for it I never did find out, but those rounds punched a line of holes right through Jerry’s shield and he went down.

“Son of a bitch!” I yelled and put two in the shooter’s chest.

Then this other guy, the thirteenth guy, comes crashing right into me. Even with all that was going on I thought, Drug addict. He was pale and sweaty, stank like raw sewage, and had a glazed bug-eyed stare. Sick bastard even tried to bite me, but the Kevlar pads on my sleeve saved my gun arm.

“Get off!” I screamed and gave him an overhand left that should have dropped him, but all it did was shake him loose; he blundered past me toward one of the other guys on my team who was blocking the door. I figured he was making for that sweet Cigarette outside, so I pivoted and parked two in his back, quick and easy. Blood sprayed the walls and he hit the deck and skidded five feet before coming to rest in a motionless sprawl against the back door. I spun back into the room and laid down cover fire so I could pull Jerry behind the table. He was still breathing. The rest of my team kept chopping the whole room up with automatic fire.

I heard gunfire coming from a different part of the warehouse and peeled off from the pack to see what was happening, found a trio of hostiles in a nice shooting blind laying down a lot of fire at one of the other teams. I popped a few of them with the last couple of rounds in my mag and dealt with the third hand-to-hand and suddenly the whole thing was over.

In the end, eleven alleged terrorists were shot, six fatally including the cowboy with the Chinese assault rifle and the biter I nailed in the back—who, according to his ID, was named Javad Mustapha. We’d just started going through IDs when a bunch of Federal types in unmarked black fatigues came in and stole the show, kicking everyone else out onto the street. That was okay with me. I wanted to check on Jerry. Turned out that none of our team was killed, though eight of them needed treatment, mostly for broken ribs. Kevlar stops bullets but it can’t stop foot-pounds of impact. Jerry had a cracked sternum and was one hurting pup. The EMTs had him on a gurney, but he was awake enough to wave me over before they took him away.

“How you feeling, dude?” I asked, squatting next to him.

“Old and sore. But tell you what… steal me that Cigarette boat and I’ll be feeling young and spry.”

“Sounds like a plan. I’ll get right on that, pops.”

He ticked his chin toward my arm. “Hey, how’s your arm? The EMT said that fruitcake bit you.”

“Nah, didn’t even break the skin.” I showed him. Just a bad bruise.

They took Jerry away and I started answering questions, some of them for the Feds in the unmarked BDUs. Javad hadn’t been armed and I’d drilled him in the back so there would be a routine investigation, but my lieutenant told me it was a no-brainer. That was Tuesday morning and this was Saturday morning. So why was I in a car with three Feds?

They weren’t talking.

So, I sat back and waited.

Chapter Four

Easton, Maryland / Saturday, June 27; 11:58 A.M.

THEY PUT ME in a room that had a table, two chairs, and a big picture window with a drawn curtain. An interrogation room, though the sign outside had read Baylor Records Storage. We were somewhere in Easton off Route 50, more than seventy miles from where they’d picked me up. Buckethead told me to sit.

“Can I have a drink of water?”

He ignored me and left, locking the door.

It was nearly two hours before anyone came in. I didn’t kick up a fuss. I knew this routine. Park someone in an empty room and leave them to stew. Doubt and a guilty conscience can do a lot when you’re alone. I didn’t have a guilty conscience and no doubts at all. I simply lacked information, so after I did a visual on the room I went into my own head and waited, reviewing the number of thong bikinis I’d seen. I was pretty sure the count was twenty-two, and of those at least eighteen had a legal and moral right to wear a thong. It was a good day at the beach.

The guy who finally came in was big, very well dressed, maybe sixty but there was no trace of middle-age soft about him. Not that he looked especially hard, not like a muscle freak or a career DI. No, he just looked capable. You pay attention to guys like him.

He took a seat opposite me. He wore a dark blue suit, red tie, white shirt, and tinted glasses that made it hard to read his eyes. Probably on purpose. He had short hair, big hands, and no expression at all.

Buckethead came in with a cork restaurant tray on which was a pitcher of water, two glasses, two napkins, and a dish of cookies. It was the cookies that weirded me out. You generally don’t get cookies in situations like this and it had to be some kind of mind trick.

When Buckethead left, the guy in the suit said, “My name is Mr. Church.”

“Okay,” I said.

“You are Detective Joseph Edwin Ledger, Baltimore Police, age thirty-two, unmarried.”

“You trying to fix me up with your daughter?”

“You served forty-five months with the army, honorably discharged. During your time in service you were involved in no significant military actions or operations.”

“Nothing was happening while I was in the service, at least not in my part of the world.”

“And yet your commanding officers and particularly your sergeant in basic wrote glowingly of you. Why is that?” He wasn’t reading out of a folder. He had no papers with him at all. His shaded eyes were fixed on me as he poured a glass of water for each of us.

“Maybe I suck up nicely.”

“No,” he said, “you don’t. Have a cookie.” He nudged the plate my way. “There are also several notes in your file suggesting that you are a world-class smartass.”

“Really? You mean I made it through the nationals?”

“And you apparently think you’re hilarious.”

“You’re saying I’m not?”

“Jury’s still out on that.” He took a cookie—a vanilla wafer—and bit off an edge. “Your father is stepping down as police commissioner to make a run for mayor.”

“I sure hope we can count on your vote.”

“Your brother is also Baltimore PD and is a detective two with homicide. He’s a year younger and he outranks you. He stayed home while you played soldier.”

“Why I am here, Mr. Church?”

“You’re here because I wanted to meet you face-to-face.”

“We could have done that at the precinct on Monday.”

“No, we couldn’t.”

“You could have called me and asked me to meet you somewhere neutral. They have cookies at Starbucks, you know.”

“Too big and too soft.” He took another bite of the wafer. “Besides, here is more convenient.”

“For…?”

Instead of answering he said, “After your discharge you enrolled in the police academy, graduated third in your class. Not first?”

“It was a big class.”

“It’s my understanding that you could have been first had you wanted to.”

I took a cookie—Oreo for me—and screwed off the top.

He said, “You spent several nights of the last few weeks before your finals helping three other officers prepare for the test. As a result two of them did better and you didn’t do as well as you should have.”

I ate the top. I like it in layers. Cookie, cream, cookie.

“So what?”

“Just noting it. You received early promotion to plainclothes and even earlier promotion to detective. Outstanding letters and commendations.”

“Yes, I’m wonderful. Crowds cheer as I go by.”

“And there are more notes about your smart mouth.”

I grinned with Oreo gunk on my teeth.

“You’ve been recruited by the FBI and are scheduled to start your training in twenty days.”

“Do you know my shoe size?”

He finished his cookie and took another vanilla wafer. I’m not sure I could trust a man who would bypass an Oreo in favor of vanilla wafers. It’s a fundamental character flaw, possibly a sign of true evil.

“Your superiors at Baltimore PD say they’re sorry to see you go, and the FBI has high hopes.”

“Again, whyn’t you call me instead of sending the goon squad?”

“To make a point.”

“About…?”

Mr. Church considered me for a moment. “On what not to become. What’s your opinion of the agents you met today?”

I shrugged. “A bit stiff, no sense of humor. But they braced me pretty well. Good approach, kept the heat down, good manners.”

“Could you have escaped?”

“Not easily. They had guns, I didn’t.”

“Could you have escaped?” He asked it slower this time.

“Maybe.”

“Mr. Ledger…”

“Okay, yes. I could have escaped had I wanted to.”

“How?”

“I don’t know, it didn’t come to that.”

He seemed satisfied with that answer. “The pickup at the beach was intended as something of a window to the future. Agents Simchek, Andrews, and McNeill are top-of-the-line, make no mistake. They are the very best the Bureau has to offer.”

“So… I’m supposed to be impressed. If I didn’t think the FBI was a good next step I wouldn’t have taken your offer.”

“Not my offer, Mr. Ledger. I’m not with the Bureau.”

“Let me guess… the ‘Company’?”

He showed his teeth. It might have been a smile. “Try again.”

“Homeland?”

“Right league, wrong team.”

“No point in me guessing then. Is this one of those ‘we’re so secret we don’t have a name’ things?”

Church sighed. “We do have a name, but it’s functional and boring.”

“Can you tell me?”

“What would you say if I said ‘but then I’d have to kill you’?”

“I’d say drive me back to my car.” When he didn’t move, I added, “Look, I was army for four and Baltimore PD for eight, the last eighteen months of which I’ve been a gopher for the CT task force. I know that there are levels upon levels of need-to-know. Well, guess what, Sparky: I don’t need to know. If you have a point then get to it, otherwise kiss my ass.”

“DMS,” he said.

I waited.

“Department of Military Sciences.”

I swallowed the last of my cookie. “Never heard of it.”

“Of course not.” Matter-of-fact, no mockery.

“So… is this going to turn out to be some kind of cornball Men in Black thing? Thin ties, black suits, and a little flashy thing that’ll make me forget all this shit?”

He almost smiled. “No MIB, nothing retroengineered from crashed UFOs, no rayguns. The name, as I said, is functional. Department of Military Sciences.”

“A bunch of science geeks playing in the same league as Homeland?”

“More or less.”

“No aliens?”

“No aliens.”

“I’m no longer in the military, Mr. Church.”

“Mm-hm.”

“And I’m not a scientist.”

“I know.”

“So why am I here?”

Church looked at me for almost a minute. “For someone who is supposed to have rage issues you don’t anger very easily, Mr. Ledger. Most people would be yelling by this point in an interview of this kind.”

“Would yelling get me back to the beach any sooner?”

“It might. You also haven’t asked for us to call your father. You haven’t threatened me with his juice as commissioner.”

I ate another cookie. He watched me dismantle it and go through the entire time-honored Oreo ritual. When I was done he slid my glass of water closer to me.

“Mr. Ledger, the reason I wanted you to meet the FBI agents today was because I need to know if that’s what you want to be?”

“Meaning?”

“When you look inside your own head, when you look at your own future, do you see yourself in a humorless grind of following bank accounts and sorting through computer records in hopes of bagging one bad guy every four months?”

“Pays better than the cops.”

“You could open up a karate school and make three times more money.”

“Jujutsu.”

He smiled as if somehow he’d scored a point and I realized that he’d tricked me into correcting him out of pride. Sneaky bastard.

“So, tell me honestly, is that the kind of agent you want to be?”

“If this is leading up to some kind of alternative suggestion, stop jerking me off and get to it.”

“Fair enough, Mr. Ledger.” He sipped his water. “The DMS is considering offering you a job.”

“Um… hello? Not military? Not a scientist?”

“Doesn’t matter. We have plenty of scientists. The military connection is merely for convenience. No, this would be something along the lines of what you do well. Investigation, apprehension, and some field work like at the warehouse.”

“You’re a Fed, so are we talking counterterrorism?”

He sat back and folded his big hands in his lap. “‘Terrorism’ is an interesting word. Terror…” He tasted the word. “Mr. Ledger, we are very much in the business of stopping terror. There are threats against this country greater than anything that has so far made the papers.”

“‘So far.’”

“We—and when I say ‘we’ I embrace my colleagues in the more clandestine agencies—have stopped fifty times as many threats as you would believe, ranging from suitcase nukes to radical bioweapon technologies.”

“Yay for the home team.”

“We’ve also worked to refine our definition of terrorism. Religious fundamentalism and political idealism actually play a far less important role, in a big-picture sense, than most people—including heads of state, friendly and not—would have the general public believe.” He looked at me for a moment. “What would you say is the most significant underlying motive for all world strife—terrorism, war, intolerance… the works?”

I shrugged. “Ask any cop and he’ll tell you that,” I said. “In the end it’s always about the money.”

He said nothing but I could sense a shift in his attitude toward me. There was the faintest whisper of a smile on his mouth.

I said, “All of this seems to be a long way from Baltimore. Why’d you bring me here? What’s so special about me?”

“Oh, don’t flatter yourself, Mr. Ledger, there have been other interviews like this.”

“So, where are those guys? You let them go back to the beach?”

“No, Mr. Ledger, not as such. They didn’t pass the audition.”

“I’m not sure I like how you phrased that.”

“It wasn’t meant to be a comforting comment.”

“And I suppose you want me to ‘audition’ next?”

“Yes.”

“How does that play out? Bunch of mind games and psych tests?”

“No, we know enough about you from your current medical records and fifteen years of psych evaluations. We know that in the last couple of years you’ve suffered severe losses. First your mother died of cancer and then your ex-girlfriend committed suicide. We know that when you and she were teenagers you were attacked, and that some older teens beat you nearly to death and then held you down and made you watch as they raped her. We know about that. We know you went through a brief dissociative phase as a result, and that you’ve had some intermittent rage issues, which is one of the reasons you regularly see a therapist. It’s fair to say you understand and can recognize the face of terror when you see it.”

It would have felt pretty good to demonstrate the whole rage concept to him right then, but I guessed that’s what he would be looking for. Instead I made my face look bored. “This is where I should get offended that you’ve invaded my privacy, et cetera?”

“It’s a new world, Mr. Ledger. We do what we must. And yes, I know how that sounds.” Nothing in his tone of voice sounded like an apology.

“So, what do I have to do?”

“It’s quite simple, really.” He got up and walked around the table to the curtain that hung in front of the big picture window. With no attempt at drama he pulled back the curtain to reveal a similar room. One table, one chair, one occupant. A man sitting hunched forward, his back to the window, possibly asleep. “All you need to do is go in there, then cuff and restrain that prisoner.”

“You kidding me?”

“Not in the least. Go in there, subdue the suspect, put him in cuffs, and attach the cuffs to the D-ring mounted on the table.”

“What’s the catch? That’s one guy. Your goon squad could have—”

“I am aware what overwhelming force could do, Mr. Ledger. That’s not the point of this exercise.” He reached into his jacket pocket and produced a pair of handcuffs. “I want you to do it.”

Chapter Five

Easton, Maryland / Saturday, June 27; 2:08 P.M.

THE FIRST THING I noticed when I opened the door to the interrogation room was the stink. Smelled like a treatment plant. The guy didn’t stir. He was slim, probably shorter than me, dark-skinned—Hispanic or Middle Eastern. Black hair that was sweat-soaked and lank. He wore a standard orange prison jumpsuit and he seemed completely out of it, his head hanging almost down to his knees.

I stepped into the room, conscious of the big mirror on my left. Mr. Church would be watching me, probably eating another vanilla wafer. The door closed behind me and I turned to see Buckethead staring at me through the glass. For a second I thought he was smiling, and then his expression registered. It was more like a wince, a flinching twist of his face as if he expected a scorpion to jump out at him. Even behind a steel door the agent was spooked by this guy. Swell. I held my cuffs in my right hand and extended my left in a calm, assertive gesture, palm outward. It looks placating but it’s right there in case you need to block, grab, or hit.

“Okay, pardner,” I said calmly. “I need you to cooperate with me here.” A beat. “Can you hear me, sir?

The man didn’t move.

I angled around the table, coming up on his left. “Sir? I need you to stand up with your hands on your head. Sir…Sir!”

Nothing.

I moved closer. “Sir, I need you to stand up—”

And he did. All at once his head snapped up and his eyes popped open as he shot to his feet and spun toward me. My heart skipped. I recognized the guy. The pale, sweaty face, the glazed pop-eyed stare. It was Javad—the terrorist I’d shot and killed back in Baltimore. He hissed like a cat and threw himself at me. He was maybe one-fifty, five seven, but he hit me in the chest like a cannonball, driving us both across the room so hard that my back crunched against the rear wall. I hit my head and sparks burst in my eyes. I jammed my forearm under his chin as Javad snapped at me like an animal, lunging forward over my arm, his teeth banging together with a weird porcelain clack. He grabbed my shirt with both hands, trying to pull us closer together.

The DVD player in my head kept running and rerunning the scene back at the warehouse where I’d shot him in the back. Granted, I wasn’t the one who checked his vitals afterward, but I’d put two .45 slugs in him from fifteen feet. Pretty much does the trick. If it doesn’t then your only logical ammunition upgrade is Kryptonite. But for a guy who should be dead, he was pretty damn spry.

Even though this was all happening too fast I still had time to register the look in his eyes. Despite the twisted, ferociously hungry snarl of his face and the snapping of his teeth, his eyes were totally empty. No flicker of awareness, no trace of self-knowledge, not even the fire of hate. This wasn’t the deadeye stare of a shark, nothing like that. This was freak-show stuff because there was nothing there; it was like looking into an empty room.

I think that terrified me more than the teeth that were biting the air an inch from my windpipe. Right then I knew why the other applicants had failed this audition. They’d probably been big men like me, strong men like me, and maybe they’d been able to hold him off this long—just long enough to look into those soulless eyes. I think that’s when they failed. I don’t know if Javad tore their throats out. I don’t know if this was the point where they started screaming for help and Church sent Buckethead and his goon squad in with Tasers and riot sticks. What I did know was that looking into those eyes nearly took the soul out of me. I could actually feel my throat closing up, could feel an icy wire sending electricity down through my bowels.

I saw terror and hopelessness there. I saw death.

But here’s the thing, you see, I’d seen those things before. I may not have been on any of the world’s battlefields, but Church was right when he’d said that I’ve seen the face of terror. It went a lot deeper than that, though. It isn’t just terror that I understood… I knew the face of death. I’d been bedside when cervical cancer took my mom. I was the last thing she saw before she slipped into the big black nothing, and I saw the light and life go out of her; I saw her eyes change from living eyes to those of a dead person. You can never forget that; the image is burned onto the front of your brain. I was also the one who found Helen after she’d swallowed half a bottle of drain cleaner. She’d left a goodbye message on my voice mail and was already gone when I kicked in the door. I saw her dead eyes, too.

I’ve also looked into the dead eyes of men I’ve killed on the job. Two men in eight years, not counting the four at the warehouse.

So, I’d looked into dead eyes before, I know what I saw there. I saw death and terror and hopelessness. Not my mom’s, not Helen’s, not the criminals I’ve killed—no, the deadness I see is my own, reflected in eyes that have nothing of their own to show. You can’t fake that dead look. A lot of warriors have that look because they are in harmony with death. Church probably knew all this. He knew everything else about me. He knew my psych file. That bastard knew.

Javad lunged forward again, his fingers tearing my shirt, his stink that of a carrion bird. No… that wasn’t right, that wasn’t it. Javad’s smell was that of carrion. He smelled like the dead. Because he was dead. This whole train of thought shot through my brain in a microsecond, its speed and clarity amplified by terror.

Terror’s a funny thing, though. It can take your heart from you and bare your throat to the wolves; it can make you go all hot and crazy, which almost always gets you killed… or it can make you go cold. That’s what happens to warriors—real ones, the kind who are defined by conflict. Like me.

So I went cold. Time slammed to a halt and the whole room seemed to go quiet except for the muffled hammering of my own heart. I stopped trying to get away from something I couldn’t escape—I was jammed into a corner and Church wasn’t sending the damned cavalry—so I did what Javad was doing. I attacked.

I swung my right hand around in a palm shot that turned his head so hard to the right that I heard his neck bones grind. It would have stopped anyone; it didn’t stop him any more than the two slugs had stopped him. But it gave me a few seconds’ escape from those teeth, and even as Javad started wrenching his face back toward me I hooked my leg around his and chopped at the back of his knee. Maybe he couldn’t feel pain but a bent knee is a bent knee—it’s a gravity thing. He canted to one side and I used his sagging weight to spin and drive him into the wall. I caught him by the back of the hair and slammed him face forward into the wall once, twice, again and again. His jaw disintegrated; but I grabbed what was left of his chin and twisted my fingers into his hair and then I pivoted my hips as hard and as fast as I could, taking his head with me. My body turned faster and farther than his neck could.

There was a huge wet snap!

And then Javad was gone. His body switched off like someone had kicked the plug out and he simply dropped. I stepped back and let him fall.

I could barely breathe; sweat poured down my face, stung my eyes. I heard a sound behind me—I wheeled around and Church was leaning against the frame of the open doorway.

“Welcome to the new face of global terrorism,” he said.

Chapter Six

Easton, Maryland / Saturday, June 27; 2:36 P.M.

“WHAT WAS HE?”

We were back at the table. They’d let me clean up in a bathroom. I showered and dressed in borrowed gym clothes. The shakes had started in the shower. Adrenaline accounted for a lot of it, but it was more than that. After thirty minutes my hands were still trembling and I didn’t care if Church saw it.

He shrugged. “We’re still working on a name for his condition.”

“Condition? That son of a bitch was dead!”

“From now on,” Church said, “we may have to consider ‘dead’ a relative term.”

I had to sit with that for a while. Church waited me out.

“That is the same guy I shot at the warehouse, right? I mean, I put him down hard. I saw blood and bone on the walls…”

“Javad Mustapha, an Iraqi national,” Church agreed, nodding. “Your shots were mortal but not immediately so; he was still alive when he was transported to the hospital where he was pronounced DOA. He ‘revived’ shortly after arrival.” He spread his hands. “We controlled that incident and you won’t find specific mention of it in the papers or in any official report.”

“Holy Christ… are we talking zombies here?”

Church smiled faintly. “We’re calling him a ‘walker.’ Short for ‘Dead Man Walking.’ The head of my science team has too much of a pop culture sensibility. And before you ask, it’s not anything supernatural.”

“How did this happen? Some kind of toxic spill… a plague…?”

“We don’t know. A prion disease, perhaps, or a parasite; maybe both, but certainly something that causes hyperactivity of the stem cells. True to the nature of parasites, the infected have a totality of purpose built around procreation. Not sexually, of course, but through a bite that is apparently one hundred percent infectious. We’ve only begun to research it.”

“Is it only his bite that’s infectious?” I asked. It felt like ice-cold army ants were marching around in my gut.

“We’ve done a number of tests on sweat and other body fluids but the strongest concentration of the disease is in the saliva. The bite transmits the infection.”

I looked at the bruise on my arm. “I’m not wearing Kevlar. If I’d been bitten in there…”

He looked at me.

Anger was a white-hot furnace in my chest. “You’re a total rat bastard, you know that?”

“As I said, Mr. Ledger, this is the new face of terrorism. A fierce, terrible bioweapon we don’t yet understand. It may take us months to even construct a viable research protocol, which means that time is completely against us. We think that your friend Javad in there was the bioterrorist approximation of a suicide bomber, that he was the ‘patient zero’ for an intended plague directed at the U.S. The blue case recovered at the scene was some kind of climate-controlled containment system, quite possibly to protect the other cell members from their own weapon. None of the others at the warehouse showed any signs of infection.” He paused. “We think we stopped them.”

“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?

Chapter Seven

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.

Gault leaned back and sipped his water and observed El Mujahid through the open tent flap. The Fighter stood right outside and was growling orders to his men. Even those who were bigger and more physically powerful than the Fighter seemed shrunken in his presence, their wattage dialed down as his shone like the sun. Once he sent them out to do whatever bit of nastiness he assigned them, they would swell like giants and through them El Mujahid’s fist would reach out and strike with godlike force across borders and around the world.

Gault thought the man was very well named; a name that could have been a code, a disguise, but wasn’t. It was as if the man’s peasant parents—a couple of nearly illiterate dust farmers from some godforsaken corner of Yemen—had known that their only child was destined to become a warrior. Not merely a soldier for Allah, but a general. It was a powerful name for a child, and as the boy grew into a man he had embraced the potential of his name. Unlike so many of his peers he was not recruited by groups of militant fundamentalists—he sought them out.

By the time El Mujahid was thirty he was on the wanted lists of over forty nations, and on the top ten most wanted list of the United States. He had ties to Al Qaeda and a dozen other extremist groups. He was single-minded, relentless, smart—though not particularly wise—and when he spoke, others listened. That made him terribly feared, but feared in the way a guided missile was feared.

Amirah… ah, thought Gault, now she was something entirely different. If the Fighter was the missile, then the Princess—for that was what her name meant—was the hand at the controls. Well… she shared those controls with Gault. By his estimation it was the most effective, harmonious, and potentially lucrative collaboration since Hannibal met an elephant handler. Probably more so.

The tent flap whipped open and the Fighter strode inside. He never simply walked anywhere—he had the same swagger as Fidel Castro, moving through space as if he wanted to bruise the air molecules and teach them their place. It always reminded Gault of the character of the Roman general Miles Gloriosus from the old Broadway musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Gloriosus’s opening line, bellowed from offstage, was: “Stand aside everyone… I take large steps.” Sometimes Gault had to dig his fingernails into his palms to keep from smiling when El Mujahid strode into the room.

The Fighter snatched up the water bottle and poured himself a glass, sloshing half of it on the table, and threw it back. Gault wondered at what point affectation had given way to true personality trait.

“The teams are leaving now,” the Fighter said as he dragged over a chair and threw himself into it. The cheap seat creaked under his bulk, but he ignored it. He was a handsome man with unusual looks for someone of Yemen birth. His eyes were a pale brown, almost gold, and his skin, though tanned by the blistering sun, was not as dark as many of his countrymen. Over the last eighteen months Gault had arranged for highly skilled cosmetic surgeons to do some touch-up work on the Fighter, including resizing his ears, a comprehensive dye job on his hair—head to feet—tonal changes to his vocal chords, and some bone smoothing on his brow and chin. They were all small operations but the total effect was that El Mujahid looked even more like a European. Like a Brit. Give him a modern haircut, lose the fierce mustache, and put him in an Armani suit, Gault considered, and he could pass for northern Italian or even Welsh. The anomaly of the Fighter’s complexion, and his ability to speak an uninflected English with a hint of a British accent, factored heavily in Gault’s plans for the man, and Gault had paid good money to make sure that under the right circumstances the Fighter would make a believable non-Arab. He’d even provided a series of audiotapes to allow the Fighter to practice speaking with an American accent.

Gault looked at his watch—a Tourneau Presidio Arabesque 36 that he’d taken from a former colleague who had no further need for checking the time of day. “As always, my friend, you are precise to the minute.”

“The Koran says that—” But that was all Gault heard. El Mujahid loved his long-winded scripture quotations and as soon as the big man was in gear Gault tuned him out. He sometimes forced himself to mentally say “yada yada yada” to drown out the doctrine. That worked well, and he had himself trained to start paying attention again when the Fighter wrapped it up with his trademark closer: “Allah is the only God and I am his wrath on Earth!”

Grandiose, but catchy. Gault liked the “wrath” part. Wrath was useful.

“Very apt,” he said of the unheard scripture. “Your men should be praised for their devotion to the cause and to the will of Allah.”

Gault was a lapsed Presbyterian. Not completely atheist—he believed some kind of god existed somewhere; he just didn’t think the human race had the Divine All on speed dial… and whatever calls they did make were certainly not being returned. To Gault religion was something to be factored in to any equation. Only a fool dismissed its power or ignored its useful potential; and only a suicidal fool allowed even a hint of disingenuousness to flavor his words. Financial backer or not, Gault would find himself lying in parts all over this corner of Afghanistan if El Mujahid thought that he was mocking his faith. The Fighter’s swagger might have started as affect, but his faith had never been anything but absolute.

The Fighter nodded his thanks for the comment.

“Will you stay for dinner?” Gault asked. “I had some chickens flown in with me. And fresh vegetables.”

“No,” the Fighter said, shaking his head with obvious regret. “I’m crossing over into Iraq tomorrow. One of my lieutenants has stolen a British half-track. I will oversee the placement of antipersonnel mines and then we need to put it somewhere that the British or Americans can find it. We’ll stage it well… the front end will have been damaged by a land mine and there will be one or two British wounded in the cab. Very badly wounded, unable to speak, but clearly alive. This has worked many times for us. They care more about their wounded than they do about their cause, which should convince even the stupidest of men that they do not have God in their hearts or holy purpose to guide their hands.”

Gault bowed in acknowledgment of the point. And he admired El Mujahid’s tactics, largely because the Fighter understood Allied thinking—they always favored rescue over common sense; which made sabotage so effective for men like El Mujahid, and which made profit so deliciously easy for Gault. Since long before the American body count had hit quadruple digits three of Gault’s subsidiary companies had landed contracts for improved plastics and alloys, both for wheeled vehicles and human assets. Now half the soldiers in the field wore antishrapnel polymer undershirts and shorts. Quite a few lives had even been saved, not that this mattered in anything except price negotiations during contract meetings; but it was there. So, the more damage El Mujahid could do with his clever booby traps the more defensive products would be purchased. And even though plastics, petrochemicals, and alloys were only eleven percent of his business, it still brought in six hundred and thirty million per year, so it was all a winwin situation.

“Ah, I understand, my friend,” he said, putting authentic-sounding regret into his voice. “You go in safety and may Allah bless your journey.”

He saw the effect the words had on the big man. El Mujahid actually looked touched. How delicious.

Amirah had long ago coached Gault in what to say when it came to matters of the faith, and Gault was as good a student as he was an actor. After his second meeting with the Fighter—and after Gault had privately noticed the subtle signs indicating how thoroughly his luggage was being searched every time he came here—he’d started packing a worn copy of a French edition of Introduction to Islam: Understand the Pathway to the True Faith, a book written by a European who had gone on to become a significant and very outspoken voice in Islamic politics. Gault and Amirah spent hours with the book, underlining key passages, making sure important pages were dog-eared, and ensuring that the bookmark was never in the same place twice. El Mujahid had never openly spoken of what he believed to be Gault’s process of conversion, but each time they met the big man was warmer to him, treating him like family now, where once he had kept him at arm’s length.

“I’ll be finished in time for the next phase of the program,” the Fighter said. “I hope you have no worries about that.”

“Not at all. If I can’t trust you who can I trust?” They both smiled at that. “All of the transportation steps are locked down,” Gault added. “You’ll be in America by the second of July… the third at the very latest.”

“That cuts it close.”

Gault shook his head. “The timetable leaves less time for random events to interfere. Trust me on this, my friend. This is something I do very well.”

El Mujahid considered for a moment, then nodded. “Well… I have to go. A sword rusts in its sheath.”

“And an unfired arrow becomes brittle with disuse,” Gault said, completing the ancient aphorism.

They stood and embraced, and Gault suffered through the big man’s enthusiastic hugs and backslapping. The man was a foul-smelling oaf and as strong as a bear.

They swapped a few pleasantries and the Fighter strode out of the tent. Gault waited until he heard the growl of El Mujahid’s truck. He got up and stood in the tent’s opening and watched the Fighter and the last of his team disappear in swirls of brown dust and diesel exhaust as they crested a hill and dropped down the other side.

Now he could concentrate on his real work. Not plastics or polymers, not body armor for Yanks about whom he didn’t give a moment’s real thought. No, now he would meet with Amirah and visit her lab to see what his gorgeous little Dr. Frankenstein had on the slab.

His satellite phone vibrated in his pocket and he checked the screen display, smiled, and thumbed the button. “Is everything coded?”

“Of course,” said Toys, which is what he always said. Toys would forget to breathe before he’d forget to engage his phone scrambler.

“Good afternoon, Toys.”

“Good afternoon, sir. I hope you are well.”

“I’m visiting our friends. In fact, your favorite person just left.”

“And how is El Musclehead? I’m so sorry to have missed him,” Toys said with enough acid to burn through tank armor. Toys—born Alexander Chismer in Purfleet—never bothered to hide his contempt of El Mujahid. The Fighter was gruff, dirty, and politically expansive; Toys was none of those things. Toys was a slim and elegant young man, naturally fastidious, and, as far as Gault could tell, absolutely unburdened by any weight of morality. Toys had two loyalties—money and Gault. His love for the former bordered on the erotic; his love for the latter was in no way romantic. Toys was sexually omnivorous but his tastes ran to expensive fashion models of both sexes and of the kind once known as heroin chic. Besides, Toys was the ultimate business professional and he had steel walls between his personal affairs and his responsibilities as Gault’s personal assistant.

He was also the only person on earth Gault truly trusted.

“He sends his love,” Gault said; Toys gave a wicked laugh. “How are the travel arrangements coming along?”

“It’s all done, sir. Our sweaty friend will have a wonderful world tour without incident.”

Gault grinned. “You’re a marvel, Toys.”

“Yes,” Toys purred. “I am. And, by the way… have you seen her yet?” His voice dripped with cold venom.

“She’ll be here in a few minutes.”

“Mm, well, give her a big wet kiss from me.”

“I’m sure she’d be thrilled to hear that. Any news or are you just calling to chitchat?”

“Actually, the bloody Yank has been calling day and night.”

Gault’s smile flickered. “Oh? What’s the urgency?”

“He wouldn’t tell me, but I gather it has something to do with our friends abroad.”

“I’d better call him.”

“Probably best,” agreed Toys, and then added, “Sir? I’m not entirely confident that the Yank is, how should I put it? A reliable asset.”

“He’s usefully placed.”

“So is a rectum.”

Gault laughed. “Be nice. We need him for now.”

Toys said, “You need better friends.”

“He’s not a friend. He’s a tool.”

“Too right he is.”

“I’ll sort him out. In the meantime get your ass on a plane and meet me in Baghdad.”

“Where do you think I’m calling you from?” Toys asked dryly.

“Are you reading my mind now?” Gault said.

“I believe that’s in my job description.”

“I believe it is.”

Gault smiled as he disconnected the call. He punched in a new number and waited while it rang through.

“Department of Homeland Security,” said the voice at the other end.

Chapter Eight

U.S. Route 50 in Maryland / Saturday, June 27; 4:25 P.M.

THE DRIVE BACK to Baltimore gave me time to think, and the thoughts I had weren’t nice ones. I wanted to kick Church’s ass for busting a big wet hole in my peace of mind. He had made me fight a dead guy.

A. Dead. Guy.

I think I logged forty miles of my trip with that thought playing over and over like a skipping record. It’s kind of a hard thought to get past. Me. Dead guy. In a room. Dead guy wants a piece of me. Find a comfortable chair for that to sit in.

Javad was not alive when he attacked me. I may not be a scientist but one of those bottom-line factoids everyone—Eastern, Western, alternative health, all of them—will agree on is that dead guys don’t try to bite you. In movies, yeah okay. Not in Baltimore. But Javad was dead, so there was that. Another twenty miles blurred by.

What was it Church had said? Prions. I had to look that up when I got home. What little I knew was Discovery Channel stuff. Something related to Mad Cow maybe?

So, okay, Joe… if it’s real then make some sense of it. Mad Cow and dead terrorists. Bioweapons of some kind. With dead guys. DMS. Department of Military Sciences, sister org to Homeland. What kind of math does that make? I put the new White Stripes CD in the deck and tried to not think about it. Worked for nearly four seconds.

I pulled off the road, went into a Starbucks, ordered a Venti and a chocolate chunk cookie—screw Church, what does he know about cookies? I paid the tab, left my stuff on the counter, went into the bathroom, splashed water on my face, and then threw my guts up in the toilet.

I could feel the shakes starting to come back, so I washed my face, rinsed my mouth out with handfuls of tap water, pasted on my best I-didn’t-just-kill-a-zombie expression, and left with my coffee.

Chapter Nine

Sebastian Gault / Helmand Province, Afghanistan / Six days ago

INTO HIS PHONE Sebastian Gault said, “Line?”

“Clear,” the voice responded, indicating that both ends of the call were on active scramble.

“I hear you’ve been trying to call me. What’s the crisis this time?”

“I’ve been calling you for days.” The voice at the other end was male, American with a Southern accent. “It’s about the dockside warehouse.”

“I figured. Have they hit it yet?”

“Yes, just like you said they would. Full hit, total loss.” The American told Gault about the task force hit. He quoted directly from the official reports filed with Homeland and the NSA. He referred to Homeland as Big G.

Gault smiled, but he made his voice sound deeply worried. “Are you sure the entire cell is terminated? All of them?”

“The task force report said that some were killed during the raid and the rest died from what they’re calling ‘suicide drugs.’ They’ve got nobody to question. No one’s going to disappear to Guantánamo Bay for any friendly chats.”

“And the subject? What about him?”

“KIA at the site.”

“Killed?” Gault asked, giving the word the kind of dubious inflection it now deserved. It wasn’t lost on the American, who hesitated before continuing with his report.

“One of the Baltimore cops took him down. He was taken to a local hospital as a DOA and I’m told that he’s on ice somewhere.”

Gault considered this. If the subject was in a morgue storage drawer then the plan was going off the rails. He had been infected with Generation Three of the Seif al Din, the Sword of the Faithful. He should not have been lying idly about. However, Gault seriously doubted that this was the case. “Find out for sure.”

“I’ve put a top guy on it and should be able to lock it down soonest.”

“What about the other two shipments?”

“They left by truck the day before the place was hit.”

“Did everything go as planned?”

“Sure. They successfully tailed the one we wanted and lost the other. It all went fine. Right now they’re surveilling the big plant and doing satellite flybys and thermal scans with helos. But no one has gone in because of a general sit-and-wait order.”

“Issued by whom?”

The American cleared his throat. “The Geek Squad.”

“Geek Squad” was their personal code for the DMS.

“Perfect.”

“Glad you think so,” said the American, “but I think you’re playing with goddamn fire here.”

“Have a little faith,” chided Gault.

“Faith, my ass. How are we going to evacuate the plant, that’s my question? The Geeks may only be watching now but a go order can come down any second, and I don’t think I can stop them from—”

Gault cut him off. “I’m not asking you to. Just sit tight and keep your eyes and ears open. I’ll be reachable for the next three or four days. In the meantime, download everything including the official warehouse assault report to my PDA.” He parted the tent flaps and looked out at the rocks and sand, at the sparse bunchgrass and withered scrub date palms. This part of Afghanistan always looked like a wasteland. Then a flash of movement caught his eye and he saw three people coming toward him from the mouth of a small cave halfway up the valley—a woman with two heavily armed guards flanking her. Amirah, coming to take him to the lab. He let out the held breath that had started to burn stale in his chest.

“But it’s too late to evacuate the staff…” the American said.

“Are you that concerned for their well-being?”

The American laughed. “Yeah, right. I’m thinking of what the Geek Squad could do with what they find in there.”

“They’ll do exactly what we want them to do.” He meant to say “what I want them to do,” but decided to throw the American a bone. “Keep me posted. If you can’t reach me then make sure my assistant has regular updates.”

The American made a rude noise. There was no love lost between him and Toys.

“You sure this bullshit is going to work?”

“Work?” Gault echoed softly as he watched Amirah walk toward him and saw that her step was lively, filled with excitement. He knew what kinds of things excited this woman. “It already has worked.”

He closed the phone and put it in his pocket.

Chapter Ten

Baltimore, Maryland / Saturday, June 27; 6:19 P.M.

“DR. SANCHEZ’S OFFICE.”

“Kittie? It’s Joe. Rudy free?”

“Oh, he’s gone for the day. I think he went to the gym—”

“Thanks.” I cleared the call and then thumb-dialed the number for Gold’s on Pratt Street. They got Rudy to the phone.

“Joe,” he said. Rudy sounds like Raul Julia from The Addams Family years. “I thought you were in Ocean City. Something about a tan, an endless stream of bikinis, and a sixer of Corona. Wasn’t that the great master plan?”

“Plans change. Look, you free?”

“When?”

“Now.”

A slight pause as he shifted gears. “Are you okay?”

“Not entirely.”

Another shift, this time from concern to caution. “Is this about what happened at the warehouse?”

“In a way.”

“Are you feeling depressed or—”

“Cut the shit, Rudy, this is off the clock.” He got that. Since long before Helen’s first suicide attempt Rudy had been my shrink some of the time and my friend all of the time. Now I needed my friend, but I wanted his brain, too. “Get dressed and come outside. I’ll be there in five.”

I MET RUDY Sanchez ten years ago during his residency at Sinai. He’d worked with Helen since the first time she’d been checked in after the spiders started coming out of the walls. Now we were both dealing with Helen’s suicide in different ways. I needed him for my part of it, and he needed me for his. None of Rudy’s patients had ever killed themselves before, and he took it pretty hard. There’s professional detachment and then there’s basic humanity. Rudy’s a great shrink. He was born for the profession, I think. He listens with every molecule of his body and he has insight.

He came out of Gold’s wearing electric-blue bike shorts and a black tank top, carrying an Under-Armour gym bag.

“You have a bike?” I asked, looking around.

“No, I drove.”

“What’s with the shorts?”

“There’s a new fitness trainer. Jamaican gal… tall, gorgeous.”

“And…?”

“Bike shorts show off my package.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Jealousy is an ugly thing, Joe.”

“Get in the fucking car.”

We drove to Bellevue State Park, bought some bottled water, and walked off into the forest. I hadn’t said much of anything in the car and Rudy let it be, waiting for me to open up, but after we’d been walking for five minutes he cleared his throat. “This is getting pretty remote for a therapy session, cowboy.”

“Not what it is.”

“Then what? Does the FBI want you to get your forestry merit badge?”

“Need privacy.”

“Your car won’t do it?”

“Not sure about that.”

He smiled. “You ought to consider seeing a therapist about that paranoia.”

I ignored him. The park trail brought us into a small clearing by a brook. I led the way down to the scattering of rocks. For a small brook it had a nice steady burble. Useful. Not that I really expected long-range mics, but safe is better than careless.

“Okay, don’t take this the wrong way, Rudy, but I’m going to take off all my clothes. You can turn around. I wouldn’t want you to lose confidence in your package.”

He sat down on a rock and picked up some small stones to toss. I stripped down to the skin and first examined every inch of my boxers, checking the seams and label. Nothing, so I put them back on.

“Thank God,” Rudy said.

I shot him the finger and went through the process with the borrowed clothes.

“What are you looking for?”

“Bugs.”

“Bugs as in creepy crawlies or bugs as in I’m being ape-shit paranoid and my psychiatrist friend had better keep the Thorazine handy?”

“That one,” I said as I put the sweats on and sat on a rock five feet away.

“What’s going on, Joe?”

“That’s the thing, Rude… I don’t know.”

His dark eyes searched my face. “Okay,” he said, “tell me.”

And I did. When I was finished Rudy sat on his rock and stared for a long time at a praying mantis that was sunning herself on a leaf. The sun was a ruby-red ball behind the distant trees and the late afternoon heat was giving way to a breezy coolness as twilight began to gather.

“Joe? Look me in the eye and tell me that everything you’ve said is true.”

I told him.

He watched my pupils, the muscles around my eyes, looking for any shifts in focus. Looking for a tell. “There’s no chance this Mr. Church was playing some kind of game on you? There’s no chance this Javad was in on it?”

“A few days ago I shot him twice in the back. Today I smashed the guy’s face to jelly and then snapped his neck.”

“That would be a no, then.” His color was starting to look bad as all of this sank in.

“Could a prion do that?”

“Before today I would have said no unreservedly. And I still don’t think so.”

“What the hell are prions anyway? I can’t remember what I remember about them.”

“Well, there’s a lot of mystery attached to them. Prions are small proteinaceous infectious particles that resist inactivation by ordinary procedures that modify nucleic acids. Does that make sense?”

“Not even a little.”

“Sadly it doesn’t get much simpler. Prions are cutting-edge science and we are quite sure that there is more we don’t know than we do know. Prion diseases are often called spongiform encephalopathies because of the postmortem appearance of the brain with large vacuoles in the cortex and cerebellum; makes the brain look like Swiss cheese. The diseases are characterized by loss of motor control, dementia, paralysis, wasting, and eventually death, typically following pneumonia. Mad cow disease is a type of spongiform encephalopathy. Coming back from the dead, however, is definitely not a known symptom.”

“So… prions couldn’t turn a terrorist into one of these monsters?”

“I don’t see how. You said Church was only guessing. It’s been what… five days since you shot Javad? That’s not a lot of time to do that kind of medical research. Church may be completely wrong as to the cause.”

“Doesn’t change the fact that Javad was dead, though.”

“Dios mio.”

“Rudy… you do believe me, right?”

He stared at the mantis some more. “Yes, cowboy. I believe you. I just don’t want to.”

I had nothing to say to that.

Chapter Eleven

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.

Chapter Twelve

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.

Chapter Thirteen

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.

Chapter Fourteen

Baltimore, Maryland / Saturday, June 27; 7:46 P.M.

I DROPPED RUDY at his office. As he got out of the car he said, “Joe… I know how obsessive you can get about things.”

“Me? Really.”

“I’m serious. Church is on some creepy level of government and he told you to leave it alone. I think you should take him at his word.”

“Yeah, let me get right on that.”

“What’s your alternative? Poke at it with a stick until all the hornets come out of the nest? Think about it… Church didn’t approach you through channels, that means he wants this kept off the record. That frightens me, cowboy, and it should frighten you.”

“I’m too wired to be scared. God… I think I need to get totally shitfaced tonight.”

He closed the door and leaned in through the window. “Listen to me, Joe… go easy on the booze. No screwing around. You’ve experienced two major traumas in only a few days. No matter how much of a macho façade you put on I know that killing those men at the warehouse had to do you some damage.”

“They dealt the play.”

“Like that matters? Just because they were doing something immoral doesn’t take away your emotional connection to it. This isn’t to say that you were in any way wrong. God knows I hope I would have the physical and moral courage to do what you did in there. You’re a white hat, Joe, but that comes with a price tag. You have a heart and a mind and pretty soon you’re going to have to open up those doors and take a close look at what kind of damage is there as a result of this.”

I said nothing.

“I’m saying this as your friend as well as your therapist.”

I still said nothing.

“Don’t think I’m kidding, Joe. This isn’t something you can shrug off. You’re required to have sessions with me about this, and you can’t go back on the job until I file my report. As of yet I don’t have anything to file. You’ve blown off two scheduled sessions so far. You need to talk about it.”

I stared out the window for a minute. “Okay.”

In a softer tone he added, “Look, cowboy, I know how tough you are… but believe me when I tell you that nobody is that tough. A complete separation from your feelings is not proof of manly strength… it’s a big glaring neon warning sign. I know you think you called me today to ask my opinion as a pal and as a medical doctor, but I have to believe that you’re reaching out for support for what you’ve been through. As far as this thing with Javad and Mr. Church goes… well, if you were capable of simply shrugging that off with no traumatic effects then I would either be afraid of you or afraid for you.”

“I’m feeling it,” I assured him.

Rudy studied my face. “I have a two o’clock open on Tuesday.”

I sighed. “Yeah, okay. Tuesday at two.”

He nodded, pleased. “Bring Starbucks.”

“Sure, what do you want?”

“My usual. Iced half-caf ristretto quad grande two pump raspberry two percent no whip light ice with caramel drizzle three-and-a-half-pump white mocha.”

“Is any of that actually coffee?”

“More or less.”

“And you think I’m damaged.”

He stepped back and I drove off. I could see in the rearview that he watched me all the way out of the parking lot.

Chapter Fifteen

Baltimore, Maryland / Saturday, June 27; 7:53 P.M.

I HEADED HOME and as soon as I was in the door I went straight to the bathroom, stripped and stuffed everything, even my boxers, into the trash and then stood under the hottest spray I could stand and tried to boil the day off my skin.

My cat, Cobbler—a marmalade and white tabby—hopped up on the toilet tank and watched me with his big yellow eyes.

I knotted a towel around my waist and thought about the beers in the fridge, but even though the adrenaline was out of my bloodstream the shakes were still right there beneath the surface. I passed on the beer and put a frozen pizza in the oven, and turned on the TV. Normally I’d surf over to one of the horror or SF channels and see who was eating whom, but right now I wanted no part of that. All I needed now was to stumble on a rerun of Dawn of the Dead and I’d probably lose it. So I put on the news. The top story was a follow-up on the fire at St. Michael’s Hospital that had occurred the same night as the warehouse raid. Over two hundred dead and half the hospital burned to the ground. They were calling it the worst hospital fire in modern U.S. history.

More depression I didn’t need, so I surfed over to a different news channel and watched a few minutes of the preevent press hype over the big Fourth of July event in Philly. They were rededicating the Liberty Bell and also installing a brand-new one—the Freedom Bell—that had been built according to the specs of the original. Something the First Lady and the wife of the Vice President had cooked up as part of their Patriotic American Women organization. Lots of rah-rah stuff to build morale for the troops in the field and raise domestic support for our overseas action. The whole event was going to center around the ringing of the Freedom Bell, which would be symbolic of American democracy and freedom ringing out around the world. Must have sounded good to Congress because they approved it and hired some woman to make the new bell, and she was supposed to be a descendant of the British metalsmith who’d cast the original Liberty Bell. My task force team was one of over a dozen similar groups that were supposed to be on site during the festivities, though overall security was naturally a Secret Service gig. We were basically thugs in suits for the day, just in case bin Laden showed up with a hundred pounds of C4 strapped to his chest. Life in post-9/11 America. Happy holidays, bring the whole family.

I switched off the set and closed my eyes. What was it Church had said? Mr. Ledger, we are very much in the business of stopping terror. There are threats against this country greater than anything that has so far made the papers.

“No kidding,” I said aloud.

So how did I work this? I’m self-aware enough to know that I have a somewhat fractured personality. Not exactly multiple personality disorder, but clearly there were different drivers at the wheel depending on my mood, and depending on my needs. Over the years I’d been able to identify and make peace with the three dominant personalities: the Modern Man, the Warrior, and the Cop. At the moment all three of them were trying to grab the wheel.

The Modern Man, the civilized part of me, was in full-blown denial mode. He didn’t want to believe in monsters and he wasn’t all that comfortable with secret government departments and all that James Bond crap. The Warrior was okay with the cloak-and-dagger stuff because it partly defined him, it allowed him the chance to be who and what he was: a killer. He was useful in a firefight, but I seldom let him out to play. He was lousy at tea parties. Then there was the Cop. That part of me had become dominant over the last few years, and he also upheld the nobler parts of the Warrior’s personality—the codes of ethics, the rules.

With my eyes closed I settled back into meditative breathing and let the parts of me sort it all out. It was almost always the Cop who got the others to shut the hell up. The Cop was the thinker. I dismantled this thing bit by bit and laid everything on the table so the Cop could take a good long look.

There were parts that didn’t fit. The most obvious was the fact that the terrorists we took down at the warehouse had been such a mixed bag. These guys aren’t known for tolerance and team spirit.

The suicide plan was also weird. Each of hostiles at the warehouse had been infected by a disease and had to take regular doses of an antidote to stay alive. That was impressive, but it also seemed like overkill. It was too sophisticated for its own purposes, considering that the mere threat of it should have been enough. It also spoke of a degree of technological sophistication that was, as far as I could judge, beyond the reach of your average extremist cell. If this was all real, and if it turned out that the plague that created these walkers was developed by the same mind, or minds, that created the control disease, then the DMS might be facing an actual real-world mad scientist. In another mood, or perhaps on another day, that might actually be funny. Right now it scared the hell out of me.

Then there was Javad. Was he really dead and somehow reanimated? Impossible? You bet; and yet I know what I saw.

From now on, Church had said, we may have to consider “dead” a relative term.

I found it hard to believe that Javad was the only infected person. There hadn’t been a lab at the warehouse. Church had to know that, too; and I should have remarked on it. The oven timer dinged and I opened my eyes. I took the pizza with me into the little nook off the kitchen where I had my computer. I ate a slice while it loaded. Then I got to work. The Cop in me was in gear now. Church had said that if I looked I wouldn’t find anything about him or the DMS. I wanted to put that to the test, so I stayed up all night searching the Internet.

I did a search on the warehouse Church had been using. Baylor Records Storage. To dig deep I had to log on through the department Web site, and there was a serious risk in that. Everything is logged, everything is tracked.

“Screw it,” I said, and kept going. But Baylor Records turned out to be a dead end. Previous owner was dead and there were no direct heirs, so the government had snapped it up for back taxes. Easy enough for someone like Church to commandeer. I searched all night to see if there was any connection between Baylor Records and the old container company warehouse where we’d taken down the terrorist cell; but if a connection existed I couldn’t find it.

Early Sunday morning Rudy called to say he’d spent all of last night and this morning researching prions.

“What happened to ‘leave it alone, Joe’?”

“What can I tell you,” he said tiredly. “So we both need therapy.”

“You find anything interesting?”

“Lots, but none of it germane to what you mean. The whole prion thing seems less and less likely, though. As dangerous as they are the infection rate is extremely slow. It can take months or years for it to manifest. I’ll keep looking, though. And don’t forget about our session on Tuesday.”

“Yes, mother.”

“Don’t start with me, cowboy,” he warned, and hung up.

The rest of Sunday went like that. I logged hour after hour on the Net, and Rudy and I shared URLs via e-mail and IM, but we didn’t seem to be getting any closer to an explanation for what Javad was or how he came to be like that. Around midnight I finally shut off the machine, took a shower, and shambled off to bed. I was hitting brick walls everywhere I went, and I guess another person would have thrown in the towel, but that’s not my sort of thing. I just needed to rest and then attack this again with a fresher set of wits.

Chapter Sixteen

Gault and Amirah / The Bunker / Six days ago

THEY LAY EXHAUSTED on the table, their clothes tangled around her waist and his ankles, his body purple and red with claw marks and bites. He never left a mark on her, not even the smallest of love bites. That would be suicide.

They never spoke of love afterward. Never told each other how much this meant, or how much they meant to each other. They already knew what the other would say. It had all been said in that first moment of eye contact. Pillow talk would limit the feeling, it would define what did not need to be defined and therefore cheapen it all to some kind of clandestine Romeo and Juliet pap. This was much bigger and, Gault hoped, likely to end with less personal tragedy.

She spoke first, saying simply, “I’ve had some vague reports. Baltimore?”

“Mm, yes,” he drawled. “Seems our warehouse is a total loss.”

“What about Javad?”

He paused, staring at the speckled surface of the acoustic ceiling tiles, deciding which version of the truth to tell her. He loved Amirah but there were levels of privacy that even she didn’t get to enter; which would make it easier if he had to kill her one of these days. He liked to keep his options open. “Uncertain.”

“He hasn’t gotten out. I’ve been tracking the news feeds…”

“I know, which means that we still have to move forward with the next few steps of the operation.”

“What about the other two locations? If the Americans know about the warehouse…”

“Don’t worry,” Gault said. “They know about one of them—the big one; but not about the other one. Right now they’re holding off, probably hoping to find where the other lorry went.”

She nodded, the motion massaging his bicep, which was starting to fall asleep. “When will you evacuate the plant?”

“Why bother? We don’t really need it anymore and I’m rather hoping they raid it.”

Amirah turned her head sharply. “Why?”

“How, why, and when they raid that plant will tell us a great deal about their intelligence gathering, and their wits.”

“Shouldn’t those details be handled by your American friend?”

“He’s too close to it to risk any direct involvement. Besides,” Gault said, “there’s something else I need him to focus on. There are some indications that there is another player in the game, possibly a new counterterrorism organization or department. Right now this is just guesswork, but it bears looking into.”

Amirah sat up and her black robes fell down to cover her with an unintentional display of rumpled modesty. She pushed a strand of glossy black hair away from her face. Without the chadri her face was incredibly beautiful. Full lips, high cheekbones, a broad clear brow, and those eyes. Gault loved those eyes. Like a falcon or some creature out of myth.

“Is it the Brits? You think Barrier is—”

He shook his head. “No, not Barrier. Something the Yanks have cooked up, but as I said—I’m not sure who yet. I have feelers out through Homeland, the FBI, a few other agencies. If I’m right then they’ll show their hands soon enough.”

“You should put your pet monkey on it. He’s tenacious.”

Gault smiled. “His name is Toys… and yes, he is tenacious.” In fact, Gault thought, he’d love to cook you over a slow fire.

“So… what are you going to do about the plant?”

“I rather think I’m going to let them raid it. I can’t think of a better way of inspiring useful fear than letting me break in and see what’s going on in that place. It’ll do us worlds of good.”

“But what about El Mujahid? He’s the master of creating fear, and his mission is already in the works. If you allow the raid on the warehouse does that mean you’ll use that instead of what my husband is—”

“Hardly,” Gault assured her. “I’m relying on the Fighter to deliver the master stroke; but a raid on the plant will surely set the atmosphere… after which everything will go exactly as we want.”

She frowned at him, chewing a lip as she considered this. He knew that she was sorting through the possible outcomes based on what she knew—what he’d allowed her to know. She would come to very logical conclusions, and on the whole they would be right; but they would be incomplete. Which was fine.

“Don’t worry, my princess,” Gault said, and turned onto his side so he could stroke her hair and brush the back of his hand against her cheek. “This is going very, very well for us. We need the Yanks to think they’re containing the situation. If they have a new special operations group, then it will help focus attention in the right direction for us. The best manipulations are always those in which the mark thinks he is in charge.”

Amirah kissed him. “You have the mind of a scorpion, my love.”

“Now, what do you have to show me?”

Her eyes lit up. “If creating great fear is what you want, then you’ll be very happy with what we’ve done since the last time you were here.”

“As good as Javad?”

“Oh no… this is much, much better.”

He almost said “I love you.” Instead he kissed her deeply and passionately and then whispered in her ear: “Show me.”

Chapter Seventeen

Baltimore, Maryland / Monday, June 29; 6:03 A.M.

NEXT MORNING I called a friend who worked early shift at DMV records and asked her to run Buckethead’s plates, but that went nowhere. No such plates existed. Big surprise.

I logged back onto the department server to reread the task force report on the warehouse; it was gone. Completely gone. No file name, no incident folders, nothing.

“You bastard,” I said aloud. Church had impressed me before, but now he was beginning to scare me. He threw enough weight to be able to locate and remove the official records of Homeland Security’s Interjurisdictional Counterterrorism Task Force. That meant accessing local, state, and federal computer mainframes. Holy shit.

There was a hard copy of the report in my desk at the squad room, but I had doubts that it would still be there if I went in to get it. This wasn’t helping my feelings of paranoia. I turned and looked around my apartment. How aggressive would these guys be? Surely they wouldn’t…

One second later I was searching my apartment from top to bottom looking for microphones, phone bugs, fiber-optic surveillance threads. I looked hard and I looked everywhere. I found nothing. That didn’t mean there was nothing to find, though; Homeland and that whole crew had a lot of very sneaky toys that were designed not to be found. All the search resulted in was a two-degree drop in my paranoia and an itchy spot between my shoulder blades like someone had a laser sight on me.

Cursing under my breath I headed into the bedroom to put on a suit in preparation for the OIS hearing, but as I was picking out a tie the phone rang. I snatched it up thinking it was Rudy.

“Detective Ledger? This is Keisha Johnson.”

I recognized her voice. She was the lieutenant overseeing the Officer Involved Shooting investigation for the Task force raid. I thought about the searches and calls I’d made despite Church’s warning to stay away from this and had a brief panic attack.

“Yes…?” I said cautiously, heart in my throat.

“In your absence we reviewed all of the videotapes from the raid last Tuesday, and after several discussions with your commanding officer and the supervisors for the task force, we’ve concluded that your shooting was in keeping with the best policies and practices of the Baltimore Police Department and no further hearings or actions will be required at this time.”

I said something clever like: “Um… what?”

“Thank you for your willingness to cooperate, and good luck at Quantico. We’ll be sorry to lose such a fine officer.” And with that she hung up.

I stared at the phone in total shock. There was no way that an OIS hearing would be handled like this. Not ever, not even if everyone involved agreed that the shooting was completely righteous. Department policy mandated a hearing, token or not. This was weird and I didn’t like it one damn bit. The paranoia was back stronger than ever. But the logic was all twisted. If I’d somehow rattled Church’s cage by trying to find some answers, why would he smooth the way for me by canceling the hearing? I couldn’t see the advantage to him in it.

I sat back down at my computer and pulled up the list of URLs Rudy had sent on prion diseases. Maybe that would give me a direction to follow, and I spent hours buried in science that was beyond me, but not so far beyond that it couldn’t scare me. I learned that prion diseases are still very rare, about one case out of a million people worldwide, and only about three hundred cases here in the States. It was rare but seriously dangerous, and the mysteries surrounding the little buggers often led to panic reactions. The whole mad cow thing was prion disease at its worst, and the haste with which tens of thousands of cattle were slaughtered showed the degree of fear associated with the threat. Not that any of this helped. I’m pretty darn sure Javad didn’t get the way he was from eating a bad McBurger. Then I clicked on another of Rudy’s URLs which took me to an article on a prion-based disease called “fatal familial insomnia” in which a small group of patients worldwide suffered increasing insomnia resulting in panic attacks, the development of odd phobias, hallucinations, and other dissociative symptoms. The whole process takes months and the victim generally dies as a result of total sleep deprivation, exhaustion, and stress. I searched all around the topic and though there was no connection at all to a state resembling living death the concept stuck in my head. Unending wakefulness. No sleep. No rest. No dreams.

“Jesus…” It was a horrifying thought, and what a terrible way to die.

Could Church have been wrong? Was Javad actually suffering from a disease whose symptoms led the doctors to believe he was dead when maybe he was really in a coma? His coming back from the dead could have been nothing more sinister than waking up from a cataleptic coma. Some part of that felt right to me, but as I read on I hit another speed bump. Several of the sites said that the victims could not be put to sleep, not even through artificial means. They didn’t lapse into a terminal coma at the end of their suffering. They died, and apparently stayed dead. Besides, even if Javad had been in some kind of walking catatonia it didn’t explain how he’d shrugged off the two .45s I’d put in his back. Clearly there was too much of the picture that I couldn’t see, and it was maddening.

Chapter Eighteen

Grace, Maryland / Monday, June 29; 8:39 A.M.

GRACE COURTLAND SAT in her comfortable leather swivel chair and sipped a Diet Coke and watched the eight color monitors that showed the inside of Joe Ledger’s car, each room of his apartment, and the consulting room in Dr. Rudy Sanchez’s office. She’d been amused when they’d each searched for bugs. None of them had found anything, of course. If they had someone on her staff would lose his job. For what the DMS paid for holographic relay technology it had better not show up on a sweep or be visible to the naked eye. The DMS had deep pockets and Mr. Church liked having toys that no one else in the schoolyard had.

Her desk was stacked with reports on Ledger. Bank account records, tax returns, school transcripts, his complete military record, and copies of everything filed about him since he joined the Baltimore Police. She’d read it all, but Joe Ledger was still a puzzle. There were so many things about him that made him excellent material for the DMS, and Grace was finding it harder and harder to hold to her position that Ledger was a screwup. If it wasn’t for that damning evidence on the task force duty log…

That morning she’d read through Ledger’s military service file. He had scored high marks in every area of training and had excelled in close-quarters combat, surveillance and countersurveillance, land warfare, and all immediate action drills. There were several letters recommending Ledger for OCS, but each included notes saying that Ledger had declined the offer. One handwritten note, from Colonel Aaron Greenberg, base commander at Fort Bragg, read: “Staff Sergeant Ledger has indicated that his goal is to use his army training to better prepare him for a career as a law enforcement officer in his hometown of Baltimore, MD. I expressed to him that this was a gain for Baltimore PD but a real loss for the army.”

It was a pretty remarkable letter, but she chose to interpret it as a lack of ambition. What really caught her attention, though, was the transcript of a deposition of Ledger’s company commander, Captain Michael S. Costas. Following the warehouse raid Church had sent agents to depose Costas under oath and after signing a secrecy agreement. Costas spoke freely and glowingly about Ledger, but one exchange in particular must have struck Church—it was the only section highlighted in yellow:

“Hero indeed,” Grace muttered, turning up her nose at Costas’s effusiveness; but as she immersed herself in Ledger’s life something shifted inside of her. She reread it, then slapped the report cover shut. “Bollocks.”

Ledger was a good fighter, that much was certain, but with all the DMS had to face could they risk having someone like him aboard? The soldier in her wanted to have nothing to do with him. And yet, the woman in her wasn’t so sure. On the screen Ledger hammering away at his computer keyboard, his face intent, his blue eyes bright and—

“Stop it, you stupid cow,” she said aloud, and turned away from the screen for a moment. This was counterproductive bullshit. This was a side effect of being alone in a lonely job in a foreign country. This was hormones and biology and that was all.

But when she turned back to the screen Joe’s eyes were still as blue.

She punched a button that brought up an Internet display screen that mimicked whatever Ledger was looking at, and Grace forced herself to concentrate on the prion information he was reading. The dry complexity of the medical information was a relief and she could feel the small flare of emotionality subside within her. Grace sipped her Diet Coke and slammed the can down on her desk. There was no way she was going to approve him coming on board. No way in hell.

Chapter Nineteen

Mr. Church, Maryland / Monday, June 29; 8:51 A.M.

MR. CHURCH SAT back in a heavy leather chair, taking occasional sips from a bottle of spring water. The wall in front of him was covered, floor to ceiling, with video monitors. One screen showed Dr. Rudy Sanchez taking notes in his private office while a patrol sergeant broke into tears as he confessed an ongoing love affair with a precinct secretary that his wife had now started to suspect. Church paid no attention to the cop, but he studied Sanchez very closely. He selected a vanilla wafer from a dish and bit off a piece.

Another screen showed Joe Ledger bent over his computer and as he typed the keystrokes were displayed in a digital text bar below the screen.

But what interested him most was the screen on the upper-left side of his display board. On that one Grace Courtland was sipping a Diet Coke and staring with great apparent fascination at Joe Ledger. The camera he had installed in her office was something not even she would find. It was two or three generations above the equipment she used, and her stuff was cutting edge. Church had better sources.

He watched her face, the shape of her mouth, the shift of her eyes as she watched Joe Ledger. Church chewed his cookie. Even if anyone had been there his face would have given away none of his thoughts.

Chapter Twenty

Baltimore, Maryland / Monday, June 29; 9:17 A.M.

I DECIDED TO come at this from a different route, so I called Jerry Spencer, my friend from DCPD who’d gotten his sternum cracked at the warehouse. Jerry was thirty years on the job and was the best forensics man I ever met. If anyone had caught a whiff of this DMS thing it’d be him.

He answered on the fifth ring.

“Jerry. Hey, man, how’s the chest?”

“Joe,” he said. No inflection.

“How are you? You still out on medical or—”

He cut me off. “What do you need, Joe?”

His tone was matter-of-fact, so I decided to be straight with him. “Jerry, have you ever heard of a federal agency called the DMS?”

There was a long silence on the line, and then Jerry said, “No, I haven’t, Joe… and neither have you.”

Before I could work out a response to that he hung up.

“Uh-oh,” I murmured, and for the next ten minutes all I did was sit there and stare at the phone. Jerry had been gotten to; a blind man could see that. It strained my head to imagine how much force it would take to spook a guy like Jerry enough to have him blow me off like that.

Cobbler jumped into my lap and I stroked his silky fur while I chewed on the problem.

Until now I’d hesitated doing a direct search on the DMS for fear of that acronym, or the words “Department of Military Sciences,” setting off some kind of alarms. For a while now the government has used different software packages to locate certain combinations of words in e-mail or Net searches. Type in something like “bomb” and “school” and it’s supposed to raise a red flag. Doing this kind of search could land my ass in a sling. On the other hand how could I just leave this be? How could Church expect me to forget it? Even if Church was right and the whole Javad/prion/walking dead thing was over—a one-shot fluke that we lucked into and solved before it got out of the box—that still didn’t alter the fact that the incident changed my whole world. Now I know how those folks feel who see a UFO or Bigfoot—not the nutcases, but the ones who are absolutely sure they’ve seen something outside of normal reality, and have nowhere to go with it.

What would happen if I did that search? I mean… what would Church really do as a result? I met the man, and even though I could see him feeding a busload of orphans and nuns to hungry wolves if it furthered his aims, I didn’t take him for petty vindictiveness.

So, what would he do if I did a search on “Department of Military Sciences”?

“Kiss my ass, Church,” I said, and hit the enter key.

I got a few hits for college ROTC programs under that name, but in terms of national security or secret agencies, absolutely nothing came up on the search. A waste of time? Maybe. Or maybe I had lobbed a serve into Church’s court.

Chapter Twenty-One

Gault and Amirah / The Bunker / Six days ago

THE LEVEL-A PVC hazmat suit was air-cooled and very comfortable, but Gault still felt like a big marshmallow. He stood close to the airlock. In one hand he held a wireless remote that would trigger the emergency release on the lock in case he had to make a run for it; in the other he held a Snellig 46, an electric wire-dart pistol. Amirah stood behind a Plexiglas wall and her fingers hovered over a computer keyboard.

“What stage is it in?” Gault asked. Their suits were soundproof and the intercoms were of the best quality.

“Advanced stage one.”

Gault cocked an eyebrow. “It’s still alive?”

The creature standing there certainly didn’t look alive. The brown skin had faded to a sickly bruise-yellow; its mouth was slack, lips gray and rubbery. It was only when Gault shifted a few feet to one side in order to see the thing’s eyes that he could detect any trace of intelligence; but even then it was rudimentary.

“I resequenced the hormonal discharge to make the blood chemistry more hospitable for the parasites. They spread the prions at a much more accelerated rate now. The nonessential functions shut down more quickly,” Amirah said brightly. “Higher brain functions deteriorate at a faster rate now.”

“How much faster?”

Amirah paused and turned and flashed him a triumphant smile. “Eight times.”

He frowned. “This is Generation Three?”

She laughed. “Oh no, Sebastian… we’ve passed that phase a long time ago. What you’re seeing is Generation Seven of the Seif al Din pathogen. We’ve broken through almost all of the symptomatic barriers.”

Gault’s head whipped around and he stared at the subject then up at the big wall clock. “Seven… Christ! When was infection begun?”

“Right before I came to meet you.”

Gault licked his lips. “That’s… what, an hour?”

She shook her head. “Less. Forty-seven minutes, and I think we can get that down even more. That rate is based on injection only; we added a new parasite to the salivary glands so infection from bites is much faster, a matter of minutes. By Generation Eight we should have it down to seconds.”

The creature shook its head like an animal shaking off a biting fly. The hazmat suits prevented the subject from hearing or smelling them, which were the two most significant response triggers; however, the sight of them was causing it to become agitated. Without human scent or sound that hadn’t happened with earlier generations. Gault moved his hand experimentally, wanting to see if the creature would track him.

Suddenly it lunged.

Without warning or hesitation it threw itself at Gault, springing across the cold metal floor of the display area, hooked fingers clawing the air as it tried to grab him. Gault cried out and staggered back, but he brought up the Snellig and fired the weapon’s twin flachettes into the monster’s naked chest. He pressed his thumb down on the activator and sent 70,000 volts into the infected predator.

The subject let out a scream like a cougar—high and full of hate—but it dropped down into a fetal ball, twitching as the current burned through it.

“That’s enough,” he heard Amirah shout, and Gault sagged back, releasing the button. His chest was heaving and his heart hammering. Amirah laughed as she came out from behind the Plexi screen. “The new parasite has enhanced predatory aggression by at least half, and it begins far sooner. Even from a nonfatal bite the infection will take hold within minutes and begin reducing cognitive function. In cases of a more serious bite, or in the presence of other traumatic injuries, the infection will spread exponentially faster.”

“He could have killed me!” Gault snapped, rounding on her and pointing the Snellig at her chest. For a white-hot moment he almost pulled the trigger.

But she was still laughing, shaking her head. “Oh, don’t be such an old woman.” She used the toe of one booted foot to pull back the creature’s upper lip. Gault saw that the pale gums were smooth. Amirah said, “I had its teeth pulled in preparation for the demonstration. I’m not an idiot, Sebastian.”

Gault said nothing for a moment, his jaw locked, lips curled back from his teeth in as savage a snarl as he’d seen on the face of the subject. Then, by slow degrees, he forced himself to let go of the moment. He made his face relax first and gradually straightened his body from the defensive crouch. “You could have effing well warned me!”

“That would have been less fun.”

“God, you’re a wicked bitch,” he said, but now he was smiling, too. It was completely artificial but he made it look convincing, thinking, You are so going to pay for that, my dear.

Amirah either couldn’t tell how upset he truly was, or didn’t care—and the hazmat suit hid most of his face—but she looked at the wall clock and then walked back to her control console, pulling off her hood. “The new hormone sequence has one more really marvelous effect,” she said as she punched some keys. There was a heavy metallic chunk as steel panels slid back on the floor. She hit another button and four curved sections of inch-thick reinforced glass rose from the floor. Their sides fit together with only a faintness of the seam visible. The glass walls hissed upward until they reached a large circular track in the ceiling. As the upper edges slid into the tracks there was another chunking sound and the walls stopped moving. Amirah watched the wall clock all the while. The subject lay in the center of a big glass and steel jar.

“Wait for it,” she murmured as the digital counters ticked away the seconds. “Should be right about now. Generation Seven is so wonderfully quick.”

The creature suddenly opened its eyes and peeled back its lips to issue a hiss of animal hatred. No sound escaped the barrier, but Gault still flinched. Then he blinked and looked from the subject to the clock and back again.

“Wait…” he said, “that doesn’t…”

Amirah’s gorgeous dark eyes sparkled with delight. “Reanimation time is now under ninety seconds.”

He tore off his hood and threw it onto a nearby console. “God,” he gasped, staring at the monster.

“If you were worried that the Americans might harvest one of our subjects for research it doesn’t matter now. They can have all of the subjects we’ve already sent… but any preventive measure they design will be built on the wrong generation of the disease.”

She walked over and placed her palm on the glass and even when the subject lunged at her and slammed its face against the inner wall on the other side she didn’t flinch. There was an adoring look on her face as she stared at the subject.

Gault came to stand next to her. The subject kept banging against the glass, its infected brain unable to process the concept of transparency. Even without scent it knew that its prey was there. That was the only thought it could hold on to.

In an awed voice, Amirah whispered, “Once we release these new subjects into the population the infection will spread beyond control. They won’t be able to keep ahead of it.”

Gault nodded slowly but his mind was working at computer speed, putting everything he’d seen and everything Amirah had said into context. It was an effort to keep his feelings about all of this off his face.

“This is unstoppable,” Amirah said with a predatory hiss in her voice. “We can kill them all.”

“Now, now,” he said, wrapping his arm around her, “let’s not lose focus here. We don’t want to kill them all, darling. What would be the point in that? We simply want to make them all very, very sick.”

He stroked her breast through the hazmat material.

She said nothing but he saw her turn away as if to look at some gauges and he was certain she was trying to hide her expression. “You told me to continue with the research, to improve the model. What do you expect me to do with everything I’ve developed? Just destroy it?”

“Yes, I bloody well do,” he said, but then he stopped, lips pursed, considering; then something occurred to him. “Actually… hold on a bit.”

She turned back to him, her face showing hurt and suspicion. “What?”

“I have a wonderful idea,” he purred. “I think I figured out how to use your new monster. Oh yes, this is both juicy and delicious.”

Still frowning, she said, “Tell me!”

“Before I do you have to promise me that you’ll use it only as I suggest. We can’t really let this generation of the pathogen out. Not ever. You do understand that, don’t you?”

She said nothing.

“Do you understand?” He said it again, slowly, reinforcing each syllable.

“Yes, yes, I understand. You really are such an old woman at times, Sebastian.”

“Dear heart… we want to buy the world, not bury it.”

Amirah gave him a slow three-count and then nodded. “Of course,” she said. “I just wanted you to see what we could accomplish. We’ve created a new kind of life, an entirely new state of existence. Unlife.”

He stepped back from her and stared, the devious smile still frozen onto his mouth.

Unlife.

God Almighty, he thought.

“Now… tell me your idea,” she said, breaking through the shell of his shocked and fragile thoughts. “How can you use my new pathogen to help us in our cause?”

And suddenly Gault was snapped out of his reverie and out of his shock and was completely present in his mind. She had said “cause,” not program. Not scheme, or plan. Cause. That is a very interesting choice of a word, my love, he thought.

So he told her and he watched her face as she listened; and he paid special attention to the muscles around her eyes and the dilation of her pupils. What he saw told him a lot. Perhaps too much, and it both elated him and hurt him. By the time he was done her beautiful face was suffused with a terrible light.

Amirah pulled him close and wrapped her arms around him. They held tightly together, ignoring the absurdity of the PVC suits.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you, too,” he said, and meant it.

And when this is done I may have to feed you to one of your pets, he thought. And he meant that, too.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Balkh, Afghanistan / Five days ago

THE TOWN OF Balkh in northern Afghanistan was once one of the great cities of the ancient world. Now, even with a population of over one hundred thousand the town is largely in ruins. The Iranian prophet Zoroaster was born there and for centuries it was the center of the Zoroastrian religion. Now, like much of Afghanistan it varies between poverty and desperation, with some rare spots of music, color, and the laughter of children too young to grasp the realities of the life that awaits them.

South and a little east of the city is the small town of Bitar, a village caught like an eagle’s nest in the spiky crags of a mountain pass. Only one serpentine road led up into it and a worse one wound down. Camels manage it because they’re stubborn, but even they slip once in a while. There are eighty-six people living in Bitar, most of them childless parents whose sons have died fighting either for the Taliban or against them; or who have gone off to work the poppy fields and never returned. A few of the youngest children walk seven miles to go to school. There are only thirty camels in the whole town. The chickens are all skinny. Only the goats look hardy, but they are a hardy breed used to very little. For plumbing the people have well water that smells of animal urine and old salt.

Eqbal was sixteen and his parents had not yet lost him to the poppy fields or the wars. Eqbal was destined to service Allah through service to his family. It was his qawn identity, he was sure, to be a farmer and in that way both preserve old ways and yet provide for the future. Despite war and strife, Eqbal believed in the future and to him it was bright with promise. Wars pass, but Afghanistan, graced by the love of Allah, endures.

Every morning Eqbal would rise with the day, clean himself, and then dress in loose robes and place a kufi cap on his head so that he would be ready to say his first prayers of the day, following the precise requirements of salat. First standing and then kneeling and finally prostrate in humility before the grace and majesty of God.

Though a young man of uncomplicated faith and one who had dedicated himself to the simple rigors of the farm life there in the dusty desert, Eqbal was not a simple-headed youth. As he tended his flocks or did chores around the farm he was often deep in complex thought, sometimes wrestling meanings out of the passages in the Qur’an; sometimes working to understand the complexities of delivering a breeched goat without losing either mother or kid. He did not think fast, but he always thought deep, and when he came to a conclusion he was generally correct.

Had he lived Eqbal would have very likely become the headman of the village, and certainly a man to be counted. But Eqbal did not live. Eqbal would not live to see his seventeenth birthday, which was eight days away.

“Eqbal!” called his father, who was laid up with a broken ankle. “How is that goat coming along?”

The young man crouched over the gravid goat, who was crying out in pain as Eqbal worked his hands inside the birth canal to try and turn the kid. The other goats picked up her nervousness and the air was a constant barrage of snorts and baas. Eqbal’s hands were red with blood and mucus and sweat shone brightly on his face as he worked, brow knitted, his clever fingers feeling along the tiny legs of the unborn goat.

“I think I have it, Father!” he called as his fingertips encountered the soft ropy length of the umbilical cord. “The cord is twisted around the hind legs.”

He heard the scrape of a crutch as his father shuffled toward the open window. “Be gentle now, boy. Nature does not want you to hurry.”

“Yes, Father,” Eqbal said. It was one of his father’s favorite sayings, and it matched the slow process of thought and action that made Eqbal his father’s son. Patience was as valuable to a farmer as seeds and water.

He curled one finger around the cord and gently—very gently—pulled it down and over the kid’s legs, then felt inside to make sure that there was no other obstruction. With great care he pushed on the kid to turn it inside the mother, who continued to bleat and cry.

“It’s clear, Father.”

“Then step back and let her do her own work,” his father advised, and Eqbal glanced up to see his father’s face in the window. He, too, was slick with sweat. The pain of his broken leg—shattered in a terrible fall on the cliffside—was etched into the lines on his face. His color was bad, but he was smiling at his son as Eqbal slowly withdrew his hand from the goat and sat back to watch.

The bleating of the goat changed in pitch as the baby began to slide along the birth canal. It was still painful, but now the goat did not sound desperate, merely tired and sore.

Within two minutes the wet, slime-slick little body slid out of her and flopped onto the straw-covered ground. Immediately the mother struggled to her feet and began licking at it, sponging clear her baby’s nose and mouth and eyes.

“A female, Father,” said Eqbal, turning again to look at his father. He froze, confused at the expression on his father’s face. Instead of relief or joy, his face stared at him with a an expression that was a twisted mask of shock and horror.

“Father…?”

Then Eqbal saw that his father was not looking at him… but behind him.

Eqbal whirled, thinking that it was one of the men from the Taliban group in the caves to the south; or a collector from the poppy farms come to take someone else off to work in the fields. Eqbal’s hand was straying toward his shepherd’s crook when he froze in place; and he could feel his own face contorting into lines of dread.

A man stood behind him.

No… not a man. A thing. It was dressed like a man but in strange clothes—light blue pants and a V-necked short-sleeved shirt. Eqbal had seen TV, he had been to the clinic in Balkh, he knew what hospital scrubs were; but he had never seen them out here. This man wore them now, and they were dirty and torn and stained to a dark shining purple wetness by blood. Blood was everywhere. On the man’s clothes, his hands, his face. His mouth. His teeth…

Eqbal heard his father scream and then his whole world was torn in red madness and pain.

EL MUJAHID SAT comfortably in the saddle of his four-wheeled ATV, leaning back against the thick cushions, heavy arms folded across his chest. Three hundred yards up the slope the screams were already starting to fade as the last of the villagers died. He did not smile, but he felt a strange joy at so much death. It had all worked so well, and so quickly. Far more quickly than the last time. Four subjects, eighty-six villagers. He checked his watch. Eighteen minutes.

His walkie-talkie crackled and he thumbed the switch and held it to his mouth.

“It is done,” said his lieutenant, Abdul.

“Are you tracking all four subjects?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the villagers.”

“Five have already revived,” said Abdul, and the Fighter thought he detected a slight tremble in the man’s voice. “Soon they will all be up.”

The Fighter nodded to himself, content in the knowledge that Seif al Din, the holy Sword of the Faithful, was in motion now, and nothing could deny the will of God.

In the village the rattle of gunfire seasoned the air like music.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Baltimore, Maryland / Tuesday, June 30; 9:11 A.M.

I MADE IT through the rest of the night and all through the morning without federal agents appearing to kick down my door. Days of searching for the DMS, Javad, the two trucks, and Mr. Church had gone exactly nowhere. I now knew way too much useful information about spongiform encephalitis, including mad cow disease and fatal familial insomnia, but I had nowhere to go with it. Hoorah for me.

I took a hot shower, dressed in khakis and a Hawaiian shirt that was big enough to hide the .45 clipped to my belt; and then headed out to my appointment with Rudy. But first I had to stop at Starbucks and pick up his silly-ass drink.

“I’M SORRY, JOE,” said Kittie, the receptionist, when I arrived at Rudy’s office, “but Dr. Sanchez didn’t come back from lunch. I called his cell and his home number but they go straight to his answering machine. He’s not at the hospital, either.”

“Okay, Kittie, tell you what… I’m going to go swing by his place and see what’s what. I’ll give you a call if I find anything. You call me if he gets in touch.”

“Okay, Joe.” She chewed her lip. “He’s okay, though, isn’t he?”

I gave her a smile. “Oh, sure… could be any number of things. He’ll be fine.”

Out in the hallway my smile evaporated. Sure, any number of things could explain this.

Like what?

On the elevator down I began to feel a little sick. Now was not a good time for Rudy to suddenly go missing. I thought about the message I’d probably sent to Church via my Internet searches and began to get a big, bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.

I stepped out of his building and looked around the parking lot. His car wasn’t there, not that I’d expected it to be. So I walked over to mine, clicked the locks and opened the door.

And stopped dead.

I had my gun out before I even fully registered what I was seeing. I spun around and scanned the entire lot, pistol down by my leg. My heart was a jackhammer. There were over fifty cars and half a dozen people going toward them or walking toward the building. Everyone and everything looked normal. I turned back to the front seat. There, on the driver’s side, was a package of Oreo cookies. The plastic had been neatly sliced and one cookie was missing. In its place was one of Rudy’s business cards.

I holstered my gun, picked up the card and turned it over. On the back was a note. Nothing complicated, no threats. Just an address that I knew very well and one other word.

The address was the dockside warehouse where I’d killed Javad the first time.

The single word was: “Now.”