Patient Zero

Chapter Twenty-Four

Baltimore, Maryland / Tuesday, June 30; 2:26 P.M.

IT TOOK TWENTY minutes to drive back to the docks and I had murder in my heart.

When I pulled up to the parking lot entrance I slowed to a stop and stared. The place had changed a hell of a lot in the last few days. There was a brand-new heavy-duty front gate that hadn’t been there when we’d raided the place, and a chain-link fence topped with coils of razor wire. There was a second inner fence that looked innocuous except for the metal signs every forty feet that read: DANGER—HIGH VOLTAGE. I saw four armed security guards, all of them dressed alike in distinctly nonmilitary uniforms. Some kind of generic guard-for-hire rig, but that didn’t fool me. They all had the trained military look. There are certain levels of training you can’t disguise with polyester sports coats and khaki slacks.

I have to admit that I debated going in quick and dirty, knocking these guys on their asses and coming up on Church out of a shadow… but I didn’t. It was a cute thought but not a good one and it probably wouldn’t do Rudy or me any good. So I drove right up to the gate and let them take a good look at my face.

“May I see some identification, sir?”

I didn’t make a fuss, just flashed them my badge and picture ID. The guard barely looked at it. He already knew who I was. He waved me through and told me to park by the staff entrance on the far side. I did as instructed, aware that they were watching me; and in my sideview mirror I caught a glimpse of a guard walking the perimeter of the roof. I strolled over to the door, taking only enough time to see other new features, like the tidy little security camera above the door and keycard lock. I didn’t need a key, though, because the door opened before I could knock. Inside the entrance was one of the most striking women I’d ever seen. She had gold-flecked brown eyes, and an athletic figure that looked hard in the right places and soft in the right places. Her hair was cut short and she wore black fatigue pants and a gray T-shirt with no markings. Nothing like “DMS” stenciled on the front. No sign of rank, either, but her bearing was officer level. You could tell that right off. She had a Sig Sauer .9 in a shoulder rig and the grips looked worn from hard use.

“Thanks for coming, Detective Ledger,” she said in a London accent. Her face showed signs of sleep deprivation and strain, and her eyes were red-rimmed as if she’d been crying. It could have been allergies, but under the circumstances I didn’t think so. I wondered what had happened to upset her; was it the same thing that had caused Church to send his invitation? Whatever it was it didn’t take a genius to get the idea that it wasn’t good.

The woman didn’t offer her name, give me a salute, or want to shake hands. She also didn’t ask me to surrender my piece.

So I said, “Church.”

“He’s waiting for you.”

She led the way down a series of short hallways to the conference room where my tac team had run into the trigger-happy terrorists. The same room where Javad had first attacked me during the raid. The big blue case was gone and the bullet-riddled conference table had been replaced with some generic government desks and computer workstations. A flat-panel TV screen filled a good portion of one wall. Décor change notwithstanding, the room gave me a serious case of the creeps. I could still feel the bruise on my forearm where Javad had bitten me—and there but for the grace of Kevlar.

The woman nodded toward a wheeled office chair in one corner. “Please have a seat. Mr. Church will be with you in—”

“Who are you?” I interrupted.

She gave me a three-count before she said, “Major Grace Courtland.”

“Major?” I asked. “SAS?”

That got the tiniest flicker, a microsecond’s widening of her eyes, but she recovered fast. “Make yourself comfortable, Detective Ledger,” she said and left.

I turned in a slow circle and took in the room, looked for and found the three microcameras. They looked expensive and of a kind I hadn’t seen before. I’d bet a year’s pay that Church was sitting in another room watching me. I was tempted to scratch my balls. This whole thing was bringing out the screw-you fifteen-year-old in me, and I had to watch that. Give in to any kind of pettiness and you lose your edge real damn fast.

So instead I strolled the room and learned what I could, even with Cookie Monster watching. There was a second and much heavier door at the far end of the room that looked brand-new—I remembered it being a regular office door before—and when I inspected it I could see the recent carpentry and smell the fresh paint. I tapped it. Wood veneer over steel, and it was dollars to doughnuts that the wall had been reinforced, too.

I heard the door behind me open and I turned as Mr. Church entered with the British woman behind him. He was dressed in a charcoal suit, polished shoes, and the same tinted glasses. He made no comment about my investigation of the room, he just pulled up a chair and sat. Major Courtland remained standing, her face a study in disapproval.

I took a step toward him. “Where the fuck is Dr. Sanchez?”

He brushed lint from his tie. If he was threatened by me in any way he did a workmanlike job of not showing it. Courtland shifted to a flanking position with her hands folded across her stomach, perfectly positioned to make a fast grab for her pistol.

“Do you know why you’re here, Mr. Ledger?”

“I can make a few guesses,” I said, “but you can go stick them up your ass. Where is Rudy Sanchez?”

Church’s mouth twitched in what I think was an attempt not to smile. He said, “Grace?”

Courtland walked over to the wall with the TV screen and hit a button. A picture popped on at once and it showed an office with a desk and a chair. A man sat on the chair with his hands cuffed behind him and a blindfold around his eyes. Rudy. A second man stood behind him. He held a pistol barrel against the back of my friend’s head.

Rage was a howling thing in my head and my heart was throbbing in my throat like it was trying to escape. It took everything I had to stand there and hold my tongue.

After a moment Church said, “Tell me why I shouldn’t have the sergeant put two in the back of Dr. Sanchez’s head.”

I forced myself to turn away from the screen. “He dies you die,” I said.

“Yawn,” he said. “Try again.”

“What good would it do you or your organization to kill him? He’s an innocent, he’s a civilian.”

“He stopped being a civilian when you told him about the DMS and about our patient zero. You put that gun to his head, Mr. Ledger.”

“That’s a crock of shit and you know it. Nine-eleven may have wrinkled the Constitution but it didn’t run it through a shredder.”

Church spread his hands. “I repeat my question. Tell me why I shouldn’t have Sergeant Dietrich shoot Dr. Sanchez. We’re a secret organization and we’re playing for the highest possible stakes. Nothing, not even the Bill of Rights, matters more than what we’re doing and that is in no way an exaggeration.”

I said nothing.

“Mr. Ledger, if terrorists had a truck filled with suitcase nukes and one of them went off in each of twenty cities around the country it would do less damage to America as a whole, and to its people, than if another carrier like Javad got out into the population. If a plague of this kind starts we could not stop it. The infection rate and aggression factor would make it uncontrollable within minutes.” He chewed his gum for a minute and then repeated that. “Minutes.”

I held my tongue.

“If we cannot count on your complete loyalty and complete cooperation, you are worthless to us. You would be useless to me.” Even behind his tinted glasses I could feel the impact of his stare.

“What is it you want?”

“Time is very short, so this is the deal, Mr. Ledger: we have a need to put a new tactical team into operation asap. Ordinary military and even our standard special forces units are not appropriate for this, for reasons we can discuss later. Major Courtland already has one team at operational readiness; our other team is on the West Coast involved in something of nearly equal importance. One local team isn’t enough. I need a third team. I need it to be tight and I need it yesterday. I also need someone to lead that team into the field. I’ve narrowed the list of possibles down to six candidates. Five others and you.”

“Hooray for me. What does this have to do with Rudy Sanchez?”

“I want you to give me your word that you will join us and become one of us. Not some reckless outsider. You are either DMS or you’re not.”

“Or what, you’ll kill Rudy?”

Church jerked his head toward Courtland. She punched a button on the wall. “Gus? Uncuff Dr. Sanchez. Bring him a sandwich and keep him company.” She turned off the monitor.

I turned back to Church. “Why all the frigging drama?”

“To make a point. If I’d had more time to be dramatic I’d have had your father, your brother and his wife, your nephew, and even your cat in here.”

“I’m a short step away from popping a cap in you,” I said.

He leaned close. “I don’t care. Dr. Sanchez is here because you made a breach of security. How we’ll handle that is another matter. Right now we need to stop playing ping-pong here and get to the point.”

“Then damn well get to it.”

“I told you what I need.”

“A team leader?”

He nodded. “I need to start training the new team today because if we’re really lucky, Mr. Ledger, that team may have to go into the field within days, maybe within hours. I don’t have time to coax you or stroke your ego or appeal to your patriotism.”

“So… what? You wanted to make me afraid?”

“An apocalypse is an abstract and unreal concept. The sudden loss of everyone you love and care about is not. Time is not our friend.”

“You’re saying that there are more of these walker things, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” Even though I expected that answer it was like a punch in the mouth. He said, “We haven’t stopped this thing yet, Mr. Ledger. At best we slowed it down by a few days.”

“You should have figured that out before. It’s the logical—”

“We did figure it out, but we had nowhere to go with the supposition. Our code breakers have been working round the clock to determine the location of any cells connected to the one you took down. We know where one is because of the truck the task force tailed. We have not risked hitting that site because there may be more sites and we don’t want to panic these people. Play it wrong and they could go dark and we’d lose the trail, or they could release the plague right away. We’ve recovered enough information to make us reasonably sure they are sticking to a prearranged deadline, so we don’t want to hurry that along. Because we did not intercept that truck, and did not raid the place to which it went, we’re trying to make them believe they’ve given us the slip. The raid, after all, was half a day after the truck left.”

“Trucks,” I corrected. “There were two. We tailed one and lost one.”

“Too bloody right you did,” muttered Courtland, and I gave her a hard look to which she merely cocked a challenging eyebrow.

“So why the urgency to train a hit team if you’re not about to make a hit?”

“I didn’t say that. It’s my intention to have a team covertly infiltrate the one facility we have under surveillance.”

“Infiltrate to what end? To locate other cells or to find more walkers?”

“Either will do.”

I swallowed a dry throat. “What makes you think that the other hypothetical cells will still be in place? Once this cell here at this warehouse went dark the others would probably have followed a protocol of some kind—”

“Very likely,” Major Courtland cut in, “but we have to go forward with what leads we have. On the upside, however, the other facility shows no sign of activity, no rats fleeing, so maybe they think they’re clear. In the absence of more intelligence a quiet infiltration is our safest option.”

I frowned. “And with all the military special ops and guys like SWAT and HRT you want to form a new team? There are guys out there with years more experience than me. Does the name ‘Delta Force’ ring any bells with you people?”

“It’s more complicated than that,” Church said. He gestured toward the far door, the one with the heavy scanner. “The other potential team leaders are in the adjoining room. Each of them is tough, experienced, and aware of the threat. All of them are active military—two Rangers, one Navy, one Marine Force Recon, and yes, even one from Delta Force. All of them have more combat and tactical experience than you do, though admittedly you bring other qualities to the game. You’re all unique in one way or another but we don’t have time to discuss that at the moment. I need to get the team leader status sorted out right now.”

“What do you want us to do? Play rock-paper-scissors to see who gets the job?”

“Grace?” he said, and she went over to the heavy-duty door and unlocked it.

“If you’ll come this way, Detective.”

I stood up slowly. “This is a lot of James Bond bullshit to decide a human resources issue isn’t it?”

Church remained seated. He nodded his head toward the doorway, so I walked over and peered inside. Five guys in civilian clothes: three sitting and two standing. All of them looked tough and all of them looked either confused or pissed off. They seemed frozen in an agitated tableau as if the door opening had interrupted them in the middle of a heated debate.

I turned back to Church. “You still haven’t told me how you want us to sort this out.”

He made that face again that might have been a smile. I’ve seen the big hunting cats make that same kind of face. “Think outside the box, Mr. Ledger.”

“Okay,” I said, “but you have to pick up the tab afterward.”

He gave me a single short nod.

I stepped into the room. All of the men were looking me up and down, a couple of them giving me evil stares that would have scared the paint off a tank. Courtland left and pulled the door closed behind her. I heard the heavy lock engage.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Gault / The Hotel Ishtar, Baghdad / Five days ago

GAULT WAS ON the road, moving in a roundabout way from Amirah’s bunker in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan across the border to Iran, where he changed identities three times in fourteen hours and then entered a safe house run by a client of a client, where he ate, made some calls, and then changed identities again—back to Sebastian Gault. Gault was welcome in Iran and most other countries because his company was one of the world’s top suppliers of pharmaceuticals for humanitarian aid. He traveled with three kindhearted but clueless members of the World Health Organization as they visited remote villages in western Iran where a TB outbreak had been reported. Gault did a few stand-ups for a Swiss news service about the need for swift action in stemming the spread of the new strain of TB, and then thanked the Iranian government for allowing free passage for the WHO doctors. When he crossed the border into Iraq he was met by a military escort of British soldiers who got him safely all the way to Baghdad.

Toys met him in the lobby and they shook hands.

“I trust you had a comfortable trip,” said his personal assistant, taking Gault’s bag and leading him to the elevator. As they crossed the lobby they were both aware that everyone was looking at them. Toys was a not tall man but he had tall energy. He was slender, fit, and had impeccable posture; and he always managed to look cool and well groomed no matter where they were. Gault had seen him ankle deep in the mosquito swamps of Kenya looking as collected as if he were at a cocktail party at Cannes. But to anyone watching it was immediately clear which of them was the alpha. Gault was taller, more physically imposing, with swept-back hair and piercing dark eyes. He was ruggedly handsome, where Toys was delicately so. By himself Toys could command almost any room, but his light dimmed considerably in Gault’s presence. Gault knew this; and so did Toys. They were both comfortable with the arrangement.

They chitchatted on the lift, talking of relatively unimportant Gen2000 matters. Once they were in the suite of rooms they shared at the Hotel Ishtar Toys swept the place with the newest generation of Interceptor surveillance sensors and everything came up clean. Even so, they avoided any sensitive topics for an hour, at which point Toys swept it again, knowing that surveillance teams often deactivate active listening in the first few minutes after someone checks in to a hotel knowing that a smart spy would sweep the room. They typically reactivate their bugs in forty minutes, so he gave it a full hour. It still came up clean.

Toys busied himself with unpacking while Gault took a hot bath. Later, with Gault snugged into a bathrobe and ensconced in a cushy armchair, a tall gin and tonic quietly melting on a nearby table, Toys settled down onto a more decorative faux Louis XIV chair, legs crossed, rolling a neat whiskey between his palms.

“You got a text message while you were in the bath,” Toys said primly. “Just one word: ‘Clean.’ That’s from El Musclehead?”

Gault smiled and nodded. “His team field-tested an entirely new generation of the Seif al Din today. That was the code to let me know the operation was successful.” He gave Toys the details.

“That’s disgusting,” Toys said, but if he had any real emotional reaction to the slaughter not one drop of it registered on his face.

“It’s a solid step forward,” Gault reminded him.

With a waspish sniff Toys said, “So, tell me about the happy couple.”

Gault told him everything, including his observations of the telltale clues in Amirah’s voice and facial expression. Toys listened without interruption, but when Gault was done he shook his head. “I think she’s been stuck too long in that bunker with all her toys, making monsters. She’s probably halfway to being a monster herself by now. Are you sure she shares your goals?”

Gault shrugged. There was a time, early in their affair, when he thought that he and Amirah would become some kind of king and queen of the economic world. His plan would clearly work, was working already, and he estimated that at the very least his various companies would net something like twenty to thirty billion. Best-case scenario hovered deliciously around the one hundred billion mark. He could conceivably become the richest man on earth. But so much of that hinged on Amirah staying within the confines of the operation.

When it was clear Gault was not going to answer Toys tossed back the rest of his drink and got up to make a fresh one. The phone rang and Toys answered.

“I’ve been trying to reach your boss all day,” snapped the American. “Is the line clear?”

“What do you think?” Toys asked. “Hold on… he’s right here.” He handed the phone across to Gault.

“What can I do for you?” Gault said. Toys leaned in close to eavesdrop.

“This morning the heads of all of the special operations divisions were given a briefing by the head of this new Geek Squad.”

“Ah! So… who’s running it?”

“That’s the weird part. We received certain documents, ostensibly from the head of this new branch, but on several of them the name of the person in charge was different. Some identified him as Mr. Elder, Mr. St. John, Mr. Deacon, and Mr. Church. Now, whether these refer to the same man or for section heads is unknown, but I got the impression they were code names for one guy—the one who was giving us our briefing. He was introduced to us as Mr. Pope. I have some careful feelers out there and I should be able to lock it down.”

“That fits with what Toys has been able to dig up,” Gault said. “What interests me is whether you’ve been able to get a man inside, as I asked.”

“Yeah,” said the American. “I have.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

Baltimore, Maryland / Tuesday, June 30; 2:42 P.M.

I STOOD BY the door and looked them over. My nerves were still jangling from seeing that gun against Rudy’s head and I don’t know whether I believed Church would have killed him or not. I felt like there was this gigantic Big Ben–sized clock ticking right over my head.

The room was mostly bare except for a few folding chairs and a card table on which was an open case of bottled water, a tray of sandwich meats and cheeses, and an opened loaf of white bread. Apparently the DMS budget didn’t extend to decent catering.

The guy closest to me, standing to my left, was maybe six feet but he must have been two-forty and all of it was in his chest and shoulders; his face had a vaguely simian cast to it. Next to Apeman was a taller, leaner guy with a beaky nose and a long scar that ran from his hairline through his right eyebrow and halfway down his cheek. Opposite Scarface was a black guy who looked like every army top sergeant you ever saw: buzz cut, a boxer’s broken nose, and a lantern jaw. Behind Sergeant Rock was a red-haired kid in his early twenties who had a jovial face. In fact he was the only guy smiling in the room. To the Joker’s right was a real moose of a guy, easily six six, with ropy muscles and heavily scarred hands. Jolly Green Giant was the first to speak.

“Looks like we got another candidate.”

I walked into the center of the group.

Scarface grunted. “Make yourself comfortable. We’ve been in here for almost three hours trying to sort out which one of us should head this team.”

“Really,” I said and kicked him in the balls.

He let out a thin whistling shriek of pain that I ignored as I grabbed the shoulder of his windbreaker and jerked him hard and fast so that he collided with Apeman and they both went down.

I spun off that and stomped down on the Joker’s foot and then pivoted to bring the same foot up again, heel first into his nuts. He didn’t scream, but he hissed real loud; and I nailed Sergeant Rock with a palm-shot to the chest that sent him sprawling onto the food table, which collapsed under him.

That left Jolly Green Giant standing and he gaped at me in shock for maybe a half second before he started to swing; but that was a half second too long, and I darted forward and drove the extended secondary index-finger knuckle of my right hand into his left sinus, right next to his nose, giving it a fast counterclockwise twist on impact. He went back like he’d taken a .45 round in the face.

I pivoted again to see Apeman pushing his way out from under Scarface but he was only halfway to his feet and I swept his supporting leg out from under him and he fell hard on his tailbone, almost—but not quite—catching himself by planting his hand flat on the ground. I stamped on his outstretched fingers and then chop-kicked him in the chest before spinning off to face Sergeant Rock—who had come up off the collapsed card table with an impressive display of rubbery agility.

The other four guys were down and it was just him and me.

He held his hands up and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to sucker him again, but then he smiled and turned his karate guard into a palms-out. Not a surrender so much as an acknowledgment of set and match.

I gave him a nod and stepped back, and edged away from the other four. Two of them were down for the count. Jolly Green Giant was sitting in the corner holding his face; if he had any kind of sinus issues that punch I gave him would likely become a migraine. Scarface was lying on the floor in a fetal position, hands cupped around his balls, groaning. The Joker was getting to his feet, but he had no fight left in him. Apeman was sitting against a wall trying to suck in a breath.

I heard the door click open and I stepped to one side as I turned, outside of everyone’s reach. Church and Courtland came in. He was smiling, she wasn’t.

“Gentlemen,” he said quietly, “I want you to meet Joe Ledger, the DMS’s new team leader. Any questions?”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Baltimore, Maryland / Tuesday, June 30; 2:43 P.M.

“HOW LONG DID this take, Grace?” Church asked.

“Four-point-six seconds.” It sounded like the words were pulled out of her with pliers. “Or eight-point-seven if you count from close of door.”

The other candidates stared at Church and at me and one of them—Apeman—looked like he was going to say something, but he caught some look from Church and held his tongue and glared. There was not a whole lot of love in the room.

“Get up,” Church said to them. His voice wasn’t bitter or harsh, merely quiet. Sometimes quiet is worse, and I watched the faces of each man as they climbed to their feet. Jolly Green Giant and Sergeant Rock showed no trace of animosity on their faces, and the latter even looked amused. Joker’s face was cautious, guarded. Scarface looked equal parts deeply embarrassed and angry. Apeman stared hot death at me as he stood up; he rubbed his chest and gave me a sniper’s squint.

My hands were shaking, but adrenaline will do that. Plus the image of Rudy with a gun to his head wouldn’t leave my mind.

“I want to see Rudy,” I said. “Now.”

Church shook his head “No. There are other things you need to do first.”

“He’d better be okay—”

He smiled. “Dr. Sanchez is currently eating his way through an entire catering platter and probably psychoanalyzing Sergeant Dietrich’s rather complicated childhood. He’s fine and he can wait.”

No one said anything. “Okay,” I said, surprised at how calm my voice sounded. “So now what do we do?”

“Major Courtland will bring you up to speed. The entire staff will meet in the main hall in thirty minutes.” He paused and then held out his hand. “Welcome aboard, Mr. Ledger.”

“I don’t mean to offend you two,” I said, taking his hand, “but you’re both total assholes.” I gave his hand my best squeeze and damn if the son of a bitch didn’t match me pound for pound.

“I’ll cry about that later,” Church said.

We let go of each other and I folded my arms. “If I’m going to be team leader, where’s the actual team?”

“You just kicked the effing hell out of them,” Courtland said.

I turned and looked at the five men. Oh crap.

I’ve worked with street thugs, murderers, and the worst kind of lowlifes for years and have knocked in their heads, shot them, Tasered them, and sent them to prison for life, but none of them ever gave me the kinds of looks I was getting from my “team.” If they’d had a tree limb and a rope I’d be swinging in the wind.

I thought I heard Church give a quiet chuckle as he turned and left.

Maybe this was the moment where I was supposed to make some kind of speech, but before I could say anything Courtland beat me to it.

“Get cleaned up,” she snapped. “Ledger… come with me.” She started for the door.

I started to follow her but sensed movement and turned to see Apeman coming toward me. His face was purple with rage, hands balled into white-knuckled fists.

“You suckered me, asshole, and first chance I get I’m going to wipe the floor up with you.”

“No,” I said, “you’re not.” And I punched him in the throat.

I stepped out of the way as he fell.

The room was dead silent and I deliberately turned my back on the other four as I said to Courtland, “I hope to hell you have a medic here, ’cause he’s going to need one.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Sebastian Gault / The Hotel Ishtar, Baghdad / Five days ago

“LINE?”

“Clear,” said the Fighter.

“What have you to report, my friend?” Gault was chin deep in a tub of soapy water, the Goldberg Variations playing quietly on the CD player. The young woman in the other room was asleep—knowing this call was coming in, Toys had slipped something into her drink before escorting her to Gault’s room. She’d sleep for four more hours and wake up without feeling any adverse effects. It was useful being a chemist and having an assistant without a conscience.

El Mujahid said, “Everything in place.”

“Jolly good. Once you complete the first stage my lads in the Red Cross will make sure the correct transfers take place. With any luck you should be on a hospital ship heading out of the Gulf by midnight.”

“Sebastian…?” said El Mujahid.

“Yes?”

“I’m putting a lot of trust in you. I expect you to hold up your end of things.”

“My hand to Allah,” Gault said as he used his toes to turn on the hot water tap, “you can certainly trust me. Everything will go smoothly.”

There was a short silence at the other end of the line, and then the Fighter said, “Tell my wife I love her.”

Gault smiled up at the ceiling. “Of course I will, my old friend. Go with God.”

He clicked off and tossed the phone onto the closed lid of the toilet. He was laughing when he did it.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Baltimore, Maryland / Tuesday, June 30; 2:46 P.M.

AFTER MAJOR COURTLAND called in the medical team she joined me in the hallway and I could tell she was reevaluating me. Her eyes roved over my face like a scanner and I could almost hear the relays click in her head. Across the hall was a men’s room and I started toward it but she stopped me with a touch on my arm.

“Ledger… what made you think Mr. Church wanted you to do that?”

I shrugged. “He said time was short.”

“That’s not the same thing as telling you to go in there and start kicking everyone’s ass.”

“You have a problem with it?”

She smiled again, a nice smile. It transformed her from a cobra to something a hell of a lot more appealing: an actual human being. “Not at all. As much as I hate to say it I’m rather impressed.”

“‘Hate to say it’?” I echoed.

“You are a very hard person to like, Mr. Ledger.”

“Call me Joe. And no, I’m not. Lots of people like me.”

She didn’t comment on that. “Let me put it another way… you’re a very hard man to trust. Especially in an operation of this kind.”

“Grace—may I call you Grace?”

“You may call me Major Courtland.”

“Okay, Major Courtland,” I said, “it isn’t my goal in life to get you to trust me. You jokers pulled me into this. I didn’t submit a résumé. I’m not military. So if you have issues about trust or anything else up to and including liking me, then, seriously, please go and screw yourself. Major.”

She blinked once.

“I did not and do not want my life tied up in cloak-and-dagger bullshit, dead guys, or pissing contests with either the testosterone crowd in there or some prissy-assed Earl Grey–drinking, scone-munching major who isn’t even my freaking boss. I don’t know you and I don’t give a rat’s ass if you trust me.”

“Mr. Ledger—”

“I have to take a piss.” I headed down the hall to the bathroom.

I USED THE toilet and then washed my face first with hot water and then cold, dabbed it dry with a fistful of paper towels, and then leaned on the edge of the sink, staring at my face in the mirror. My skin was flushed and my eyes had the jumpy look you usually see in junkies. My hair stuck out in all directions.

“Well,” I said to my reflection, “aren’t you a picture?”

I didn’t have a comb so I used wet fingers to plaster down my hair, and as I stood there the full weight and enormity of what was going on hit me like a freight train. I bowed over the sink, tasting bile, ready to throw up… but my trembling stomach held. I raised my head again and looked into my eyes and saw fear in there, the naked realization of what all this meant.

There were more of them out there. More walkers. And I was being asked to step up and be… what? Some kind of Captain Heroism who would lead the boys in the Red, White, and Blue to victory? What was I getting myself into? This wasn’t task force duty, this wasn’t even SWAT-team level. I’d never even smelled anything this big before and now I was expected to train and lead a black ops team? How frigging insane was this? Why were they asking me? I’m just a cop. Where are the guys who actually do this for a living? How come none of them were here? Where’s James Bond and Jack Bauer? Why me, of all people?

My reflection stared back, looking dazed and a little stupid.

Working the task force had not prepared me for this. After eighteen months of that—and the years since the World Trade Center—I’d come to share the more or less common view that the terrorists had fired their worst shots and were now hiding in caves and reevaluating the wisdom of having overplayed their hand. Now Church tells me that they hold the key to a global pandemic.

By raising the actual dead?

God Almighty. Flying planes into buildings is bad enough. Chemical weapons, anthrax, nerve gas, suicide bombers… that stuff has collectively been the definition of terrorism to the global consciousness for years, and that’s been more than bad enough. This was so much worse I didn’t know if I could put it into any reasonable perspective. If they were trying to spread Ebola it wouldn’t be this bad because Ebola doesn’t chase and try to bite you. Whoever was behind this was one sick son of a bitch. Smart, sure, but sick. This went beyond religious fundamentalism or political extremism. Right at that moment I was sure we were looking at something born out of a mind that was truly and genuinely evil.

I don’t think I clearly understood Church until that moment. If I were in his place, looking into that same future, how would I handle it? How ruthless would I be? How ruthless could I be?

“I think you already answered that question, boyo,” I murmured, thinking about the five men in that room.

Church may act like a Vulcan but he had to be feeling all this stuff, too. If so, then the strain of holding back all of his emotions, all of his humanity, must be terrible. If I were going to work for him, then I’d have to look for signs of that pressure, look for cracks. Not only in me, but in him, too. On the other hand Church could be a monster himself… just one on our side. There were guys like that. Hell, after World War II our own government hired a bunch of Nazi scientists. Better the devil you know. More to the point, there was the comment FDR supposedly made about Somoza. Something like, “He’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”

Great. I’m going to work for a monster in order to fight other monsters. So what did that make me?

The bathroom floor seemed to tilt a bit as I headed for the door.

Chapter Thirty

El Mujahid / Near Najaf, Iraq / Five days ago

“THEY’RE COMING,” SAID Abdul, El Mujahid’s lieutenant. “Two British Apache attack helicopters. Four minutes.”

“Excellent,” the Fighter murmured. He took one last look around and then handed a bundle of clothes to Abdul. “There is nothing of value here. Burn them.”

The half-track sat askew in the middle of an intersection of two lonely roads, thirty-six kilometers from Najaf. Smoke still curled up from beneath the chassis. Additional smoke rose from a dozen corpses. There was blood everywhere, muted by sand to the color of dusty roses. Two cars were in flames—an old Ford Falcon and a Chinese Ben Ben—both with registration numbers that would tie them to Jihadist sympathizers. The entire picture was perfect: a battle fought to a tragic victory. A half-track crippled by a roadside bomb; a few British soldiers, outnumbered by insurgents, taking heavy casualties as they bravely fought through an ambush. All of the hostiles dead. Of the seven Brits in the truck, four were dead—badly mangled and burned—and three clung to life.

“Go, go, go,” whispered El Mujahid, and his lieutenant melted away and slipped down into a rat hole hidden by a spring trapdoor covered with coarse dry bushes. In the stillness nothing moved, and the only sound apart from the whup-whup-whup of the helo rotors were the piteous moans of the wounded.

“Allah akbar!” said El Mujahid, and then used his thumb to test the edge of the piece of jagged metal debris he had selected. He laced the tip of the metal against his forehead, right at the hairline; he drew a breath, held it, and then exhaled sharply as he ripped the metal through his skin, tearing down from upper left to lower right, through his eyebrow, across the bridge of his nose, along his cheek all the way to his jawline. Pain exploded in his face and blood surged from the cut. He could feel tears in his eyes and he had to bite down against the white-hot agony of the wound. It was worse—far worse—than he expected and it nearly tore the cry from his throat.

The helicopters were nearly overhead. With a gasp he flung the metal from him and slumped back into the wreckage, deliberately snorting blood out of his nose and mouth, making sure that the droplets touched everything. By the time the first helicopter landed he was perfectly placed, his torn face transformed into a mask of bright blood, his clothing soaked. His heart raced and he could feel blood flow from the wound with each pulse beat.

He closed his eyes and as he heard the first footfalls as the soldiers leaped from the helicopter he raised one gory hand and reached toward them, and now he let out the scream. It was a wet gargling cry, inarticulate and savagely hurt.

“Here!” he heard a voice yell, and then the half-track rocked as men clambered inside. There were hands on him, touching him, probing him, feeling for his pulse.

“This one’s alive. Get the medics!”

Fingers scrabbled around his throat, feeling for the little dogtag chain, pulling it free. “Sergeant Henderson,” a voice said, reading the name. “One hundred third armored.”

“Clear the way, let me get to him,” said a different voice; and then there was a compress against his face as the medics worked to save the lives of the British wounded.

It took every ounce of strength that the Fighter possessed not to smile.

Chapter Thirty-One

Baltimore, Maryland / Tuesday, June 30; 2:51 P.M.

WE WERE IN Courtland’s office, just the two of us. Everything was still not unpacked and I had to sit on a plastic folding chair. We were both drinking bottled spring water. One wall of the office was a big picture window that looked out onto the harbor. The afternoon sunshine made everything look peaceful, but the lie buried within the illusion was appalling. I turned away from the window and looked at Courtland.

“I’d prefer to have given you the complete version of this, but as Mr. Church pointed out, we don’t have the time, so the learning curve will be more of a straight line.” She sat back and crossed her legs. Even in the fatigue pants I could tell she had nice legs. Except for her personality, which so far was somewhere between a cranky alligator and a defensive moray eel, most things about her were nice. I even liked her husky voice and thick British accent. I just didn’t particularly like her.

“Fire away,” I said.

“After 9/11 your government formed Homeland Security and Great Britain created a similar and rather more secret organization, code name of Barrier. You won’t have heard of it. MI5 and MI6 get most of the press, which is as it should be. Barrier was given a lot of power and freedom of action and was therefore able to stop several major threats against my country that would have been, to us, as devastating as the World Trade Center attack was on you. As I was involved in some of those operations I was loaned out to your government when the DMS was formed.”

“Did you help create the DMS?”

“No,” she said, “that was Mr. Church’s doing, but there were some similarities in both structure and agenda between the DMS and Barrier, and the lines of communication, at least where antiterrorism is concerned, are wide open between the White House and Whitehall. As you probably know there are many such task forces around the country, and all of their intel passes in one way or another through DMS hands. Church is wired in everywhere. When your wiretap flagged the name El Mujahid it rang a bell at the DMS and Church ordered an immediate infiltration of the task force. By the time the team was formed we had three agents in place.”

“Really? Then you do have a working field team?”

“Did,” she said as a shadow passed across her face. “But we’ll get to that. First I need to tell you about the cell your task force took down. After the raid our computer specialists were able to salvage several laptops and we’ve been systematically decrypting their coded records. We haven’t learned as much as we’d like but we are making some headway. So far we’ve decoded what amounts to shipping manifests for weapons, medical supplies, research equipment, and even human cargo.”

“You mean agents they’ve smuggled in?”

She shook her head. “No… actual human cargo. Like Javad. Brought into this country in temperature-controlled containers like the one you found here.”

“How many others?”

“We’ve only found references to three, including Javad.”

“Shit,” I said.

“The import records indicate that the other walkers were brought into the country less than twenty-four hours before your task force raided the place. The other two must have been shipped out late the previous day; and there’s a high probability they were in those two lorries.”

“That’s why you took all of the files from the task force, isn’t it? You wanted the surveillance logs for traffic in and out of this place and you want all of it off the record.”

Again she gave me that appraising look, as if her idiot nephew had learned to tie his own shoelaces. “Yes,” she admitted.

“So where did the other containers go?”

It took her a few seconds to decide whether to tell me.

“Look, Major,” I said, “either you level with me on everything or we’re done here. I don’t know why you have a bug up your ass about me, and I frankly don’t care, but you are wasting my time hemming and hawing.” I started to get to my feet but she waved me back down.

“All right, all right,” she snapped, “sit down, dammit.” She opened a folder, removed a sheet of paper and slapped it down on the desk. “This is the log for the night before the raid. Two lorries left the warehouse lot. One eight minutes after midnight, the other at oh-three-thirty. Task force agents were assigned to follow both and report their destinations. One was tracked to a crab-processing plant near Crisfield, Maryland. The other was ‘lost’ in traffic.” She stabbed an entry with a forefinger. “You were tailing the one that got lost in traffic.”

I plucked the paper off the desk, glanced at it, and then tossed it down. “Good God, Major, if this is any indication of the precision of your intel then I’m going to grab my loved ones and make a run for the hills.”

“You’re denying that you were assigned to the tail?”

“No, I was definitely assigned to tail the truck, Major, but I didn’t do that tail. Four blocks into the follow I was pulled and replaced by another officer. My lieutenant called on the task force’s secure channel and had me report back to the surveillance van because there was more cell phone chatter and I was the only guy on shift who understands Farsi. I spent twenty minutes listening to one of the hostiles talk to an Iraqi woman living in Philadelphia. Mostly they talked about blow jobs and how much he wished she’d give him one. Really cutting-edge espionage stuff. You can believe me when I tell you, sister, that when I tail someone I don’t lose them.”

She leaned back in her chair and we stared at each other like a pair of gunslingers for maybe ten, fifteen seconds. There were a lot of ways she could have handled her response, and what she said would probably set the tone for whatever professional relationship we were going to have. “Bloody hell,” she said with a sigh. “Will you accept my apology?”

“Will you stop trying to frighten me to death with your icy glare?”

Her smile was tentative at first, still caught on some of the thorns of her earlier misconceptions, but then it blossomed full and radiant. She stood up and reached across the desk. “Truce,” she said.

I stood and took her hand, which was small, warm, and strong. “We have enough enemies, Major, it’s better if we’re at each other’s backs rather than each other’s throats.”

She gave my hand a little squeeze, then let it go and sat back down. “That’s very gracious of you.” She cleared her throat. “Since we, um, lost that one lorry we have an investigative operation going to locate it. That’s a major priority.”

I said, “What do we know of the cell itself?”

“Bits and pieces. We know that they’re using a higher level of technology than we’ve seen before from the terrorist community; and it’s just this sort of thing that justifies the existence of the DMS. Understand, the DMS was proposed at the same time as Homeland but was rejected as being too expensive and unnecessary; the belief at that time being that terrorists may be capable of hijacking planes but were incapable of constructing advanced bioweapons.” She sounded disgusted. “It’s racist thinking, of course. To a very great degree the moguls in London and Washington still think that everyone in the Middle East is undereducated and out of touch with the twenty-first century.”

“Which is bullshit,” I said.

“Which is bullshit,” she agreed. “What changed their thinking was something called MindReader, which is a piece of software that Mr. Church either procured or invented. I don’t know which and he won’t tell me. Point is that MindReader is a cascading analysis package that no other agency has, not even Barrier or Homeland. It looks for patterns through covert links to all intelligence-gathering databases. The tricky part is taking into account different operating systems, different languages—both computer and human—different cultures, time zones, currency rates, units of measure, routes of transport, and so on. MindReader cuts through all of that. It’s also what we’re using to try and decrypt the damaged files.”

“Nice toy.”

“Indeed. We began to see indications of the acquisition of materials, equipment, and personnel suggesting the creation of a bioweapons laboratory of considerable sophistication. A lab capable of both creating and weaponizing a biological agent.”

“I thought those materials were monitored? How’d they swing all that?”

She gave me a calculating look. “How would you have done it?”

“What country are we talking?”

“Terrorism is an ideology not a nationality. Let’s say you’re a small group living under cover in a Middle Eastern country, not necessarily with the blessing of your resident state. Your group is composed of separatists from a number of the more extreme factions.”

I thought about it. “Okay… first I’d have to know that most of what I would need for a conventional bioweapon would be on that list of monitored items. I can’t go to the corner drugstore and buy a vial of anthrax; I’d need to buy my materials in small quantities through several layers of middlemen so that no red flags go up. That takes time and it’s expensive. Secrecy has to be bought. I’d buy some stuff in one country, other stuff elsewhere, spreading it around. I’d buy used stuff if I could, or buy parts piecemeal and assemble them—especially hardware. I’d have them shipped to different ports, places where the watchdogs aren’t as alert, and then go through some dummy corporations to reship them and reship them again. So, this would take both time and money.”

She gave me an approving smile. “Keep going.”

“I’d need lab space, testing facilities, a production floor… preferably someplace where I could dig in. Stuff like this isn’t pick up and carry, so I don’t want to work on the run. I need a nest. Once I’m set and I’ve spent whatever time it takes to make my weapon I’d have to sort out the problem of getting my weapon from my lab to the intended target. And if we’re doing advanced medical stuff like plagues and new kinds of parasites, like the crap we’re dealing with here, then that’s harder because you need access to supercomputers, ultrasterile lab conditions, and a lot of medical equipment.”

“Spot on,” Courtland said. “Mr. Church would probably give you a biscuit for that assessment. MindReader caught a whiff of biological research equipment being bought, as you say, piecemeal. Very carefully, you understand, and in small quantities to avoid ringing the kinds of alarms that have in fact been rung. It took a while for any of this to be noticed because it wasn’t precisely the sort of thing we were expecting to find, and without MindReader we would never have spotted it at all. These materials were being ordered by firms located within nations that had been hit by crop blight, livestock disease, or similar natural calamity. Anyone who didn’t have a suspicious mind would think that these countries were scrambling to find cures for the diseases that were creating famine and starvation affecting their own people.”

“Like mad cow disease,” I suggested.

“Top marks. Except for India and a handful of others, virtually every nation on earth depends on beef production and that disease was responsible for millions of cattle deaths and billions of pounds of economic loss. It would be natural for such countries to do anything they could to find a cure.”

“Seems to me that you guys should have hit that plant already.” I saw her eyes shift away for a moment. “If the DMS has a combat team then they should have been deployed. You keep dodging my questions about what happened to the rest of your team, Major.”

“They died, Mr. Ledger.” It was Church’s voice and damn if I didn’t hear him approach. Few people can sneak up on me. I turned quickly to see Church standing in the doorway, his face dour. He came into the room and leaned against the wall by the window.

“Died how?”

Courtland looked at Church, but he was looking at me. He said, “Javad.”

“I killed Javad—”

“Twice, yes; but the first time you encountered him he was still technically alive. Infected, sure; dying, to be certain… but alive. He was being transported to a hospital for a postmortem.”

“Yeah, and—?”

“He woke up on the way to the morgue.”

“God…”

Courtland said, “The bite of a walker is one hundred percent infectious…”

“So you both said.”

“If a person receives a fatal bite then shortly after clinical death the disease reactivates the central nervous system and, to a limited degree, some organ functions, and the victim rises as a new carrier. If a person receives even a mild bite the infection will kill them in about seventy hours, which at best gives us three days to locate any victims and contain them.”

“I’m not sure I like the word ‘contain,’” I said.

“No one will like that word if it comes to that,” Church said.

“Bite victims begin to lose cognitive functions quickly,” Courtland continued, “and even before clinical death they become dissociative, delusional, and uncontrollably aggressive. In both the predeath and postreanimation phase the carriers have a cannibalistic compulsion.”

Church said, “This is all information we learned after the fact.”

I looked at them. “What the hell happened?”

Church’s face was as ice. “We didn’t know what Javad was at first. How could we? The learning process for us was very… awkward.”

“What does that mean?”

“You read about the fire at St. Michael’s Hospital? The night of the task force hit?”

I sat there, not wanting to hear this. Grace looked away but Church stared back at me with a dreadful intensity.

“Javad woke up hungry, Mr. Ledger. Only two DMS agents accompanied the body to the morgue. We lost contact with them shortly after arrival. Major Courtland and I were actually at the hospital but were conducting an interview in another wing. When the alert came in we called in all available teams, but by the time they arrived on the scene the infection had spread to an entire wing of the hospital. Major Courtland’s Alpha Team had perimeter duty and Bravo and Charlie teams entered the hospital to try and contain the situation.”

“We thought there had been an attempt by other terrorists to recover the bodies of their fallen comrades,” Courtland said. “But it was only Javad. By the time the teams were inside the infection was completely out of control. Javad had gotten all the way down to the lobby and was attacking people in the waiting area. Mr. Church was able to subdue him—and before you ask, no, we didn’t know what Javad was at that point. He was a suspected terrorist, albeit one we thought had been killed. Our agents were confused because the attackers appeared to be patients, doctors, nurses. Our men… hesitated. They were overwhelmed.”

“How many of them did you lose?”

“All of them, Mr. Ledger,” Church said. “Two teams; twenty-two men and women. Plus the two agents who had been in the ambulance. Some of the finest and most capable tactical field operatives in the world. Torn to pieces by old women, children, ordinary civilians… and ultimately by each other.”

“What… did you do?”

“You read the newspapers. The situation needed to be contained.”

I leaped to my feet. “Jesus Christ! Are you telling me that you deliberately burned down the entire fucking hospital…? What kind of sick son of a bitch are you?”

Without turning he said, “Earlier, when I told you that if this plague gets out, there will be no way to stop it, I was not exaggerating. Everyone would die, Mr. Ledger. Everyone. We are talking the actual apocalypse here. Counting Javad, our patient zero, we have a loss of life totaling one hundred and eighty-eight civilians and twenty-four DMS operatives. Two hundred and ten deaths as a result of one carrier. Friends of mine are dead. People I knew and trusted—and all of this spread from a single source that was, more or less, contained. We lucked out in that the attack was inside a building that had reinforced windows and heavy-duty doors we could lock. And, to a small degree we were on the alert, though not for something like this. If no security had accompanied his body to the hospital… well, it’s doubtful we’d be here having this conversation. Same goes if the terrorist cell had followed through with its plan. Had Javad been turned loose, say, in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, or South Central L.A. on a Saturday afternoon, or at the rededication of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia this coming weekend, we would never have been able to contain it. Never. Now we are reasonably sure that there are more strike cells, each one likely to have one or more walkers. We know where one is and we have that under heavy surveillance. If there are others we need to find and neutralize them. We have to do everything we can to locate and destroy these other carriers. If we don’t then we will have failed all of humanity. We may already be too late.” He turned toward me, and his face was filled with a terrible and savage sadness. “To stop this thing… I’d burn down heaven itself.”

I stood there, stunned and sick. “Why the hell did you drag me into this shit?”

“I brought you here because you have qualities I need. You are an experienced investigator with an understanding of politics. You can speak several useful languages. You have extensive martial arts training. You are tough and you are ruthless when it comes down to it. You’ve demonstrated that you lack hesitation in a crisis. Hesitation got our other teams killed. You’re here because I can use you. I want you to lead my new team because my existing agents are being slaughtered and I need it to damn well stop!”

“But why now? Why didn’t you tell me this the other day when I auditioned for you?”

“Things have gotten worse,” said Courtland. “The other day we thought we had this under control, that we really had gotten the jump on it. We were wrong. We programmed MindReader to search all available databases for anything that might be related. One of the things we programmed it to find were cases of attacks involving biting.”

“Oh crap…”

Church said, “So far there have been three cases. All isolated, all in the Middle East. Two in very remote spots in Afghanistan and one in northern Iraq.”

“When you say ‘isolated’…” I began.

“All three were identical: small villages in remote areas that have natural barriers—mountains in two cases, a river and a cliff wall in the other. Each village was totally wiped out. Every single man, woman, and child was killed. Every body showed signs of human bites.”

“And, what, the villagers were all walkers now?”

“No,” said Courtland. “Every person in each village had been shot repeatedly in the head. No other bodies were found.”

“What does that tell you?” Church asked.

“God Almighty,” I breathed. “The isolation, the cleanup afterward… it sounds like someone’s been taking the walkers out for test-drives.”

“The most recent one was five days ago,” Courtland said.

“Okay,” I said softly. “Okay.”

“This time they left a calling card,” Church said, “a video of the slaughter and a message from a hooded man. We’re running voice recognition on it but my guess is that it will be El Mujahid or one of his lieutenants.”

“The attack took place in a small mountain village called Bitar in northern Afghanistan,” said Courtland quietly. “Military authorities were tipped off to the attack but arrived hours after it was over. They found a tape that had been left for them on one of the bodies of the dead. Barrier intercepted it and was only fortunate enough to keep it from being generally released. We’re lucky it wasn’t posted on YouTube.”

“If you’re in,” Church said, “then as soon as possible I want you to lead Echo Team in a quiet infiltration of the crab plant in Crisfield. That will put you and the members of your team in terrible danger. I make no apologies about it… I brought you here because I need a weapon. A thinking weapon. Something I can launch against the kind of people who would use something like Javad against the American people.” He paused for a moment. “The only people who have ever faced a walker and lived are in this room. So let me ask you, Mr. Ledger,” he said softly, “are you in or not?”

I wanted to kill him. Courtland, too. I could feel my lips curling back and past the stricture in my throat. With a hiss in my voice I said, “I’m in.”

Church closed his eyes and sighed. He stood with his head bowed for a moment. When he opened his eyes he looked ten years older but far, far more dangerous.

“Then let’s get to work.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

British Army Field Hospital at Camp Bastion / Helmand Province, Afghanistan / Five days ago

OF ALL OF the British forces in Iraq the Sixteenth Air Assault Brigade had suffered the worst casualties. Their turnover of troops was steady, with fresh battalions moving into the field to replace those units that had suffered losses or had suffered too many days under the unforgiving Iraqi sun which daily beat down at above 120 degrees. Wounded soldiers—British, American, and a mixed bag of other Allied troops—were brought in with disheartening regularity. The triage process had taken on an assembly-line pace. Get them in, stabilize the most serious wounds, check their IDs, and then airlift the worst cases out to hospital ships in the Gulf. Less seriously wounded were transported by helicopter or armored medical bus to bases scattered around the country, where they would remain on the chance that they might be rotated back to their units. Great Britain had diminished its presence in Iraq since 2007 and it was more politically useful to keep the same experienced troops in the country than to send in fresh ones.

The serious cases would eventually be transported home to the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine at Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham. Too many of them would ultimately fall under the care of the British Limbless Ex-Servicemen’s Association who would try—and sometimes fail—to secure proper disability benefits for them and see them through rehab as they worked to find a new version of their civilian lives.

Captain Gwyneth Dunne lived with these facts day after day. Running the British Army Field Hospital at Camp Bastion was like working a busy ER in one of the outer rings of Hell, or at least that’s how she described it to her husband, who was stationed with the 1st Royal Anglian regiment in Tikrit. She was a registered nurse whose training was in pediatrics, but the wizards at Division had decided that this qualified her to triage battle-wounded soldiers. It was a total ongoing cockup.

She was at her desk in a Quonset hut that had two overhead fans that did nothing but push around stale hot air, reading through the computer printouts on the three wounded soldiers from the ambush near Najaf. Lieutenant Nigel Griffith, twenty-three; Sergeant Gareth Henderson, thirty; and Corporal Ian Potts, twenty. She didn’t know any of them; probably never would.

The door opened and in walked Dr. Roger Colson, the senior triage surgeon.

“What’s the butcher’s bill, Rog?” Dunne asked, waving him to a chair.

He sank down with a sigh, rubbed his eyes, and gave her a bleary look. “It’s not promising. The officer, Griffith, has a chest wound that’s going to need more surgical attention than we can give here. The good news is that there’s a pretty good Swedish chest cutter on HMS Hecla. I’m having him prepped for airlift.”

“Does he have a chance?”

Dr. Colson lifted one hand and waggled it back and forth. “Shrapnel in the chest wall. We managed to reinflate the left lung, but he has some fragments near the heart. It’ll take a deft hand to sort him out.”

“What about the others?”

Colson shrugged. “They should both go out with Griffith. Corporal Potts is probably going to lose his left leg below the knee. Maybe the hand as well. We don’t have a microsurgeon here and they don’t have one on the hospital ship, either, so even if he keeps the hand he’ll lose most of its function, poor bastard.” He rubbed his eyes again, which were red and puffy from too many hours staring at wounds that he didn’t have the staff or materials to properly treat. “The best of the lot is Sergeant Henderson. Very bad facial laceration. He’ll be disfigured but the eyes were spared, so there’s that.”

“I never met Henderson. He’s a new lad, transferred from the Suffolk regiment.”

“Mm,” Colson said, indifferent to that part of it. “Should have stayed in Suffolk and raised sheep.”

“You want him transported out?” Dunne asked.

“I should think so. Injury like that will take a long time to heal and he looks like he might have been a handsome bloke. Injury of this kind will have traumatic personal effects.”

Dunne looked down at the three printouts of the survivors spread out on her desk. She picked up Henderson’s and examined the face of the thirty-year-old sergeant from the farmlands. “He was a handsome lad.”

She shook her head and turned the page over to show the doctor.

“Ah well,” Colson said sadly, “he doesn’t look like that anymore. Pity, the poor blighter.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

Baltimore, Maryland / Tuesday, June 30; 3:12 P.M.

AS CHURCH AND Courtland led me through a series of hallways I said, “I’m going to take a flyer here and assume that you know that there is no way this prion thing is simply the weapon du jour of a group of religious fundamentalists.”

“No kidding,” Church said.

The warehouse was very large, with suites of offices, workrooms of all kinds, and several big storage rooms. There were scores of jump-suited workmen shifting crates, running wires, and swinging hammers. Guards patrolled the hallway and every one of them looked like he’d had his sense of humor surgically removed. Not a lot of smiling in that place, and I could certainly understand why. I wondered how many of the people in the halls had lost friends at St. Michael’s.

“So the real reason you didn’t hit the crab plant is because of what happened at St. Michael’s,” I said. “You’re thinking that if the DMS’s cream of the crop would fall prey to fatal hesitation then anyone else would, too. Even special ops.”

“You’d make a bloody good terrorist,” Grace said with an approving smile.

“I’m hoping he’ll make a great terrorist,” Church corrected and pushed through the door.

Grace Courtland gave me a wink as she followed. I wondered why her team was not being offered the job. Maybe they were still too shocked and too hot after what happened to their friends at St. Michael’s. More likely they were too valuable to throw away on what clearly could be a suicide mission or a trap. I didn’t for a moment think that Church wouldn’t be aware that I would think that, but it did give me a bit of a measure between what Church needed to get done and what he could spare compassion on. Big gap, probably getting wider every minute.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Baltimore, Maryland / Tuesday, June 30; 3:16 P.M.

WE ENTERED THE main warehouse floor, which was big enough to be an airplane hanger. Back in the shadows I could see a number of vehicles, mostly civilian with a few military Hummers and transport trucks sprinkled throughout. There were two big storage bins lining one wall, one marked EQUIPMENT and the other ARMS. A soldier with an M-16 stood outside the arms locker, eyes slowly scanning the room, his finger laid straight along the outside of the trigger guard. One corner of the room had been turned into a makeshift training area with several hundred square feet of blue gym mats.

The other candidates I’d tussled with—minus the clown I’d punched in the throat—were seated in the front row of an otherwise empty section of folding chairs. I could feel their eyes on me, and two of them gave me cautious nods: Sergeant Rock and the Jolly Green Giant. The latter held an ice pack to his face.

Across from them was a second row of chairs and these were filled with a dozen hard-looking men and women in fatigue pants and black T-shirts. No one wore any patch or insignia indicating branch of service or rank, but at least half of them had military tattoos of one kind or another.

Church stepped onto the mats and gave each group a long, considering stare. Even in that vast room he gave the impression of size and substance. All conversation ceased immediately and every eye was on him. I’ve seldom encountered a more commanding presence and though he was surely aware of the effect he had on everyone there wasn’t the slightest sign that he was jazzed by it. It was a fact of life to him, or, more probably, a tool.

Grace and I stood at the edge of the training floor, she on the side with the dozen—her team, I presumed—and me closer to the four men I was supposed to lead.

“Time is short,” Church began, “so let’s cut right to it. With the loss of Bravo and Charlie teams at the hospital we are critically shorthanded. Over the next three months we will recruit and train at least a dozen additional teams, but that doesn’t help us right now.” He paused and looked at Grace’s team. “Echo Team needs to build, train, and get to combat readiness asap. I expect each member of Alpha Team to assist in any way possible.”

Grins began to form on the faces of some of the Alpha Team bucks, but Church said, “Understand me here. If anyone, any single person, no matter what rank or MOS, does anything to interfere with the training process—whether by a harmless stunt or some kind of hazing nonsense—I will take it as a personal insult. It will be better for you to wake up in a room full of walkers, let me assure you.”

That wiped the smile off everyone’s face. We all knew he meant it, and I was starting to get a pretty good idea that he was a total whack job.

But he was our whack job.

He turned to Echo Team. “Lieutenant Colonel Hanley has chosen to spend the rest of the day in intensive care. Apparently his larynx got in the way of his good judgment. Pity about that.” He looked real broken up about it, too. Church pointed to me. “Captain Ledger is now your team leader, effective immediately. You will all offer him your very best support.” He didn’t add a cheesy “or else” but everyone heard it.

He waited for questions. Perhaps “dared” is another word, and then beckoned me over. When I was within range for a quiet comment I murmured, “‘Captain’ Ledger? I was only an E6 in the army.”

“If ‘captain’ doesn’t suit you, we can discuss it later.”

“Look… what’s my brief here? Is this a hand-to-hand session? Do you have a curriculum you want me to follow?”

“No, but in short I need you to know their capabilities and their flaws so that you know who to trust and at what moment.”

“With Alpha Team watching?”

“Yes.”

I shook my head. “Not going to happen. If my guys are going to have to go in alone, then we train alone. Show them some respect.”

I was aware of having said “my guys,” and Church was aware of it, too. He smiled. “Fine then.” He signaled to Grace. “Captain Ledger will be using the gym floor. Take your team to the small arms range.”

She hesitated and then nodded, called to her team and led them away.

Church walked over to a chair on which was a stack of thick folders. He handed the top four folders to me. “These are the records for your team. These are the men who have the best overall qualifications and whom we could get on site in time to meet you. I have a few others on their way here from the field, but the earliest ETA from that group would be thirty hours. These other folders are possibles. I’m having them all brought in and if you have time I want you to review the candidates and make your selections.”

“Who do I have to clear them with?”

He shook his head. “No red tape in the DMS, Captain. Your team, your call.”

Jesus Christ, I thought. No pressure there. I said, “Listen, Church, since you yanked me out of my life and stuck me with this job, and since you seem to want to give me a lot of personal freedom of action and authority, I hope you’re as good as your word when I want to do things my way.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, as of this moment there’s the police department way, the federal law enforcement way, the military way… and my way. If you want me to function at my best then you’re going to have to accept that I’m going to have to make up some of my own rules. I don’t know enough about your playbook and, quite frankly, I don’t like the way you operate. If I’m not a cop anymore then I’m something else, something new. Okay, then from here on out I’ll decide what that is; and that includes building, shaping, and leading my team. My team, my rules.”

We stood there like a couple of mountain gorillas, eyeing each other to see if this was going to be a fight or a collaborative hunt. He smiled. “If you’re looking for an argument, Captain, you’re wasting your breath and you’re wasting your own training time.”

“Do I have to salute you?” I asked, keeping the smile off my face.

“I would prefer not.”

“What about my job? I’m supposed to report back to work tomorrow and I have to let someone know at the precinct. And my—”

He cut me off. “If time allows, you and I can sit down and go over whatever details need seeing to. I’ll even have someone go and feed your cat. All of that is beside the point. Right now, I need you to step up and be the team leader.”

“I want to see Rudy.”

“Dr. Sanchez and I will have a talk first. You can see him later.”

“Can you tell me one thing at least?”

“Make it quick.”

“Who the hell are you?” When he didn’t respond I said, “Will you at least tell me your first name?”

“As far as you’re concerned, it’s ‘Mister.’” Blindsiding this guy was never going to be easy. “Have fun getting to know your men, Captain Ledger,” he said. “I’m sure they’re all dying to get to know you better.”

With that he turned and left.

“Son of a bitch,” I said softly and turned to face my team.

Chapter Thirty-Five

HMS HECLA / Royal Navy Hospital Ship / Four days ago

THE MEDIVAC CHOPPER airlifted the wounded British soldiers from the field hospital at Bastion, across Pakistani airspace into the Gulf of Oman where it touched down on the helipad at the stern of the HMS Hecla, a hospital ship, and an hour later the ship headed out of the Gulf into the Arabian Sea and steered west toward the Gulf of Aden and then turned northwest into the Red Sea.

Within forty minutes of the transfer of wounded from the helicopter to the Hecla, Lieutenant Nigel Griffith was in surgery. Griffith survived the operation but coded in recovery. The ICU team brought him back once, then again, and finally Griffith’s heart simply failed.

Corporal Ian Potts was treated and made comfortable, but the doctors were already planning the amputations of his hand and leg.

Of the third man from the ambush, Sergeant Gareth Henderson, it was later reported that he died as a result of head trauma. His death was observed and recorded by Nurse Rachel Anders and Dr. Michael O’Malley, both of whom were temporary medical staff from the Red Cross, coming off a six-month volunteer stint aboard and expecting to transfer off the Hecla to join an international infectious disease medical research team stationed in the Great Bitter Lake region of Egypt. His body was wrapped in a body bag and transferred to the cold room in the ship’s hold, along with forty-one other corpses from the meat grinders in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At 2:55 that morning a second helicopter landed on the stern of the Hecla, and Nurse Anders and Dr. O’Malley boarded the chopper along with four very large wheeled metal equipment cases. Drugs and medical supplies for the research team. The helo lifted off and flew east toward the lake. When it landed, Anders, O’Malley, and the two others were greeted warmly by the research team, all of whom were strangers but each of whom were happy to have their team strengthened.

O’Malley oversaw the unloading of the metal cases personally while Anders loitered outside the tent, smoking a cigarette, ostensibly relaxing after a harrowing tour. Two men approached: a tall sandy-haired man in a lightweight white suit and a slightly shorter dark-haired man in dun-colored trousers and a Polo shirt. The tall man bent and kissed her on both cheeks. “It’s good to see you, Rachel. I trust the flight was without incident.”

“Everything went well,” she said, exhaling as she spoke.

“Jolly good.” The man gave her a wink and then slipped in through the tent flaps. The shorter man lingered for a moment to survey the surroundings before following his companion inside. In the tent the doctor looked up suddenly from behind one of the cases, but his face changed from alarm to pleasure instantly.

“You gentlemen are up and about early,” O’Malley said, rising and extending his hand.

“Early bird and all that,” the tall man said. He nodded to the case behind which the doctor stood. “Still snug in there?”

“I was just about to open it.”

“Oooh, I just can’t wait,” murmured the shorter man with asperity.

The doctor undid the locks and lifted the lid, then swung open the side doors so that the contents were revealed. Inside the case a large man lay in a fetal curl, his head swathed in white bandages. He turned his face toward the newcomer and opened his eyes, which were red-rimmed with fatigue and pain.

“Sebastian,” he whispered.

Gault smiled down at him and then extended his hands; together he and Dr. O’Malley helped El Mujahid to his feet while Toys hung back by the tent entrance and watched; he wore a smile but it did not reach as far as his cold cat-green eyes. The Fighter was a little unsteady and his bandages were stained with blood seepage, but for all that he still exuded an aura of great animal strength. They helped him into a chair and O’Malley set to work removing the soiled wrappings. The gash was ugly and it disfigured the Fighter’s face. Gault privately thought that El Mujahid might have done too thorough a job because his lip had a sneering curl, proof that nerves and muscles had been damaged. All that had really been required was a disfiguring wound; but, he reflected, never tell a tradesman how to do his own job, and El Mujahid’s job was mayhem and slaughter. He flicked a glance at Toys, who appeared to be mildly disgusted, but whether it was from the ugly wound or the man whose features it distorted was not clear. Gault figured it was both.

O’Malley gave him a shot for the pain, though El Mujahid appeared not to need it; and he gave him vitamins, antibiotics, and a stimulant. When he had applied a fresh dressing Gault thanked him and suggested the doctor join Nurse Anders outside for a smoke. Toys went with him.

When they were alone, Gault pulled over a folding chair and sat down, bending close to the Fighter. “You did yourself quite a nasty, my friend. Are you sure you can complete the mission? It will be a lot of travel. Another helicopter, a ship, trucks, and all of it in a few quick days. That’s enough to tire the average bloke, but with that injury…”

The Fighter grunted. “Pain is a tool; it is a whetstone to sharpen resolve.”

Gault wasn’t sure if that was a quote from scripture, but it sounded good.

“The trigger device is already in the States,” Gault said, “in a safe in the hotel room we’ve booked for you. The combination is Amirah’s birthday.”

Gault looked for the flash of anger in El Mujahid’s eyes, saw it, and mentally nodded to himself. Yes, he thought, he knows about us. It was something Gault had begun to suspect, but he didn’t yet understand why El Mujahid was leaving the matter off the table.

Aloud he said, “I suggest you leave it in the safe until the very last minute. We wouldn’t want an accident, would we?”

“No,” said the Fighter in a soft voice, “we wouldn’t want that.”

TOYS STOOD JUST beyond the campfire light, lost in the deep black shadows cast by a stand of date palms. He was staring at the entrance to the tent where Gault and El Mujahid were deep in conversation. As soon as he had left the tent his smile had vanished as surely as if some hand had reached into his mind and flicked off a switch. His features changed in the absence of observation. He became a different kind of creature.

“Amirah,” he murmured aloud, his lips curling into a feral sneer at the taste of the name. Before Gault had met her, before he’d allowed himself to fall in love with that woman, his friend and employer had been perfect. Brilliant, wonderfully ruthless, efficient and inflexible. In short—beautiful. Now Gault was getting sloppy and he was getting far too confident. Overconfident. Against Toys’s frequent cautions Gault was taking unnecessary risks, spinning plans within plans, and all of it because of that mad witch.

“Amirah,” he said again.

God, how he would love to see her bleed.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Baltimore, Maryland / Tuesday, June 30; 3:25 P.M.

THE FOUR OF them stared at me. Half an hour ago we were strangers and I was beating the crap out of them; now I was supposed to lead them on an urban infiltration mission against unknown odds and, very likely, plague-carrying walking corpses. How could I open a dialogue with these men with all of that hanging in the air?

Okay, I thought, if you’re going to do this, Buddy boy, then you’d better get it right the first time.

“Attennnn-hun!”

They shot to their feet and snapped to attention with all the speed and precision of career military. I walked up to stand in front of them and gave them all a hard, steady look. “I don’t make threats and I don’t like speeches, so this one will be short. If you’re here then you know what’s going on. Maybe some of you know more about this than I do. Whatever. You four are supposed to be the best of a good lot, all active military. Until this afternoon I was a Baltimore police detective. Church says that I’m a captain, but I haven’t seen any bars on my collar or a paycheck with ‘Captain’ Ledger on it, so it might still sound hypothetical to some of you. But from this point on I’m in charge of Echo Team. Anyone who doesn’t like it, or doesn’t think they can work with me can leave right now without prejudice. Otherwise hold your line. You have one second to decide.”

Nobody moved a muscle.

“That’s settled then. Stand at ease.” I gave them a quick rundown of my military and law enforcement career, and then told them about my martial arts background. I wrapped it up by saying, “I don’t do martial arts for trophies or for fun. I’m a fighter, and I train to win any fight I’m in. I don’t believe in rules and I don’t believe in fair fights. You want a fair fight, join a boxing club. I also don’t believe in dying for my country. I have a kind of General Patton take on that: I think the other guy should die for his. Any of you have problems with that?”

“Hooah,” murmured Sergeant Rock, which was more or less Ranger slang for “fucking-A.”

“We may actually be doing a field op as early as tomorrow. We don’t have time for male bonding and long nights around a campfire telling tales and listening to a harmonica. They brought us on board to be field ops. First-liners and shooters. We’re going to try a quiet infiltration, but if we get a kill order then scared or not we’re going to put hair on the walls. When we lock and load, gentlemen, then those living dead motherfuckers had better start being scared of us because, by God, sooner or later we are going to wipe them out. Not hurt ’em, not slow ’em down… we are going to kill them all. End of speech.”

I shifted to stand in front of Sergeant Rock. His dark brown skin was crisscrossed with scars, old and new. “Name and rank.”

“First Sergeant Bradley Sims, U.S. Army Rangers, sir.”

Sir. That would take some getting used to. “Okay, Top, why are you here?”

“To serve my country, sir.” He had that noncom knack of looking straight through an officer without actually making real eye contact.

“Don’t kiss my ass. Why are you here?”

Now he looked at me, right into me, and there were all kinds of fires burning in his dark brown eyes. “Few years ago I stepped back from active duty to take a training post at Camp Merrill. While I was there my son Henry was killed in Iraq on the third day of the war. Six days before his nineteenth birthday.” He paused. “My daughter Monique lost both her legs in Baghdad last Christmas when a mine blew up under her Bradley. I got no more kids to throw at this thing. I need to tear off a piece of this myself.”

“For revenge?”

“I got a nephew in junior year of high school. He wants to join the army. His choice if he enlists or not, but maybe I can do something about the number of threats he might have to face.”

I nodded and stepped to the next man. Scarface. “Name and rank.”

“Second Lieutenant Oliver Brown, Army, sir.”

“Duty?”

“Two tours in Iraq, one in Afghanistan.”

“Action?”

“I was at Debecka Pass.”

That was one of the most significant battles of the second Iraq War. I’d heard a general on CNN call it a “hero maker,” and yet the mainstream news barely mentioned it. “Special Forces?”

He nodded. He did it the right way, just an acknowledgment without puffing up with pride. I liked that. “That where you picked up the scar?”

“No, sir, my daddy gave me that when I was sixteen.” That was the only time he didn’t meet my eyes.

I moved on. Joker. “Read it out,” I said.

“CPO Samuel Tyler. U.S. Navy. Friends call me Skip, sir.”

“Why?”

He blinked. “Nickname from when I was a kid, sir.”

“Let me guess. Your dad was a captain and they called you ‘Little Skipper.’”

He flushed bright red. Hole in one.

“SEALS?”

“No, sir. I washed out during Hell Week.”

“Why?”

“They said I was too tall and heavy to be a SEAL.”

“You are.” Then I threw him a bone. “But I don’t think we’re going to be doing much long-distance swimming. I need sonsabitches that can hit hard, hit fast, and hit last. Can you do that?”

“You damn right,” he said, and then added, “Sir.”

I looked at the last guy. Jolly Green Giant. He towered several inches over me and had to go two-sixty, all chest and shoulders, tiny waist. Yet for all the mass he looked quick rather than bulky. Not like Apeman. One side of his face was still red and swollen from where I’d hit him.

“Give it to me.”

“Bunny Rabbit, Force Recon, sir.”

I shot him a look. “You think you’re fucking funny?”

“No, sir. My last name is Rabbit. Everyone calls me Bunny.”

He paused.

“It gets worse, sir. My first name’s Harvey.”

The other guys tried to hold it together, I have to give them that—but they all cracked up.

“Son,” said Top Sims, “did your parents hate you?”

“Yeah, Top, I think they did.”

And then I lost it, too.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Sebastian Gault / The Hotel Ishtar, Baghdad / Four days ago

SO MANY PARTS of Gault’s plan were in motion now, and it was all going beautifully. Gault and Toys, together and separately, had been on-site to oversee the most critical phases, and it had been like taking a stroll in a summer garden. No one they knew could move around the Middle East with the freedom Gault enjoyed; certainly no one in the military. Even ambassadors had five times the restrictions that were imposed on him. He, however, was unique. Sebastian Gault was the single biggest contributor—in terms of financial aid and materials—to the Red Cross, the World Health Organization, and half a dozen other humanitarian organizations. He had poured tens of millions into each organization, and he could say, with no fear of contradiction or qualification, that he had helped to ease more suffering and save more lives than any other single person in this hemisphere. Without benefit of a government behind him, with no armies, no overt political agendas, Gault, through Gen2000 and his other companies, had helped eradicate eighteen disease pathogens, including a new form of river blindness, a mutated strain of cholera, and two separate strains of TB. His comment at the World Health Summit in Oslo had first been a beauty of a sound byte and had later more or less become the credo of independent health organizations worldwide: “Humanity comes first. Always. Politics and religion, valuable as they are, are always of second importance. If we do not work together to preserve life, to treasure it and keep it safe, then nothing we fight for is worth having.”

In truth, the wisest statement Gault had ever heard—and he heard it from his own father—was that “everyone has a price.” Good ol’ dad had added two bits of his personal wisdom as codicils to that. The first was: “If someone tells you that they can’t be bought it’s a matter of you having not offered the right amount.” And the second was, “If you can’t find their price, then find their vice… and own that.”

Sebastian Gault loved his father. Damn shame the man had smoked like a furnace, otherwise he might be here to share in the billions rather than lying dead in a Bishops Gate cemetery. Cancer had taken him in less than sixteen months. Gault had been eighteen the day before the funeral, and had stepped right in as owner-manager of the chain. He sold it immediately, finished college, and invested every dime in pharmaceutical industry stock, taking some risks, acting as his own broker so that he saved his fees for reinvestment, buying smart, and constantly looking toward the horizon for the next trend. Unlike his peers he never bothered looking for the Golden Fleece pharma stock—the elusive wonder drug that will actually cure something. Instead he focused on new treatment areas for diseases that might never be cured. It wasn’t until well after he made his first billion that he even paid attention to cures; and even then it was cures for diseases that nobody cared about, things that affected tribes in third-world shit holes. If it hadn’t been for Internet news he might never have even gone in that direction, but then he had a revelation. A major one. Cure something in the third world, take a visible financial loss on the effort to do so, and then let the Internet news junkies turn you into a saint.

He tried it, and it worked. It was easier than he expected. Most of the third world diseases were easy to cure; they exist largely because no major pharmaceutical company gives a tinker’s damn about starving people in some African nation whose name changes every other week. When Gault’s first company, PharmaSolutions, found a cure for swamp blight, a rare disease in Somalia, he borrowed money to mass-produce and distribute the drug through the World Health Organization. The WHO—the most well-intentioned and earnest people in the world, but easily duped because of their desperate need for support—told everyone in the world press about how this fledging company nearly bankrupted itself to cure a tragic disease. The story hit the Internet on a Tuesday morning; by Wednesday evening it was on CNN and by Thursday midday it was picked up by wire services everywhere. By close of business on Friday PharmaSolutions stock had doubled; by the close of business the following week the stock price had gone vertical. That was the first time Gault, then twenty-two years old, made it onto the cover of Newsweek.

By the time Gault was twenty-six he was a billionaire several times over. He openly pumped millions into research and scored one cure after another. When he launched Gen2000 he stepped into the global pharmaceutical arena for real, but by then he owned billions in stock in other pharma companies. The fact that at least half of the diseases for which he ultimately found a cure were pathogens cooked up in his lab never made it into the press. It wasn’t even a rumor in the wind. Enough money saw to that; and so far his father—bless his soul—had been right. Everyone had a price or a vice.

Toys was reading the London Times. “Mmm,” he murmured, “there’s speculation—again—about your being given a knighthood; and another rumor about a Nobel Prize.” He folded down the paper and looked at Gault. “Which would you prefer?”

Gault shrugged, not terribly interested. The papers dredged that much up every few weeks. “The Nobel win would drive up the stock prices.”

“Sure, but the knighthood would get you laid a lot more often.”

“I get laid quite enough, thank you.”

Toys sniffed. “I’ve seen some of the cows you bring home.”

Gault sipped his drink. “So how would a knighthood change that?”

“Well,” Toys drawled, “‘Sir Sebastian’ would at very least get some well-bred ass. As it is now you seem to rate your playmates by cup size.”

“Better than the half-starved creatures you find so thrilling.”

“You can never be too thin or too rich,” Toys said, quoting sagely.

They were interrupted by the chirp of Toys’s cell phone. Toys looked at it and handed it over without answering. “The Yank.”

Gault flipped it open and heard the American’s familiar Texas drawl. “Line?”

“Clear. Good to hear from you.” As usual Toys bent close to listen in.

“Yeah, well, the shit’s hit the fan round here and we’ve all been scrambling. I’ve been in continuous meetings for the last couple of days. There’s the matter of a tape from Afghanistan. An attack on a village. You follow me?”

“Of course.”

“You should warn me about shit like that, dammit. That’s set a lot of brushfires and Big G has been trying to take over the whole show. There’s been a lot of pressure to crowd the new team out.”

“The DMS?”

He could almost hear the American flinch at the use of an uncoded word. “Yeah. The President wants them in, and everyone else wants them out, and I mean out: closed down.”

“Any chance of that?”

“None, far as I can see. For whatever reason the President seems to be defending this group against all comers. I actually witnessed him read the riot act to the National Security advisor in front of a couple of generals. It’s getting ugly in D.C.

“I’m working on planting one of my guys in this group.”

“How sure are you that you can?”

The American paused. “Pretty sure.”

Toys raised his eyebrows and mimed applause. Gault said, “Keep me posted.”

He closed the phone and set it aside. Toys walked back to his chair and settled into it and the two of them considered the implications of the call.

Toys said, “Perhaps I’ve been underestimating that bloke.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Baltimore, Maryland / Tuesday, June 30; 3:36 P.M.

“OKAY,” I SAID, “so we danced a bit earlier. Is anyone too damaged to train? More to the point, is anyone too banged up to go into combat today or tomorrow if it comes to it?”

“Well… my nuts still hurt,” Ollie said, then added, “sir. But I can pull a trigger.”

“I’m good,” Bunny said. He tossed the ice pack onto the floor beside the mats.

Skip winced. “Nuts for me, too, sir. I think they’re up in my chest cavity somewhere.”

“They’ll drop when you hit puberty,” Bunny said under his breath. He looked at me. “Sir.”

“Skip the ‘sir’ shit unless we’re not alone. It’s already getting old.”

“I can fight,” Skip said.

I nodded to First Sergeant Sims. “What about you, Top? Any damage?”

“Just to my pride. Never been blindsided before.”

“Okay.” I nodded. “Church wants Echo Team to be operationally ready to carry out an urban infiltration sometime in the next day or two. The last two combat teams were KIA by these walkers. I haven’t seen the tapes yet, but they tell me those guys were at full complement and fully trained, but because of the unknown nature of the enemy at the time they became confused, and that caused hesitation, which proved disastrous. The five of us are supposed to be the new bulldogs in the junkyard. Sounds great, sounds very heroic—but on a practical level I’ve never led a team before.”

“As pep talks go, coach,” Bunny said, “this one kinda blows.”

I ignored him. “But what I have done is train fighters. That I know I can do. So, because I’m the big dog I get to teach you four to fight the Joe Ledger way.”

So far the Joe Ledger way had involved them getting their asses handed to them, so they weren’t all that eager to rush in. Not a “rah team” moment.

“How exactly are we supposed to kill these walker things?” Skip asked. “They, er, being dead and all.”

“Try not to get bitten, son,” Bunny said. “That’s a start.”

“In the absence of further info from the medical team we’ll proceed on the assumption that the spine and/or brain stem is the key: damage that and you pull the plug on these things. I kicked the living shit out of the first one—Javad—and I might as well have been shaking his hand; but then I broke his neck and he went right down. Seems reasonable that there’s activity in the brain stem area, so for us the new sweet spot is the spine.”

“Let me ask something,” Skip said. “The way you dropped Colonel Hanley… don’t you think that was a little harsh?”

“Church said something that had me scared and pissed off.” I told them about Rudy sitting there with a gun to his head.

“She-e-e-it,” Top said, stretching it out to about six syllables.

“That’s not right,” Skip said.

“Maybe not,” I admitted, “but it put me in a zero-bullshit frame of mind. I don’t play well with others when they get between me and what I want.”

“Yeah,” said Bunny, “I feel you.”

“Even so,” Skip said, “it reduced our operational efficiency by one man.”

Top answered that before I could. “No it didn’t. Hanley was a loudmouth and a showboat. He got mad and focused his anger on the cap’n as if he was the problem at hand. A man thinking with his heart ’stead of his head has stepped out of training. He’d get us all killed.”

“Yeah,” Bunny agreed, “the mission always comes first. Don’t they teach you that in the navy?”

Skip shot him the finger, but he was grinning.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

The DMS Warehouse, Baltimore / 3:44 P.M.

THE FOUR OF them went to change out of civvies into the nondescript black BDUs that one of Church’s people supplied—correct sizes, too, even for Bunny. I was about to head off to the bathroom to swap out of my clothes when I saw Rudy standing by the row of chairs, an armed guard by his side. I walked over to Rudy and we shook hands, then gave each other a tight hug. I looked at the guard. “Step off.”

He moved exactly six feet away and stared a hole through the middle distance.

I punched Rudy lightly on the shoulder. “You okay, man?”

“Little scared, Joe, but okay.” He glanced covertly at the guard and lowered his voice. “I’ve spent the last few minutes talking to your Mr. Church. He’s…” He fished for an adjective that probably didn’t exist.

“Yeah, he is.”

“So, you’re Captain Ledger now. Impressive.”

“Ridiculous, too.”

He lowered his voice another notch. “Church took me on a quick tour. This is not some fly-by-night operation. This is millions of taxpayer dollars here.”

“Mm. I still don’t know anything about how it runs. I’ve only seen two commanding officers—Church and this woman, Major Grace Courtland. Have you met her?”

Rudy brightened. “Oh yes. She’s very interesting.”

“Is that the shrink talking or the wolf in shrink’s clothing?”

“A little of both. If I was crass I’d make a joke about wanting to get her on my couch.”

“But of course you’re not crass.”

“Of course not.” He looked around the room. “How do you feel about all this?”

“Borderline freaked. You?”

“Oh, I’m well over the border into total freakout. Luckily I have years of practice at a professional appearance of calm tranquility. Inside I’m a mess.”

“Really?”

“Really.” His smile looked frozen into place. “Church told me about St. Michael’s and about that village in Afghanistan.”

I nodded, and for a moment I had this weird feeling that we were standing there surrounded by ghosts.

“And now you’re working for them,” Rudy said.

“Working for them maybe isn’t the right way to say it. It’s more like we’re both working against the same enemy.”

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend?”

“Something like that.”

“Church said that you might be leading a small team against these terrorists. Why not send the entire army, navy, and marine corps all at once?”

I shook my head. “The more feet on the ground the bigger the risk of uncontrollable contamination. A small team wouldn’t get in each other’s way; there would be fewer instances where a soldier would be faced with the choice of whether to shoot an infected comrade. It simplifies things. And… if worse comes to worst and the infection has to be contained like it was at St. Michael’s then there are fewer overall losses of assets.”

“‘Assets’?” Rudy echoed.

“People.”

“Dios mio. How do you know all this?”

“It’s just common sense,” I said.

“No,” he said, “it’s not. I wouldn’t have thought of that. Most people wouldn’t.”

“A fighter would.”

“You mean a warrior,” said Rudy.

I nodded.

Rudy gave me a strange look. Behind him my four team members came filing in dressed in black BDUs. Rudy turned and watched as they walked over to the training area. “They look like tough men.”

“They are.”

He turned back to me. “I hope they’re not so tough that they’re hardened, Joe. We’re not just fighting against something… we’re fighting for something, and it would be a shame to destroy the very thing you’re fighting to preserve.”

“I know.”

“I hope you do.” He looked at his watch. “I’d better go. Mr. Church is going to introduce me to the research teams. I think he’s trying to recruit me, too.”

“Ha! That’ll be the day.”

But Rudy gave me a funny look before he turned and headed back into the offices with the guard a half step behind him, rifle at port arms. I watched them until they passed through the far doorway.

“Shit,” I murmured. I walked over to the team and had just opened my mouth to explain the first drill I wanted them to do, but I never got the chance as behind us a door banged open and Sergeant Gus Dietrich came pelting into the room.

“Captain Ledger! Mr. Church wants you immediately.”

“For what?” I asked as Dietrich skidded to a halt.

Dietrich hesitated for a fraction of a second, the new chain of command probably still uncertain in his head. He made his decision quickly, though. “Surveillance teams found the missing truck. We think we found the third cell.”

“Where?”

“Delaware. He wants you to hit it.”

“When?”

“Now,” said a voice, and I wheeled to see Church and Major Courtland striding across the floor. “Training time’s over,” he said. “Echo Team is wheels up in thirty.”

Chapter Forty

Claymont, Delaware / Tuesday, June 30; 6:18 P.M.

FOUR HOURS AGO I was buying coffee for Rudy at a Starbucks near the Baltimore aquarium and now I was ankle deep in shit and sewer water in a tunnel under Claymont, Delaware. Life just gets better and better. I was even wearing my street shoes, too. Once we’d gotten the go order there was no time to find boots my size or change into fatigue pants.

We all wore Kevlar chest protectors, limb pads, gun belts, and tactical helmets and night-vision goggles. We had enough weapons to start a small war, which was pretty much the plan.

We’d taken a chopper from Baltimore and offloaded in the parking lot of an abandoned elementary school near Route 13 near Bellevue State Park. Not a lot of foot traffic out that way. From there we’d piled into the back of a fake UPS van borrowed from the local vice squad’s surveillance team and they drove us around behind a liquor warehouse up the street from Selby’s Fine Meats. We used the warehouse’s cellar to access the storm drains and from there into the main sewer line that was supposed to have a vent in the meatpacking plant. My handheld GPS tracker pointed the way.

Ollie Brown was on point and I liked the smooth way he moved, making very little noise despite the water; he checked his corners and kept his eyes pointing in the same direction as his gun sights. The big guy, Bunny, was our cover man, tailing us with a M1014 combat shotgun that looked like a toy in his hands, and in the bad light he looked like a hulking cave troll as he walked bent over, filling the tunnel. I was second in the string, with Top Sims and Skip Tyler behind me. I didn’t have a silencer for my .45 so Sergeant Dietrich had loaned me a Beretta M9 with a Trinity sound suppressor and four extra magazines. I didn’t have a long gun, though everyone else did; handguns were always my thing.

We moved like ghosts, no chatter, just a line of men moving through shadows to face monsters. It was unreal, I felt like I was in a video game. Shame real life doesn’t have a reset button.

In the chopper we’d sketched out what plans we could. “Here’s the skinny,” I said as we nodded our heads together over a map in the narrow confines of the chopper’s cabin. “Church has a en route to give us a thermal scan of the place, but that’s about as much intel as we have. He’s also arranging to have phone lines cut and Major Courtland said that they’ll get a presidential order allowing them to disrupt all cell reception in the area. We don’t want one of the hostiles texting his buds on his LG Chocolate.”

“LOL,” Bunny murmured.

“We’ll come up through the sewers. We pulled up the schematics for the storm drains and there’s a big line that goes right under the plant, very nicely placed for a quiet walk-in once the lights are off. Questions?”

“Mission priorities?” asked Top.

“Mr. Church wants prisoners for interrogations. We’d all like more intel before we kick the doors on that crab plant. From all indications that’s going to be the big enchilada. The computer geeks think this meatpacking place is a storage depot for our hostiles, not a main action center.”

“Does that mean taking a bullet to give him his prisoner?” Ollie asked, his eyes hard, challenging.

“No, but don’t let it fall that way. Shoot to wound, try to disable whenever possible, but don’t get killed.”

“High on my to-do list, boss,” observed Bunny, and Skip nodded.

“What about those zombie motherfuckers?” asked Top.

“If we’re lucky the walkers will be in their containers, locked up and on ice.”

“And if we’re not lucky?”

“If it doesn’t have a pulse, Top, you have my permission to blow it all the way back to hell.”

They all nodded. It was the only part of the plan that they liked. I could see their point. In the annals of warfare there was a long history of men getting killed because they lacked clear intelligence. We had jack shit.

Before we boarded the chopper I said, “Look, we don’t know each other and we haven’t even had the chance to train as a team. Church is asking us to hit the ground running. Let’s do just that. None of us are green at this sort of thing, so let’s act and function like professionals. Chain of command is me, then Top. Everyone else is equal. We all watch each other’s backs as well as our own. Five of us go in, five of us come out. We all clear on that?”

“Hooah,” Top said.

“Hoo-fricking-ah,” agreed Skip.

That was half an hour ago; now we were in the sewers and as we walked I had to fight to keep my whole attention on the matter at hand. If there was ever a better definition of too much too soon I don’t want to hear it. I wondered how unsettled the others were, and how that would affect them once things got hot.

Ollie stopped, one fist raised, and we froze in place. He pointed to our ten o’clock and I saw the rusty iron ladder bolted to the wall. It was covered in moss and rat shit and it ran up into a black hole in the ceiling. Thick frigid white mist snaked down through a grille set into the concrete.

“Scope,” I whispered to Skip and he produced a fiberscope camera that was attached to the display screen of a miniature tactical video system. We clustered around and studied the screen display. It showed an empty room lined with stained metal tables. No movement except for the mist.

“Must be cold as hell up there,” Top said. He glanced at me. “Them walkers need to be kept on ice, right?”

“Let’s hope so; but even if it’s cold up there let’s not take anything for granted.”

“Skip,” I said, “up the ladder. Look for trips and traps.”

But after he was up there for a minute he quietly called down, “Clear. No electronics. Just a padlock. I need the bolt cutters.”

Bunny pulled them from his pack and handed them up. There was a sharp metallic snap and then Skip was handing down the chain in sections. That was good news as far as it went, but it still spooked me. Any time something is too easy, it isn’t.

“Go, go, go,” I hissed as one by one Echo Team climbed the ladder and took defensive positions inside the room. I went up next to last and gave the room a quick eyeball, but it really was empty, just an old meat-cutting room with roller tables and hooks on chains so that sides of beef or pork could be swung in on ceiling-mounted rails from the killing rooms, then once cut they would be rolled along the metal tables into an adjoining room for cleaning and packaging. Waste and blood was flushed down the floor gutters to the sewers. The function of the room was obvious and I don’t think any of Echo Team missed the irony of being in a room made for butchery.

The mist was ankle deep and clung to the floor, obscuring our feet. It stank of raw sewage and decay. The ambient temperature had to be right above freezing although the air was oppressively humid. There were doors on either end of the room. One led to the disused packaging shed, which was empty except for old heaps of dirty Styrofoam meat trays and rolls of plastic wrap; the other door was locked.

“I got it,” Ollie said, and as he knelt in front of it he pulled a very sweet set of professional lockpicks from his thigh pocket. It was as good a set as I’d ever seen and he handled them with practiced ease. It wasn’t the sort of thing soldiers carry; I’d have to ask him about it later.

There was a soft buzz in my ear and I held up my hand for silence. There was some static on the line but Grace Courtland’s voice was clear and strong. “Thermal scans show multiple tangos.” “Tango,” or “T,” was field code for “terrorist.”

“Count how many?”

“Clustered. Maybe twenty, maybe forty.”

“Say again.”

She repeated it and asked me to confirm reception.

“Echo One copy.”

“Alpha on deck,” she said, “local law on standby.”

“Copy that. Orders?”

“Proceed with caution.”

“Copy. Echo One out.”

I called the men over and we crouched down, heads together. “Thermal scans say that we have upward of twenty warm bodies in the building. No way to know how many walkers—their heat signatures are too low.”

I saw the news register on each man’s face. Skip looked scared, Bunny looked mad. Top’s eyes narrowed and Ollie’s face turned to stone.

“Five men in, five men out,” I reminded them.

They nodded, but I added, “This isn’t the O.K. Corral. We don’t know for sure that everyone in here is a hostile. Check your targets, no accidents, and I don’t want to hear about ‘friendly fire.’”

“Hooah,” they said, but without much enthusiasm.

“Now… let’s go kick some undead ass.”

Chapter Forty-One

Claymont, Delaware / Tuesday, June 30; 6:23 P.M.

OLLIE FINISHED PICKING the lock and Bunny teased the door open, wary for trip wires and alarms, but no bells rang and nothing blew up as the door swung inward on rusty hinges. There was no other sound except the distant hum of motors.

I took point this time. My soaked sneakers wanted to squelch so I placed my feet carefully, taking my time to stay silent. The hall was empty and long, filled with gray shadows and the ever-present mist. We hugged one wall and moved forward in line, staying low, watching front and back, checking every door we passed. When the corridor ended at an L-junction I paused and peered carefully around the edge, keeping my head well below the normal light of sight. I made a “follow me” sign and we turned left to follow the hall. We found one locked door, which Ollie opened without effort, but it was just a storeroom.

I lingered for a moment in the doorway trying to estimate the probable enemy numbers based on the amount of stored goods. I noticed Top nearby doing the same thing. He gave me a raised eyebrows look. Either there were twenty really hungry terrorists in this place or the count was closer to forty, maybe twice that.

We backed out and closed the door.

The hall took on a curve and we followed it for another twenty yards until we reached a set of those big vinyl double doors of the kind that flap open when you push a cart through them. We flanked the doors, staying low, and listened.

It took a second to settle into the vibrational rhythm of the place, mentally filtering out the sounds of compressors and other ambient noises that you might expect in a dilapidated old building. Then we heard it.

A low, inhuman moan.

It suggested a dreadful hunger and it was on the other side of the door.

Skip shot a nervous glance at Top, who gave him a wink that was supposed to look casual and light, and didn’t. I saw the looks on everyone’s faces and I made them meet my eyes. It would reinforce the orders I’d given them. Prisoners—if possible.

Then there was a sound to our right farther along the curving corridor and as we looked there was a dark movement and then the weak overhead lights threw a shadow on the wall. A silhouette of a guard with a slung assault rifle. A guard, not a walker.

Ollie was closest so I gave him the nod and he went down onto the floor like a snake and eased into a low shooting position. I saw the guard’s booted foot round the corner first and then his whole body, and then there was a phfft-phfft sound as Ollie squeezed off two silenced shots. The man’s head snapped back and he sagged against the wall; Bunny ran past me and reached the guard before he had a chance to collapse onto the floor. Between Ollie’s shot and Bunny’s quick feet the whole thing looked choreographed, practiced. In human terms it was terrible, but in the way of warriors it was beautiful, a demonstration of the soldier’s art taken to its most polished level.

The cop part of my mind noted that Ollie’s handgun of choice was a silenced .22. An assassin’s weapon. The low weight of the bullet made a dot of an entry wound but didn’t have the mass to exit the skull, so the bullet just bounced around and snaped off all the switches. Ollie had taken him in the head with both shots. Most shooters, even the very good ones, are not good enough to confidently try two in the head without a double-tap to the body to stall movement; and he’d taken the shots from thirty feet. Ollie had brought his A-game with him.

Back at the vinyl door we set ourselves for our entry. Foggy mist curled out from under the door like the tentacles of some albino octopus. The smell was worse here. The sewers had been bad but the stench here was of meat rotting on the living bone, a vital corruption I’d only smelled once before—when I killed Javad. The second time.

We flanked the door and Top pulled out a little handheld dentist’s mirror and angled it under the door, slowly turning it left and right. Inside there was a whole row of big blue cases. Not a surprise but it didn’t exactly make me want to do the Snoopy dance. From what I remembered of the building schematics this had to be the main production floor, but the row of cases blocked all but a narrow strip; and in the center of the row stood a guard. He had his back to us and he was craning to look through a slender gap between two of the cases. We heard more of the moaning and now we could orient sound with location. Something was happening on the far side of the cases, on the big production floor. The guard was eager to see it. So was I.

I holstered my pistol and drew my knife. I held a finger to my lips then touched my chest. The others nodded. Bunny and Top curled their fingers under the flaps of the door. At my nod they pulled the flaps open as quickly as silence would allow, and I moved into the room fast and hard. I reached around and clamped my left palm over the guard’s mouth and used my thumb and the edge of my index finger to pinch his nose shut; at the same time I kicked him in the back of the knee with one foot and as he suddenly fell back against me I cut his throat from ear to ear, taking the carotids, the jugular, and the windpipe in one deep sweep. I pulled him back and pushed him into a forward crouch so that his nodding head would prevent the spray of arterial blood. He was dead before he knew he was in threat and it hadn’t made a sound. Bunny and Skip took the body and eased it down as I straightened. I wiped the blade and sheathed it, drew my pistol and thumbed off the safety.

There were four cases in the row and they completely blocked the door and hid us from whoever else was in the room. I took the dentist’s mirror from Top and checked around both ends of the row. On our right I could see down a corridor formed by a second row of cases that were lined up at a right angle to the first set and a row of laboratory tables cluttered with equipment. There was one guard standing in the gap between the two sets of cases, and near him were six men in stained white lab coats. Everyone was looking through the gap into the center of the main room.

I faded back and used the mirror to peer around the left end of our row. Two guards stood shoulder to shoulder about twenty feet away, also looking toward the center of the room, but this time I could see what they were looking at. What I saw froze the blood in my veins to black ice.

The room was large, as big as a school auditorium, with a high ceiling set with grime-covered louvered windows. Against the far wall was a third row of blue cases, and against the left wall were more lab tables. Scattered throughout the room were at least a dozen armed guards, all of them with automatic weapons; and maybe four more men in lab coats. But in the far left corner was a big cage made from industrial-grade chicken wire and steel pipes. Ten of the blue cases stood with their doors wide open, and three guards were using electric cattle prods to drive a snarling, staggering line of walkers toward the cage.

The cage was packed, wall to wall, with children.

Chapter Forty-Two

Claymont, Delaware / Tuesday, June 30; 6:26 P.M.

THE CHILDREN WERE huddled into a pack inside the cage, their eyes wide, their mouths trembling. I could see some of them weeping but they made no sound, though whether it was terror of the walkers or threats from the guards that stilled their tongues I couldn’t tell.

I pulled back and handed the mirror to the others, making them each take a fast look.

I mouthed the words “we need prisoners,” but I don’t know if any of them were able to process the thought. Top, the only man among us who had kids of his own, had the most murderous expression I’d ever seen on a human face.

I held up three fingers and everyone got set, Ollie and Skip on the left flank, Bunny and Top with me. I counted down fast.

“Go!” I snarled, and we rushed into the room.

Chapter Forty-Three

Claymont, Delaware / Tuesday, June 30; 6:27 P.M.

BUNNY OPENED UP with the shotgun on the two closest guards, blasting them into red tangles of flailing limbs; Top shot two of the lab techs and then turned his fire on the cluster of guards. I could hear shots and screams as Ollie and Skip tore into the guards on the far side. I raced straight forward, gun up and out, and shot the guard standing by the door to the cage. It was a long shot; bad aim could kill one of the kids, but I had no choice. The walkers were yards away. My shot took the guard in the mouth and he rebounded off the chicken wire and fell, his fingers still curled around the latch. As he fell the door swung open.

The guards with the cattle prods turned toward us. Two of them tossed down their prods and fumbled for their guns. I shot one twice in the chest but even as I was swinging my barrel toward the other the nearest walker leaped at him and buried its teeth in his throat. They fell together in a thrashing heap. I shot the remaining guard who was caught in a moment of bad choice: drop the prod and grab his gun or fend off the walkers. My bullet knocked him into the arms of a walker. The creature, a middle-aged Asian man in a track suit, bore him down and began savaging him. I shot the walker in the back of the head.

A man rushed at me from my right and I turned to see that there had been at least eight more guards on the other side of the first row of blue cases. They opened up with AK-47s and I had to dive for cover behind one of the lab tables. I dropped, rolled, and came up by the far corner and emptied my magazine into them, dropping two. As I ejected the mag and slapped another in, Top Sims caught them from an oblique angle, chopping down three of them with bursts from his MP5. Skip Tyler opened up from the other side and the guards tried to fight their way out of a crossfire.

Behind me there was a huge shriek of noise and I spun to see the children surge through the open door of the cage. Three walkers lunged at them and that fast I was up and running, shooting above the heads of the children, trying to make head shots while dodging incoming fire. The children were hysterical and in their panic they flooded across the entire production floor. The gunfire from Echo Team faltered as the children surged around the lab techs and guards, trying to flee the walkers, looking for any way out and finding only guns and teeth and terror.

One of the lab techs whipped back one flap of his white shirt-jacket and pulled a Sig Sauer and shot a ten-year-old girl in the chest.

“Fuck prisoners!” I heard someone snarl and the tech died in a hail of bullets. The voice I’d heard had been my own, the bullets mine and Top’s.

A guard brought an Uzi up and tried to shoot me even though there was a line of children between us. I shot him through the eye.

“Run!” I yelled to the kids. “Go that way!” I pointed toward the door, even tried to shove some of the kids that way, but their terror was too deep, too complete.

“Behind you!” I heard Bunny roar, and I crouched and spun to see a walker—a hulking brute in a football jersey—lunge at me, his mouth already smeared with blood. He was coming so fast that I knew that a head shot wouldn’t stop him, so I drove into him with a sliding side kick to the thigh that jerked him to a stop, and as I pivoted off the kick I brought the gun up under his chin and blew off the top of his head. As he fell backward another walker leaped over him. This one was a young woman in what had once been a very expensive tailored suit. I shot her in the throat but the bullet tore only flesh and the slide locked back on my gun. There was no time to reload as she slammed into me; so I pivoted to let her mass whip around and past me. Her fingers never managed to grab me and she flew off and slid ten feet along the floor. With a human being the shock and impact of the fall would have given me a few seconds to reload; but the walker came right off the floor and dove at my legs, trying to bury her teeth in my flesh. With my left hand I drew my knife and drove the blade down as hard as I could in the back of her skull, right above the collar. The furious tension was instantly gone and she dropped to the ground, a piece of my pant leg caught between her teeth.

Top Sims came from my left and stood cover while I reloaded, dropping a lab tech and a walker by the time I had the new mag in and the slide released.

There was a bull roar and we pivoted to see Bunny being rushed by three walkers. There were a half dozen kids huddled behind him and his shotgun was empty. He slammed the folding stock of the shotgun across the face of one walker and I could tell that he was unnerved when the monster just shook it off. Years of training condition us to fight even the most aggressive person, but none of us had trained to fight the dead, to fight things that could not be hurt, that could barely be stopped.

I started in his direction, but Top waved me off. “I got it!”

Bullets burned the air around me and I turned to see a pair of guards using an overturned table as a shooting blind. Dumbasses. The table was aluminum. I put four rounds through the thin metal, two sets of two, and both men fell back with sucking chest wounds.

A blur of movement made me turn again and a little boy of about seven wrapped his arms around my left thigh and clung to me, screaming, his face streaked with tears. A walker came loping across the floor, red teeth bared in a hungry grimace. I shot him in the chest and head and then shot a guard. The clinging child let go and I turned to see him falling to the floor. One side of his face was streaked with blood from a terrible bite. The walker had gotten him before he’d run to me for help. The child’s body twitched and thrashed, and lay still.

God Almighty.

Across the room I saw Skip and Ollie moving along the fringes of the room with a line of children between them, killing every adult they encountered.

A guard nearly clipped me with a short burst from his AK-47, but I saw the movement of the barrel and beat him to the trigger pull. Behind him I saw that there were still some children in the cage. The door was closed but unlocked and the children had fingers hooked through the chicken wire trying to hold the door closed as six walkers fought to pull it open. Only the walkers’ lack of coordination had kept the children safe this long, but inch by inch the door was opening. I tore across the room.

Gunfire made me dodge to the left and a line of bullets chased me along a lab table, shattering glass and filling the air with a spray of jagged shards. I dodged around a lab tech so that he was chopped apart by the gunfire. A guard was at the end of the table drawing a bead on Skip. There were too many children around, so I bashed down on his wrist with my gun barrel and chopped him across the throat with my left hand. He pitched back out of my way. I brought the gun up and shot three of the walkers, using two shots for each, concentrating on the ones farthest away from the children. They collapsed down and then I plowed into the remaining three undead. I used my last two bullets to kill one of them point-blank, and as his body sagged I front-kicked his corpse into the zombie next to him. The two of them crashed down and I spun to take the last creature standing, a man in jeans and a Hellboy T-shirt. I slammed into his chest with my forearms so that his weight crashed the cage door shut. He lunged his head over my arm and caught the strap of my Kevlar vest in his teeth. I tried boxing his ears with cupped palms, but that did no good, so I grabbed him by the hair and the back of the belt and rammed him headfirst into the wall. His skull collapsed on the first impact; the bones in his neck splintered on the third. I dropped him as the zombie who’d fallen under the one I’d kicked came crawling out from under, scuttling toward me on hands and knees. I axe-kicked the back of his neck and he dropped, twitching for a moment, and then lay still.

I put my back to the cage as I switched magazines. My last one. The room was still in turmoil, but now each of my men had set up defensive stations. Top and Bunny had at least ten kids behind them and they were standing shoulder to shoulder, taking careful aim to bring down walkers, techs, and guards. Across the room, Skip Tyler had six kids tucked into a niche made from a collapsed table and a line of blue cases. There were bodies heaped in front of him. Ollie was by the entrance, and as the last few guards tried to race past him to escape he coldly shot them down.

In the center of the room there were still half a dozen walkers, a few guards, and some kids. Everyone was covered with blood and I could see why none of my guys had gone to rescue those children. It was impossible to tell if they were infected or not.

I had twelve rounds left and there were still six kids out there. I had to try.

I rushed in, firing as I ran, dropping guards and walkers alike. One of the kids ran toward me and I knelt down, waving him on even as I aimed past him, but when he was ten feet away I saw that his eyes were empty and his mouth was open, teeth bared. It was the little kid who had clung to me for safety.

“God,” I whispered through a throat filled with hot ash. I shot the child.

For one moment there was a lull in the gunfire as the child pitched backward from the point of impact and slid to a stop on the floor. I could feel every set of eyes in the room on me, burning me with their stares. The children huddled behind my men cringed and cried out in renewed terror.

Then one of the other children in the center of the room snarled with unnatural hunger and rushed at Skip’s group.

The gunfire began again.

When it stopped nothing moved in the center of the room except a pall of gun smoke and white fog that was now polluted with red.

I stood on the fringes of the carnage, my pistol held out in front of me, one bullet left. The thunder I heard in my ears may have been the echo of the gunfire, or it may have been my own heart pounding out like the drums of damnation.

Slowly, filled with fear and horror at what we had all just done, I lowered my gun.

Chapter Forty-Four

Claymont, Delaware / Tuesday, June 30; 6:35 P.M.

I CALLED IT in.

There was an overturned table behind me and I leaned against it while I surveyed the room. A pall of acrid gun smoke hung like a blue veil in the humid air, and the kids kept crying. Each of my men looked stricken. Except for Ollie Brown, whose face showed nothing at all. He could give Church a run for his money. Skip looked sick; Bunny’s and Top’s faces were rigid with fury.

I wondered what expression was on my face. Maybe shock, probably fear; but if my features truly reflected what I felt then my expression would be mingled horror at what had been about to happen to these poor kids and a dead sickness for what I had just done. That I’d been forced to do it made no difference to me at all. I felt unclean.

Five minutes ago there had been dozens of people in this room. Now most of them were dead. I’d killed at least a quarter of them myself. I’d killed so many people that I’d lost count. The realization hit my brain like a fist. I’d killed before, but this was worse. Ten times worse than the task force raid. And part of the guilt I felt was a secret shame because deep inside my soul the warrior part of me was beating his chest and yelling in exultant triumph even while the more civilized parts of me cringed.

I took a step toward Top’s group but the children behind him shrieked and pulled back, terrified of me. They’d seen me gun down at least two other children. They were too young to understand about the infection. They couldn’t know I wasn’t a monster, too. Top gathered a few of them in his arms, shushing them, murmuring quiet words as Bunny stood by, awkward and helpless. I stayed where I was.

There was a noise and I looked up to see Alpha Team flooding into the room, weapons up and out. Major Courtland was in front with her pistol in her hands, Gus Dietrich was on her flank. They skidded to a stop and stared at the scene of total carnage.

“Bloody hell…” gasped Courtland, and her words could not have been more aptly chosen.

Dietrich stared openmouthed, and the agents of Alpha Team looked from the heaps of corpses to the crowds of weeping children to the bloodied members of Echo Team.

Courtland recovered first. She keyed her radio. “Alpha One to base. We need full medical teams double-quick. We have multiple civilian victims requiring immediate medical attention and evac.” She paused as she did a quick head count. “Civilians are all children. Repeat, civilians are children times seventeen. Send all available medical units.”

I pushed off from the table and walked over to her, my eyes stinging from the smoke.

She opened her mouth to say something, then caught herself, paused, and finally said, “Are you all right, Captain?”

I very nearly bit her head off. It was such a stupid and clumsy question, but I buried that reaction. What else could she say?

“I’ll live,” I said. “Tell your people… there are zero infected among the children. All of the bite victims are…” I couldn’t finish it.

She swallowed and relayed the info, then clicked off her mike. “Your men?”

“No casualties.”

Courtland nodded, and for a moment we shared a look. Soldier to soldier, or warrior to warrior. The ugly truth was that there were going to be casualties among my men. This event would scar every single one of them.

She looked around as the first wave of EMTs spread out through the room. The children shrieked and wept. Some of them ran toward the men and women in uniforms and the EMTs gathered them up in their arms, some of the medics and soldiers weeping as they held the kids. Other children shrank back, all trust in adults having been torn out of them. A few sat in unmoving silence, speaking of damage that went all the way down to the cellar of their souls.

“Was this how it was at St. Michael’s?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No. Everyone there died. My team was outside the whole time.”

I nodded. “This morning I was just a cop,” I said.

“I know.”

There was more to say but it didn’t need to be said aloud. We both understood.

“We got a live one!” Dietrich called, and we turned to see a wounded lab tech trying to crawl out from under a dead walker. In his nearly mindless state of pain he reached out to the nearest person in a soundless plea for help. Ollie Brown stood over him, a sneer of contempt on his face. He drew his pistol and racked the slide.

“Stand down!” I bellowed, starting forward, but Brown was already bringing the barrel down toward the tech. Suddenly Gus Dietrich stepped forward, grabbed Ollie’s wrist and swung it violently upward. The pistol blast was shockingly loud, even to my wounded ears, but the bullet just buried itself in the wooden roof timbers thirty feet above.

I got up in Ollie’s face. “Stand down right now, Lieutenant.”

His face was ugly with fury, but after a long moment the tension bled out of his limbs. Top Sims stepped between him and the lab tech, his hand on his holstered pistol.

“Let him go, Sergeant,” I said, and Dietrich carefully released Ollie’s wrist and took a short step to one side, his eyes hard. To Ollie I said, “Secure your weapon.”

Ollie’s eyes bored into mine and then past me to the tech, and for a second I thought he was going to try for the shot, but then he eased the hammer down, flicked on the safety, and holstered his piece. EMTs immediately stepped up to triage the wounded man.

“What the hell’s wrong with you?” I snapped. “What part of the mission orders sounded like ‘shoot unarmed prisoners’?”

“He’s a piece of shit.” Ollie sneered.

“He’s the only person we have left to interrogate.”

Ollie said nothing, so I grabbed him by the elbow and pulled him a few yards away. I wasn’t nice about it and when he tried to pull his arm away I dug into a nerve. Even with his stone face the pain showed through. I eased the pressure and he jerked his arm free.

“Okay, Ollie, let’s sort this out right here, right now.”

“There’s nothing to sort out,” he said, then added a sarcastic, “sir.”

“You’re one more smartass remark away from getting bounced off this team.” He blinked at that and snapped his mouth shut on whatever he was about to say next. I leaned close. “You’re a top-notch fighter, Ollie, and I’d rather keep you than lose you, but if you can’t follow orders then you are no good to me or anyone. Now I’m going to ask you only once and that’s it. Are you on my team or not?”

Ollie met my stare for a long ten-count and then he inhaled sharply through his nose and exhaled slowly. “Fuck it,” he said.

I waited.

“I’m in.”

“My rules, my way?”

He nodded and closed his eyes for a few seconds. “Yes, sir.” No sarcasm this time.

“Look at me,” I said. He opened his eyes. “Say it again.”

“Yes, sir. Your rules, your way.”

I nodded and stepped back. “Then we won’t discuss this again.” I turned and walked away, passing Dietrich and Courtland without comment, and rejoined Echo Team. After a moment Ollie followed.

To the team I said, “I guess they’ll debrief us once we’re back in Baltimore. They’ll need to know everything.” I paused. “I have a friend, Dr. Rudy Sanchez. He’s a police psychiatrist, and he’s a good man.”

“A shrink?” Skip asked.

“Yeah. He’s at the DMS, and I want each of you—each of us— to take a few minutes and sit down with him.”

“Why?” asked Skip.

Top turned to him. “Tell me something, kid; when you woke up this morning did you think that by suppertime you’d be killing zombies and gunning down little kids?”

Skip dropped his eyes and looked dejectedly down at the floor.

Top laid a big hand on his shoulder, gave it a squeeze. “Believe me, Skip, you don’t want to go to sleep tonight with this in your head and no one to talk to.”

Ollie just stood there with his eyes glistening and his fists balled into knots.

Bunny said, “I ain’t ever gonna sleep again.”

Chapter Forty-Five

The DMS Warehouse, Baltimore / Tuesday, June 30; 8:51 P.M.

A CHOPPER TOOK us back to the warehouse in Baltimore. On the way Grace told us that quarters had been set aside for each of us. “It’s not much,” she said over the whine of the rotor, “we had small offices converted into bedrooms. Mr. Church has asked that you and your men go to your quarters and wait until called for. He doesn’t want any of you talking to other DMS personnel until he’s had a chance to meet with you himself. Don’t worry, you’re not under suspicion, it’s just that a lot of the DMS staff are new and some have not been informed about the nature of this crisis. Security is paramount.”

We didn’t like it but we all understood and we flew the rest of the way in silence. I noticed that Top was pretending to sleep but was actually studying Ollie, who had turned stiffly away from Courtland and me and was staring out the window. When Top noticed me watching him, he smiled and closed his eyes. After that he really did look like he was sleeping, but I didn’t believe it.

IT WAS NEARLY dark when we landed. A guard met me as I debarked and took me to Church’s office. His face showed little emotion, and he sure as hell didn’t rush up to embrace me, but I could see his eyes behind the tinted lenses of his glasses as he gave me a thorough up-and-down appraisal. He waved me to a chair and then sat down behind his desk; and the guard poured me a cup of coffee before he left.

“Grace said that there were no injuries sustained by Echo Team.”

I almost said, “Nothing that will show,” but it was trite. He seemed to guess my thought, though, and nodded.

“And you managed to secure a prisoner.”

I said nothing. If he knew about Ollie—and I’m sure he did—he left it off the table.

“What’s going to happen with those kids?”

“I don’t know. They’ve all been admitted to the hospital with FBI protection. The Bureau’s taken over the problem of identifying them. Some of the children are too traumatized to even give their names. None of them remember how they were taken. A few had recent burns on their skin consistent with liquid Tasers, so we can assume they were taken unawares, perhaps randomly.”

“Experimenting on kids puts a whole new spin on this thing.”

“Yes,” he said, “it does, and I want to hear your full report on what happened today, Captain, but first I want your assessment of the crab plant. When is the absolute soonest you can hit it?”

“There’s maybe a slim chance that the hostiles in the other plant won’t know about the hit we just did. The cell lines were jammed, right? And you cut the landlines, right? It’s late in the day,” I said. “Communication between the cells would necessarily be at a minimum anyway. I think we have to hit it by noon tomorrow.”

“Why not right now? We have sufficient firepower to do a hard entry.”

I shook my head. “There are three reasons why that’s not going to happen tonight. First, you need to interrogate your prisoner. Second, the meat plant was full of kids. Who the hell knows how many civilians are in the crab plant. If you go in all John Wayne then you could get a lot of innocent people killed.”

“And the third reason?”

“Because that plant belongs to Echo Team and I don’t want anyone else jumping our action. Look, you hired us on to be your first team. Well, you got what you paid for. I know you had to be here watching the feeds from the helmet cams. So you know what we went through in there, and you know how tight my guys are. Alpha Team may be DMS elite or some shit but they were a half-step off getting to first base. They should have been in there faster. I shouldn’t have had to call them once things got hot.”

“Grace Courtland and Gus Dietrich are superb agents. As good as anyone on Echo Team,” Church said. “At one point all of them were, but… since St. Michael’s they’ve been showing signs of stress disorder. In the last two days their team drills are down by fourteen percent and their live ammunition drills show hesitation. None of that was there before St. Michael’s.”

Now I understood. I put my cup down and leaned my elbows on his desk. “So we understand each other here?”

“If what you saw in Delaware has taught us anything it’s that we are losing ground on this thing. I want the crab plant hit tonight. Now.”

“No way. My team needs to rest. You talk about reduction in combat efficiency, well, you put a top team into a critical situation without time to rest then you don’t have a top team anymore. You have tired men who will be off their game. Going right back out would get them killed. Twelve hours to sleep and plan the hit.”

“Two hours’ sleep and they debrief in the helo.”

After a minute, I said, “I see the science team. Then we go in three hours. That’s not negotiable. I won’t lead my team to a slaughter. I’ll go in alone before I do that.”

For a moment it looked like he was considering that as a suggestion. Then he nodded.

“Okay.” He took a vanilla wafer and gestured to the plate. “Have one.”

I had an Oreo. “Do you want reconnaissance or scorched-earth?”

“My science division needs data. Computers, lab equipment, pathogen samples… we need to leave the place intact.”

“What kind of backup can we expect?”

“The works. Alpha Team will be on deck and they’ll be first in if you need them; F-18s in the air, helo support for extraction if it gets hot. Special Forces strike teams can be inside in ten minutes; and the National Guard is on standby. If it turns into a firefight we have the edge. If the perimeter is breached we’ll take a closer look at the scorched-earth option.”

He didn’t have to explain that if there was a containment breach and my team was inside then we’d be flash-fried along with the hostiles. And even though that’s what I would order myself it didn’t make me feel any better about it.

“What’s going on with the prisoner? I thought you’d be interrogating him by now.”

“That would be nice,” he agreed, “but he has two bullets in his chest cavity. He’s in surgery. They’ll page me the moment he’s stabilized enough to answer questions.”

“And what if the control disease kicks in before then?”

“Then there will be that much more pressure on you to bring me another prisoner when you hit the crab plant.”

“Swell.” I finished my coffee. “Okay, take me to your mad scientists.”

Chapter Forty-Six

The DMS Warehouse, Baltimore / Tuesday, June 30; 9:20 P.M.

AS HE LED me to the labs, Church said. “Dr. Sanchez has agreed, conditionally, to help us through the current crisis.”

“What are his conditions?”

“He’ll be here as long as you are. Apparently he thinks you need a minder.” He appeared amused. “Major Courtland is bringing him up to speed on everything.”

“Rudy’s not a fighter.”

“We all serve according to our nature, Captain. Besides, your friend may be tougher than you know.”

“I didn’t say he wasn’t tough. I just don’t want to see you put a gun in his hand.”

“Noted.”

We entered a huge loading dock that had been newly enclosed by cinderblock, and the smell of limestone and concrete hung thick in the damp air. There was a row of oversized trailer homes of the kind used as temporary offices on construction sites. As we passed each, Church threw out a single identifying word. Cryptography. Surveillance. Operations. Computers.

We passed one whose door was marked with a TWELVE in black block letters, and Church made no comment about this one. There were four armed guards outside, two facing out, two facing the unit’s only door, and a tripod-mounted .50 stood behind a half-circle of sandbags, its wicked black mouth pointing at the trailer door. I slowed for a moment, frowning, feeling the tension that was screaming in the air, and I felt a chill like an icy hand close around the back of my neck.

“Damn,” I breathed. “You have more of them in there?”

“Among other things, yes,” he said softly. “It’s also our surgical suite, and that’s where our prisoner is. But to answer your question, we have a total of six.”

“Like Javad?”

Church’s face seemed to harden as he said, “The six walkers were all from St. Michael’s. One doctor, three civilians, two DMS agents.”

“My… God!”

“This evening I’m having three of them sent to our Brooklyn facility for study. The others will remain here.”

“For study? But… you’re talking about your own people.”

“They’re dead, Captain.”

“Church, I—”

“They’re dead.”

Chapter Forty-Seven

Hotel Ishtar, Baghdad / June 30

“WHO WAS ON the phone?” Gault asked as he came out of the bathroom, a plush crimson robe cinched around him. “Was it Amirah?”

Toys handed him a cup of coffee on a china saucer. “No, it was the Yank again.”

“What did he want? No—let me guess. The Americans finally raided the crab plant? Bloody well time, too—”

“No,” said Toys. “It seems they’ve raided the other facility. The one in Delaware. The meatpacking plant.” He overpronounced the word “meatpacking,” enjoying the implications of each syllable.

Gault gave a bemused grunt and sipped his coffee. “That’s unfortunate.” He sat and chewed his lip for a few seconds. “What about the other plant? They were supposed to locate and infiltrate that first.”

Toys sniffed. “Leave it to the U.S. government to always do the right thing at the wrong time. What’s that phrase you like so much?”

“‘Bass ackwards.’”

Toys giggled. He loved to make Gault say it.

Gault finished his coffee and held his cup out for more. Toys refilled it and they sat down; Gault in the overstuffed chair by the French windows, Toys perched on the edge of the couch with his saucer on his knees. An iPod in a Bose speaker dock played Andy Williams singing Steve Allen, with Alvy West on alto sax. Meet Me Where They Play the Blues. Toys had been converting all of Gault’s vast collection of historic big-band music to the iPod. Gault wondered where he found the time.

When the song ended, Toys said, “This alteration in the timetable… is that going to change things? With El Musclehead, I mean.”

“I’ve been working that through in my head. The timing is tricky. It really would have been better if they hit the crab plant first, and I can’t understand why they didn’t.”

“Could they have decrypted the files from the warehouse? You said it was only a matter of time.”

“A matter of very precise time. I paid good money to make sure that those files would not be cracked this quickly. The flashdrive was deliberately and very precisely damaged and the programs corrupted just enough to have given us at least forty hours more, even if they used the best equipment.” He shook his head in frustration. “Dr. Renson and that other computer geek assured me that no technology exists to do it faster.”

“What about MindReader?”

Gault waved that away. “MindReader’s a myth. It’s Internet folklore cooked up in some hacker’s fantasies. They’ve been mythologizing about it since the nineties.”

Toys was insistent. “What if it’s real?”

Gault shrugged. “If it’s real and the DMS has it, then, yes, they could scramble the timetable. But so what? At this point nothing they do can stop the program.”

“You’re the boss,” Toys said in a wounded tone of voice that he knew needled Gault. “But it doesn’t answer the question of what to do about the crab plant… and whether this will spoil the whole operation.”

“No,” Gault said after some consideration, “no, it won’t spoil the plan. Too many things are in motion now. But as far as the plant goes, it won’t be a total disaster.”

Toys studied his face and began to grin. “You’re making that face. I know that face, What have you got cooking over there?”

Gault gave him an enigmatic smile. “Expect another call from the Yank sometime soon.”

“Hm,” purred Toys, “I’ll be waiting with bated breath.”

Chapter Forty-Eight

The DMS Warehouse, Baltimore / Tuesday, June 30; 9:24 P.M.

THE INTERIOR OF the lab was somewhere between a scientist’s wet dream and a god-awful mess, with heaps of books and spilled stacks of computer printouts, coffee cups everywhere and tables laden with every manner of diagnostic and forensics equipment. Gas chromatographs, portable DNA sequencers, and a lot of stuff I’d never seen before even at the State Crime Lab. Sci-fi stuff. Machines pinged and beeped and blipped and a dozen technicians in white lab coats pushed buttons and made notes on clipboards and exchanged grim looks. In the middle of all of this was one desk, bigger than all the others, that was a shrine to pop culture geekiness, and though I pride myself on seldom showing surprise I went a little slack-jawed at what I saw. In an astonishing display of either the blackest humor on record or spectacular bad taste, there were horror magazines, bobble-heads of zombies from half a dozen movies, at least fifty zombie novels with dog-eared pages, and the entire collection of resin action figures of Marvel superheroes as decaying zombies. Seated like a happy school kid in the middle of this oasis of poor taste was a sloppy thirty-something Chinese guy with a bad haircut and a Hawaiian shirt under his lab coat. Church stood beside the desk—but not too close—and his immaculate suit and air of command seemed like a statement by comparison.

“Captain,” Church said, “let me introduce Doctor Hu.”

I stared. “Doctor Who? Are you shitting me? This some kind of goofy code name or something?”

“H-U,” Church said, spelling it.

“Oh.”

Without rising Hu offered his hand and I shook it. I expected something slack and moist but he broke the stereotype and gave me a hard, dry shake. What he said, though, was, “You’re the hotshot zombie killer. Man, I just saw the footage from Delaware. Wow! Freaking awesome! You can kick zombie ass”

He smelled like old baked bread, which is not as good as it sounds. “I thought you guys called them walkers.”

“Yeah, sometimes.” He shrugged. “It’s more PC, I guess. Doesn’t stress the troops.”

I gave his toys a significant nod. “And you wouldn’t want to appear insensitive.”

Hu grinned. “Denial is stupid. We’re fighting the living dead. Would you prefer we call them ‘undead citizens’? I mean, I originally wanted to call them ALFs.”

I looked from him to Church. “Alien lifeless forms,” Church said with a wooden face.

“Get it?” Hu said, “Because they’re illegal aliens.”

I said, “How do people not shoot you?”

He spread his hands. “I’m useful.”

And I swear to God I saw Church’s mouth silently form the words “Only just.” Aloud he said, “Dr. Hu enjoys his jokes more than does his audience.”

“You said as much about me the first time we met.”

“Mm.” Church turned to the scientist. “Please answer any questions Captain Ledger has.”

“What’s his clearance level?”

Church was looking at me as he said, “Open door. He’s in the family now.” With that he walked over to a nearby workstation, pulled out the chair, sat, crossed his legs, and appeared to totally tune us out.

Hu looked me up and down for a moment, nodding to himself, then he beamed a great smile. “You have any background in science?”

“Forensics on the job,” I said, “a few related night courses, and a subscription to Popular Science.”

“I’ll use smallish words,” he said, trying not to sound as condescending as he was. “We’re dealing with a weaponized disease of immense complexity. This didn’t evolve, this isn’t Mother Nature getting cranky and throwing out a mutation. This isn’t even a disease pathogen that could have evolved. We’re into the bizarro zone here. Somebody brewed this up in a lab, and whoever made this is smart.”

“Joe Obvious speaks,” I said.

“No,” he said, “I mean scary smart. Whoever did this should have a shelf full of Nobel Prizes and a whole alphabet soup behind his name. I don’t have the stuff to make this and Mr. Church buys me lots of nice toys. This would take a major research facility, electron mikes, clean rooms, and a lot of shit you never heard of maybe. Maybe stuff no one’s ever heard of. This is radical technology, Captain.”

“Call me Joe.”

“Joe?” He snapped his fingers. “Hey… your name’s Joe Ledger.”

“Yeah, I thought we’d pretty well established that.”

“You into comic books. Y’know… Dr. Spectrum?” He had an expectant look on his face. “Dr. Spectrum, the superhero from Marvel Comics? His secret identity is ‘Joe Ledger.’ That’s pretty cool, don’t you think?”

“All things considered,” I said, “no, not very much.”

“Doctor…” Church said with a note of soft warning in his voice.

“Okay, okay, whatever. We’re talking about the disease,” he said, and for a moment I saw the scientist behind the geek façade. “Look, science is only occasionally cool and a soul-crushing bore the other ninety-nine percent of the time. Aside from the fact that the empirical process requires endless repetition on each and every freaking step, there’s also the reality of state and federal regulations on what we can and cannot do. A lot of research opportunities are limited and some are blocked. Biological weapons, that sort of thing.”

“Even with the military?”

“Yes.”

“Even supersecret military?” I said, half smiling.

He hesitated. “Well, okay, that starts getting to be a bit more fun, but even then you can’t publish half the time, which means you don’t get prizes and you don’t write bestsellers.”

“No groupies?”

“You joke, but there are women attracted to brains. We don’t all die virgins.”

“Okay. And this relates to zombies how?”

“I think we have ourselves a genuine mad scientist. A supervillain.” He seemed really happy about the idea. I kind of wanted to punch him.

I glanced at Church, who raised his eyebrows in a “you’re the one who wanted to talk to him” kind of look.

Hu said, “I’m serious. We have someone with deep intellect and vast resources. I mean that: vast. Bear in mind that lots of terrorists come from oil-producing nations. It would take that kind of money for our Dr. Evil to do this sort of thing.”

“Got it. So has your supervillain actually managed to raise the dead?”

“No, look… these walkers are not actually dead… but they’re not alive, either.”

“I thought those were pretty much the only two choices.”

“Times change. You know that movie, Night of the Living Dead? Well, I think ‘living dead’ is a pretty good name for what we got here.” He took a Slinky off his desk and let it flow back and forth between his palms. “Here’s the thing, the body is designed by evolution to have natural redundancies, without which we’d never survive injury or illness. For example, you only really need about ten percent function of the liver, twenty percent function of one kidney, part of one lung. You can live with both arms and legs removed. There are millions of pages of research and case evaluation of patients who have continued to live well past the point where their bodies should have shut down. In some cases we can discover why, in some cases we’re still in the dark. With me so far?”

“Sure.”

“Now look at the walkers. If they were truly and completely dead then we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I’d still be in Brooklyn and you’d be doing whatever you were doing before Mr. Church shanghaied you. Why? Because the dead are dead. They have zero brain function, they don’t get up and chase people.”

“Javad Mustapha was dead,” I pointed out. “I killed him. Twice.”

Hu shook his head. “No, you killed him once, and that was during your second encounter with him. Mind you, when you shot him during that raid you gave him what should have been mortal wounds, and he would have died had it not been for the presence of this pathogen; but this little bastard of a disease did not allow Javad to die. You see, this disease shuts down any part of the body that is not directly related to the purpose of its existence.”

“Which is?”

“To spread the disease. These things are designed to be vectors. Very aggressive vectors. The disease simply shut off the areas damaged by your bullets. Don’t look at me like that; I know how weird this sounds, but someone cooked up something that nearly kills its victims but at the same time prevents them from dying as we previously understood death. Plus, they added a little of this and a little of that so that the host body—the walker—aggressively spreads the pathogen. It’s marvelous but it’s bizarre, because the disease is constantly trying to kill the host while working like a bastard to keep parts of it alive.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“Sure it does, but not in the way you think; and to a degree that does fit with nature… sort of. When you have an infection the fever you get is the immune system’s attempt to burn it out of the bloodstream. Sometimes the fever does more harm than the disease. Psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis… they’re a couple of examples of the immune system doing harm because it’s trying to fix the wrong problem, or trying too hard to fix a minor problem. In nature there are plenty of examples,” he said, “but what we have here is someone who has taken that concept into a totally new direction. We have a fatal disease, several parasites, gene therapy, plus some other shit we haven’t sorted out yet, all present in a molecular cluster unlike anything on record. If these guys weren’t trying to destroy America they could make billions off the patents alone.”

“Does this have anything to do with fatal familial insomnia?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Bonus points for even knowing that name. The answer to that is… yes and no. That’s the prion disease they used as a starter kit, but they’ve tricked it out with the other stuff. Even now it has some of the characteristics of a typical TSE.”

“‘TSE’?”

“Prions are neurodegenerative diseases called ‘transmissible spongiform encephalopathies,’ or TSEs,” he explained. “We still know very little about prion transmission and their pathogenesis. We do know that prions are proteins that have become folded and in that form act differently from normal proteins. These are strange little bastards… they have no DNA and yet they’re capable of self-replication. Usually sporadic cases strike about one person per million, and at the moment these account for, say, about eighty-five percent of all TSE cases. Then you have familial cases, which account for ten percent of TSEs, and which are passed down through bloodlines in ways not yet understood, since inherited traits are genetic and, like I said, prions have no DNA. The remaining five percent are iatrogenic cases, which result from the accidental transmission of the causative agent via contaminated surgical equipment, or sometimes you see it occurring as a result of cornea or dura mater transplants, or in the administration of human-derived pituitary growth hormones. Still with me?”

“Clinging on by my fingernails. How come these prions are making monsters instead of just killing people?”

“It’s a design requirement of this new disease cluster. Prions produce a lethal decline of cognitive and motor function, and that allows the parasite-driven aggression to cruise past conscious control. Somebody took the prion and attached it to these parasites. Don’t even ask how because we don’t know yet. It’ll be a new process, something they invented. They essentially turned a TSE into a fast-acting serum transfer pathogen, but with all sorts of extras, most notably aggression. The victim’s aggression is amped up in such a way as to closely imitate the rage response some PCP and meth addicts have on the downside of a strong high. Ever see the movie 28 Days Later? No? You should. The sequel rocks, too. Anyway, that movie dealt with a virus that stimulated the rage centers in the brain to the point that it was so dominant that all other brain functions were blocked out. The victims existed in total, unending, and ultimately unthinking rage. Very close to what we have here.”

“What, you think a terrorist with a Ph.D. in chemistry watched a sci-fi flick and thought ‘Hey, that’s a good way to kill Americans’?”

Hu shrugged. “After all the stuff I’ve seen in the last week, I wouldn’t be surprised. Now, there may be some higher brain functions but if so it would be far lower than the most advanced Alzheimer’s patient.”

“An Alzheimer’s patient is still going to feel pain, and I beat the shit out of Javad and he didn’t so much as blink.”

“Yeah, well, we’re getting into one of our many gray areas. Remember that we’re not dealing with a natural mutation, so a lot of what we know will be based on field observation and clinical testing.”

“So… if we’re talking disease why are we also talking living dead? How does that work?”

“That’s something we’re working on with the walkers we harvested from St. Michael’s,” Hu said, and for the moment there was no fanboy smirk on his face. “This disease cluster reduces so much of the body’s functions that it goes into a kind of hibernative state. That’s what we’ve been calling ‘death’ for these cases, but we’re wrong. When you shot Javad his body was already ravaged by the disease and the injuries hastened the process. He slipped into a hibernative coma that was so deep that the EMTs who checked his vitals got nothing. Consider this,” he said, shifting in his chair, “animals can hibernate and to a very, very limited degree so can humans. Not easily, but it sometimes happens. You see it once in a while in hypothermia cases. But when a ground squirrel hibernates its metabolism drops down to like one percent of normal. Unless you had sophisticated equipment you’d think it was dead. Even its heart beats so infrequently that a cut wouldn’t bleed much because the blood pressure is too low.”

“Can’t some yogis do the same thing?”

“Not even close. Even in the deepest yogic trance their metabolism is maybe ninety-nine or at most ninety-eight percent of normal. These walkers, on the other hand, are going into hibernative states as deep as a ground squirrel’s. Much deeper than a hibernating bear. Almost anyone who checked their vitals would declare them dead. We had to use machines to establish this and even then we almost missed it. What we have here is someone who has managed to either splice ground squirrel DNA to that of humans—and before you ask, no, they are not compatible according to what we know of modern transgenics—or they’ve found a way to alter the chemistry of the body to cause artificial hibernation. Either way, we can see the effect but we’re nowhere close to understanding it.” He set down the Slinky and leaned forward. “Once the victim is in hibernation this disease cluster reorganizes the functioning matrix of the body. It somehow uses the fatal familial insomnia protein to wake the victim up again and keep them awake; but during the hibernation the parasite has closed off those areas of the body that have been severely injured—as with the gunshot wounds. Our walker gets up because the parasite has kept the motor cortex going as well as some of the cranial nerves—the ones governing balance, chewing, swallowing, and so on. However, most of the organs are in shutdown and the reduced blood and oxygen flow has caused irreparable brain damage to the higher functions such as cognition. The heart pumps only a little blood, and the lungs operate at an almost negligible level. Circulation is so significantly reduced that necrosis begins to occur in disused parts of the body. So, we have nearly a classic brain-dead, flesh-hungry, rotting zombie. It’s beautiful, man, absolutely freaking beautiful.”

The urge to hit him was getting tougher to control.

“Can they think at all? Are they problem-solving?”

He shrugged. “If the walker is capable of conscious thought, we haven’t seen evidence of it. But really, we don’t know what they can’t do, or what variations might emerge in a larger cross section of the population. Maybe that’s why they had the kids today—trying the pathogen on a new test group. Body chemistry is different in kids. But overall, these are brain-dead meat machines. They walk, growl, bite, and that’s it.”

I blew out my cheeks. “Can they feel pain?”

“Unknown. Certainly they don’t react to it. There’s not even a flinch mechanism that we’ve seen. Though at St. Michael’s we learned that they’ll recoil from fire. They appear to be oblivious to, or are capable of disregarding, other forms of pain and the threat of pain.”

“They die, though,” I said. “Brain and brain stem injuries seem to do the trick.”

“Right, and if I were you I’d stick with that. But whether they can be otherwise injured in the classic sense… that’s complicated. Our walkers have a hyperactive wound-healing capacity. Not on the scale of Wolverine from X-Men who regenerates back to complete health, but more on the lines of car tires when they’re filled with a can of that sealant stuff. Wounds do seal, as we know, otherwise we’d bleed out from a paper cut. Proteins called fibrins and high-molecular-weight glycoprotein-containing fibronectins bond together to form a plug that traps proteins and particles and prevents further blood loss; and this plug establishes a structural support to seal the wound until collagen is deposited. Then some ‘migratory cells’ use this plug to stretch across the wound, during which platelets stick to this seal until it’s replaced with granulation tissue and then later with collagen. In the walkers this whole process is running at superspeed. Shoot one and the wound closes right away. If this were a natural mutation we’d consider it an evolutionary response to a highly dangerous environment; fast healing in the presence of the potential for frequent cuts. But this is designer stuff; and again, our Dr. Evil has a gold mine of a patent in his hands because that process alone might be a potential cure or treatment for hemophilia and other bleeding disorders. And the battlefield uses would be worth billions.” He leaned close. “And if you and your Rambo squad can take out the geniuses behind this then I’m going to swipe this shit and file the patents, and then I’ll buy Tahiti and retire.”

“I’ll see what I can do.” I sighed. “What about treatment, something to kill these prions? Can we give people something to amp up their immune systems?”

He shook his head. “The body’s immune system doesn’t react to prion diseases the way it does to other diseases; it doesn’t kick in and the disease spreads too rapidly with nothing to slow it down. Once it takes hold there is no treatment.”

“Terrific.”

“And killing a prion is incredibly difficult. In labs, where growth hormones are cultivated from extracted pituitary glands, solvents of various kinds have been used to purify the tissue; these solvents kill everything… except the damn prions. Even formaldehyde won’t kill them, which really boggles me. Radiation treatment and bombardment with ultraviolet light doesn’t kill them. We—and by that I mean my fellow wizards in the scientific community as a whole—have tried virtually everything to kill TSEs including treating diseased brain tissues with all manner of chemicals including industrial detergent—and the prions simply won’t die. They don’t even die with the host organism. Bury a corpse with a prion disease and dig up the bones a century later… and the prions are still there. They are, after all, simply proteins.”

“Is that all of it?” I asked.

“I could go on and on about the science—”

“I mean, are those all of the highlights? Is there anything else I have to know if I’m going to lead my team into that crab plant?”

Again Hu looked at Church and now the distant look was gone from Church’s eyes. He nodded to the doctor. “Well,” Hu said, “there’s the issue of infection.”

“Right, it’s transmitted through a bite. I saw enough of that firsthand about three hours ago. I saw those bastards biting kids.”

I looked to see how that hit Hu but there wasn’t a flicker of compassion on his face. He was too caught up in how cool he thought this all was. I wondered how he’d feel if he was in a locked room with a walker.

Hu gave me a devious grin. “It’s a bit worse than that. A whole lot worse, actually.”

Chapter Forty-Nine

The DMS Warehouse, Baltimore / Tuesday, June 30; 9:39 P.M.

“WHAT’S WORSE?”

We turned to see Grace Courtland entering the lab with Rudy right behind her. Rudy looked terrible. His face was the color of old milk, except for dark smudges under his eyes; his lips were a little wet and rubbery, and his eyes had the glassy and violated look of a victim of some dreadful crime.

“Jeez, Rude, are you okay—?” I said quietly as I moved to intercept him.

“Later, Joe. It’s been a hard day for everyone, but let’s talk later.”

Church got to his feet and joined the group. “Captain, your friend Dr. Sanchez has already been entertained by Dr. Hu. And I believe Major Courtland has shown him the St. Michael’s tapes.”

Rudy looked at the floor for a moment, then he took a deep breath and tried to master himself. I hadn’t yet seen those tapes, so having gotten my own tour of hell I could pretty well imagine what horrors were banging around in his head. It made me feel like a total shit for having gotten him dragged into this.

“You’re about to tell him about the rate of infection, Doctor?” Rudy asked in a voice that was steadier than I expected.

“Yep, but he’s your friend… why don’t you break the news to him.”

Rudy nodded. He cleared his throat. “Joe… I’m not sure which I think would be worse, a real case of supernatural zombies like out of the movies or what we have here.”

“Definitely what we have here,” Hu said. Courtland agreed, and even Church nodded.

“This is a lousy way to start a conversation,” I said. “I would have thought that zombies would pretty much be your worst-case scenario.”

Rudy grimaced and shook his head. “You understand what prions are, right? Okay, with any disease there is an incubation period, and for prion pathologies it’s typically very long, anywhere from several months to thirty years in humans.”

“I told him about the parasites,” Hu said.

Rudy nodded. “Prions, though extremely dangerous, are far from being short-term weapons and could at best represent a time-bomb effect. Whoever made this disease pioneered some new way to speed up the process of infection. Now it happens in minutes.”

“Seconds,” I corrected. “Like I said… I saw it.”

Hu said, “We’re seeing all kinds of variations in terms of infection, time of death, and speed of reanimation. We’re only just beginning to build models to study it but we’re nowhere near understanding it. The pattern’s funky, and I’ll bet you my whole set of Evil Dead action figures that we’ve either got mutations or more than one strain. In either case we are seriously screwed.”

Rudy said, “I think we can safely say that when the carrier and victim are in an agitated state, as we had in the hospital and in Delaware today, then the process happens very fast. Adrenaline and ambient temperature both accelerate the process.”

“This is why this is such a major threat,” Church interrupted quietly. “There has always been a lag factor with diseases, even weaponized diseases, and we don’t have that here.”

“Okay. Message understood. If any infected people get out we’re screwed.”

“And when in doubt, Captain,” said Church, “shoot to kill.”

“Dios mio,” Rudy murmured, but I met Church’s stare and gave him a microscopic nod.

“What about inoculation? Can you juice my team in case we get bit?”

“No way,” Hu said. “Remember, the core of this thing is a prion and a prion is simply a misfolded normal protein. Any vaccine that would destroy the prion would destroy all forms of that protein. Once we identify all the parasites we might be able to kill that, and maybe that’ll do some good. No, I think that your team has to consider prophylactic measures instead.”

“Is this thing airborne? I mean, if all we have to do is protect against a bite, then we can suit up with Dragon Skin or Interceptor, or some other kind of body armor. There’s plenty of stuff on the market.”

“I don’t think it’s airborne,” Hu said dubiously, “but it might be vapor borne, which means spit or sweat might carry it. In a tight room at high temperatures… you might want a hazmat suit of some kind.”

“Hard to fight in a hazmat,” I pointed out.

Church held up a finger. “I can make a call and have Saratoga Hammer Suits here by morning.” I guess all of us looked blank, so he added, “Permeable chemical warfare protective overgarments for domestic preparedness. It’s a composite filter fabric based on highly activated and hard carbon spheres fixed onto textile carrier fabrics. It’s tough, but light enough to permit agile movement as well as unarmed and armed combat. It’s been out for a bit, but I can get the latest generation. I have a friend in the industry.”

“You always have a friend in the industry,” Hu said under his breath, which got a flicker of a smile from Grace. A DMS in-joke apparently.

Church stepped away and opened his cell phone. When he came back he said, “A helo will meet us at the staging area for the crab plant raid by six A.M. with fifty suits.”

“I guess you do have a friend in the industry,” Rudy said.

“And the big man scores,” Hu said, and held up his hand for a high five but Church stared at him with calm, dark eyes. Hu coughed, lowered his hand, and turned to me. “If you go in with body armor and those suit thingees you should be okay. Unless…”

“Unless what?”

“Unless there are a lot of them.”

“Let’s hope not.”

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

“What are the chances of that, Doctor?”

He didn’t answer, which was answer enough.

“Damn,” I said.

Chapter Fifty

Amirah / The Bunker / Tuesday, June 30

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

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

“Line?”

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

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

“How is he?”

“No longer pretty.”

Amirah laughed. “He was never pretty.”

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

“Is… he in much pain?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You know I do.”

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

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

Chapter Fifty-One

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

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

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

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

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

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

I sipped more water, letting him work through it.

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

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

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

“Yeah, I know, Rude, but it’s not like we’re talking the Mark of Cain here.”

He gave me such a long withering look that I wanted to squirm. “No? Look, I’m not pointing a finger at any country, any faith, any political party. This is a failing in the whole species. We, the human race, have committed a terrible and unforgivable sin; and before you embarrass us both by asking—no, I’m not having a Catholic moment. This is far more fundamental than church or state. This is ours to own because we know better. As a species, we know better. We really do understand right and wrong, same as we really do grasp all the subtle shades of gray. We have had thousands of years of religious leaders, philosophers, free thinkers, and political scientists explaining the cause and effect of destructive behavior. You’d think by now, at the point where we are this technologically advanced and where communication between all races is not only possible but globally instantaneous, that we’d have learned something, that we’d have benefited from all those previous mistakes. You’d think we’d have become more forward-thinking and farsighted. But we’re not. With computer modeling we can virtually look into the future and see how things will go if we follow these courses, and yet we don’t do a thing to change direction. Maybe the true human flaw is our inability to act as if the next generation matters. We never have. Individually maybe, but not as a nation, not as a species.”

Rudy rubbed his eyes.

“Today,” he said slowly, “I watched video proof of the criminal indifference of the human race. People who are certainly intelligent enough to know better have created a weapon so destructive that it could destroy the entire human race, and why? To further a religious or political view. If this was the act of a single person I’d say that we’re dealing with psychosis, a fractured mind… but this is a deliberate and careful plan. The people involved have had sufficient time to think it through, to grasp the implications. And yet they continue with the program. Today you saw them experimenting with children. Children.” He sighed. “They know better and they still don’t care. If there’s a better description of the Mark of Cain I haven’t heard it.”

“That’s them, Rudy. Not us.”

“No, no,” he conceded tiredly. “I know that. It’s just that I don’t trust that our government is any wiser. Or any government. We did, after all, invent the bomb; and we’ve experimented with bioweapons and germ warfare. No, cowboy, we all bear some trace of Cain’s mark. All of us, whether we’re directly involved at the policy level or not.”

“Some of us are trying to do something about this shit, Rudy. Let’s not paint everyone with the same brush.”

He sighed. “I’m tired, Joe… and I’m not attacking you. I’m feeling my way through this.” He looked at me for a long time. “But, you’re marked, too. Not with guilt, but with the awareness of the beast that lives in all of us, in every human heart. The awareness is in your eyes. I’ve played poker with you; I know that you can hide it better than me, better than most. Better than Grace Courtland. Not as well as Church. Point is that you carry the same mark as everyone else here. As I do.” He made a grimace that was his best attempt at a smile. “It’s a bonding experience. We’ll always be linked by this shared knowledge. All of us linked by the human race’s most recent demonstration of its absolute bloody-minded determination to commit suicide.”

“Like I said, not everyone’s part of the problem, Rude. Some of us are trying our damnedest to be part of the solution.”

He gave me a bleak and weary smile. “I hope that’s not bravado, cowboy. I sincerely hope you believe that.”

“I do. I have to.”

He closed his eyes and sat there for a long minute saying nothing, but every few seconds he let out another long sigh. “I haven’t had near enough time to process this yet. If I’m going to be of any use I’m going to have to get my own ducks in a row. I mean… I’ve been kidnapped, had a gun to my head, found out that terrorists have an actual doomsday weapon… you’d be surprised how much of that we don’t cover in medical school.”

“Not even in shrink school?”

“Not even in shrink school.”

We sat with that for a bit. “Church told me that you’ve signed on to the DMS. Why’d you go and do that?”

Rudy gave me a wan smile. “Because Church asked me to. Because of what happened at St. Michael’s. Because of you. And because I know. Not only the secrets, Joe… I know the truth of all of this. I’m marked. That makes me a part of this from now on. If I don’t do something to contribute to the solution I think I’d go mad.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I hear you. But how do you feel about being on the ‘team’?”

“That’s too complex a question for a simple answer. On the surface I guess I appreciate the opportunity to do some good for the people who are in turn trying to save the world.”

“And below the surface?”

“I know where your morals are, Joe. You’re too reasonable to have a red state/blue state agenda. You’re much more of a right and wrong personality, and that works for me. I think Church may be built along some of the same lines. So, I guess that one of the strongest rays of hope I see in this whole thing is the fact that what we have standing between us and a destroyed future are three people—Church, you, and Grace Courtland—who actually see the way the trend is going and are in the position to do something about it.”

“That’s a lot to put on our shoulders, brother.”

“Yes,” he said, “it is.” He rubbed his eyes. “We all have so much to do. You have to be a hero. I have to get my act together so I can help everybody else keep their acts together. And Church and Courtland have to do whatever it is that they do.” Rudy got up and patted me on the shoulder. He looked a little bit more like his old self, but I knew that there was a lot of road still to travel. “I’m going to try and get at least an hour’s sleep. You should, too.”

I said that I would but knew that I wouldn’t. There was too much to do and the clock was ticking. I stood in my doorway and watched him shamble off to bed. I felt impossibly tired and was just turning to go back inside when a door banged open at the end of the hall and a white-faced Dr. Hu yelled two words that sent a chill of terror through me: “Room Twelve!”

Behind him I could hear the sudden staccato of automatic weapons fire.

Chapter Fifty-Two

The DMS Warehouse, Baltimore / Tuesday, June 30; 10:21 P.M.

I TORE DOWN the hallway toward the open door. Gus Dietrich was coming out of his room dressed in boxer shorts and a beater. He saw me running and opened his mouth to say something but then I grabbed Hu and shoved him out of my way. Hu hit Dietrich and they fell together through Dietrich’s open doorway. I ran into the hall and cut left. My quarters were pretty close to the loading bay and I got to the bay door before any of the armed guards. There was a knot of confused techs and staff milling around at the bay doorway and I bellowed at them to clear a path.

“Got your back,” I heard Bunny say as he skidded into the bay right behind me. Top Sims was right behind him.

I turned to the crowd. “Everyone out—now! Close the door and kill that fucking alarm!”

They backed out of the room as the three of us hurried past rows of trailers. When we reached Room 12 what we saw stopped us in our tracks. The machine gun emplacement was deserted, the big gun still smoking, the floor littered with shell casings. I could only see one of the four guards—or, what was left of him. His body was bent backward over the low wall of sandbags surrounding the gun, his throat completely torn away. There were small pools of blood everywhere and spatters from what looked like arterial sprays. Whatever had happened here had happened fast and mean.

We moved up quick and quiet. Bunny scooped up an MP5.

“This is getting to be a long damn day,” he muttered as he checked the magazine. “It’s out.” He patted down the dead guard and found a fresh magazine.

“On my six!” I whispered and I could feel him come up behind me. Top flanked us. He’d picked up the dead guard’s handgun and was fanning it to cover all the corners. Someone in the crowd must have had some authority because the alarm died, leaving its banshee echo bouncing off the walls.

“Check your targets,” I said softly. “We don’t know who is infected or how many hostiles we have.”

We paused in a tight knot and listened. There were scuffling sounds from two directions: behind the trailer and inside.

“I’ll take the inside,” I whispered. “You two around the sides.”

“This is messed up,” said Bunny.

“No shit, farmboy,” snarled Top. “Let’s go.” They faded off to my left, heading down the length of the trailer as I moved onto the bottom step of the double-wide. The door to Room 12 was open and I could see figures moving inside. I saw another weapon on the deck, a Glock nine, but the slide was locked back, so I ignored it as I leaped up onto the top step. I was in a hurry but the cop in me was always watching and I flicked a glance at the door. No visible signs of a forced entry or forced exit. Even though I had no time to worry about that it still bothered the hell out of me.

I braced myself and stepped into the trailer. Inside it was a charnel house. Two lab-coated doctors lay in broken twists of limbs; beyond them three people dressed in hospital gowns were sprawled in pools of red. The prisoner we’d taken at the meatpacking plant had been in a surgical bay that was in a screened-off section of the trailer, but the screens had been torn down and the prisoner’s throat had been completely torn away. The doctors who had been working to save his life were dead. The air smelled of cordite and the coppery stink of blood. Each of the corpses had been shot repeatedly in the head. In the very back of the trailer was a fourth patient and he had one of the soldiers down and was tearing at him with broken teeth. The soldier was screaming and flailing his arms to fend off the attack and I couldn’t yet see if he’d been bitten, or if so how badly.

I went straight for the walker.

There wasn’t time to shout orders or to fall back and wait for reinforcements. Maybe more help was coming, but I didn’t know, and I had to trust that they’d handle things outside. I concentrated on the walker who was trying to kill this terrified young man.

The trailer was seventy feet long and I cleared the entire length in a couple of heartbeats. Gunfire erupted from outside and the walker froze in place, lifting its head, dead eyes casting around for the noise. While I was still twenty feet back I scooped up a heavy metal clipboard from a table and hurled it side-armed like a Frisbee. It was weighted with a thick sheaf of papers but I put a lot of shoulder into it. It whistled through the air and caught the walker on the side of the head, knocking him against the wall. He lost his grip on the soldier, who slumped down into a whimpering heap. The blow did no harm, though, and the creature instantly whipped its head around, lips peeling back from its teeth, dead eyes blazing. It lunged at me, but I was in full stride now, matching momentum and force with its angle of attack. As it reached for me I used my hands to slap both arms down and then grabbed its throat with my left and used my right to hit it with a palm shot to the temple. I knew I couldn’t hurt it, but my rushing mass slammed it back against the wall and I leaned into the throat grab, feeling the hyoid bone crunch. A normal man would have died right there, trying to suck wind through a throatful of broken junk; but this thing kept snarling. I hit it again, knocking its mouth away from me, and then slammed the side of its head a third time but this time I kept the heel of my palm pressed hard against its temple so that the walker was effectively pinned to the wall with that bloody mouth facing away from me. I wormed my fingers up the side of its head and knotted them in its lank and filthy hair.

I felt it tense all of its muscles to surge back against me, the way an animal will lunge to try and break free of another predator, but that’s what I wanted it to do. As the walker lunged off the wall I dropped back a step and pulled with all my strength. The effect was that the walker flew forward toward me far faster than it intended, and I immediately pivoted my hips so that its mass was accelerated even faster. The creature hit the center point of my turn and then flew past me as if repelled by a force field. My grip on throat and hair created torque and my pivot—plus my full body turn—propelled the walker’s body mass over and past me; but I still held on. There was a crucial point at which its flying mass sailed faster and farther than my grip on its head allowed, and at that precise moment I snapped down like a housewife shaking out a bed sheet. The zombie’s neck snapped with a loud wet crack.

I let go and let it crash down onto an examination table then it toppled lifelessly to the floor.

Outside I heard another crackle of gunfire.

There was a moan behind me and I spun around to see the soldier getting to his knees, one hand clamped to his bleeding cheek. The bite wasn’t big, but it was still a bite. Poor bastard. I saw the moment when the realization blossomed in his eyes. He knew he was a dead man and we both knew that there was nothing I could do.

I pointed at him and put steel in my voice. “Stay here, soldier!” He nodded, but his eyes were bright with tears. I turned and ran to the door of the lab, jumped left, and sprinted to the end of the trailer. Two soldiers, both transformed into walkers, were down, sawed in half by Bunny’s MP5. A second pair of walkers, both of whom looked like medical personnel, were slumped in the shadows by the wall, their heads showing wounds from small-arms fire. Top had his pistol in a two-hand grip as he moved past them.

“Watch!” Bunny yelled as a bloody-faced figure rose up from behind a stack of boxes and drove at me; but I’d already heard it. I turned into the rush and as it barreled toward me I suddenly shifted to one side and chopped him across the throat with a stiff forearm. His head and shoulders stopped right there but his feet ran all the way up into the air the way a tight end will after he’s been clotheslined by a defensive tackle. The walker crashed down onto the concrete and I pivoted to hit it again when Bunny shoved me aside, stamped down on its chest to hold it in place, and put two rounds into its skull.

We both turned to see Top sidestep another walker and chop it down with a vicious side kick to the knee, and by the time its kneecaps cracked to the ground he had the barrel jammed against its temple and fired. The slide locked back after the shot, but the walker fell away into a rag-doll sprawl.

There was a sudden, harsh silence broken only by the fading echoes of the gunfire.

“Top?”

“Clear.”

“Bunny?”

“Clear, boss,” he said almost in my ear. “We got them all.”

I turned and looked up at Bunny, whose face had transformed from its usual boyish humor into something harder and far more dangerous. He closed his eyes, took a breath, and then nodded to agree with his own assessment. “I’m good, boss,” he said after a moment.

Top was looking from corner to corner, checking every shadow, with eyes as cold as a rattlesnake’s. He met my glance and gave me a short nod.

Behind us I could hear the wounded soldier sobbing.

Chapter Fifty-Three

The DMS Warehouse, Baltimore / Tuesday, June 30; 10:29 P.M.

THE DOOR BURST open and Sergeant Dietrich came in at a dead run, still in his skivvies but with a combat shotgun in his hands, with Grace Courtland at his heels. All of Alpha Team piled in behind them, and I saw Ollie and Skip, both of them looking scared and worried. Ollie had a bath towel wrapped around his hips and his hair was frothy with un-rinsed shampoo; Skip had a fire axe in his hands. They both looked terrified of what they might find. Dr. Hu trailed the pack, followed by a few lab coats with frightened faces and wide eyes. The doctors and techs faded over to the wall and stood there looking shocked.

“Stand down!” I yelled as the soldiers raced up. “All hostiles are down.”

Dietrich slowed to a stop. “Those idiots locked the bay door,” he said, clearly angry that he wasn’t able to help.

I pointed at Dr. Hu, who was standing against a wall, tears in his eyes. “Doc, we have an injured man in here. See what you can do for him.”

Hu didn’t move. “Was he… was he…?”

“Yes.” I cut a glance at the people clustered in the doorway and lowered my voice. “He was bitten.”

Hu pressed himself back against the wall. “We can’t do anything for him!”

“You’re a doctor, for Christ’s sake… he needs help.”

He flicked a terrified glance at the trailer and shook his head, unwilling to move.

I walked over and took a fistful of the front of his Hawaiian shirt and lifted him onto his toes. “Listen to me, asshole, that boy in there is hurt and he’s scared and he’s one of us, not some action figure. This is real stuff happening to real people. I want you to do whatever you can for him, and do it right now, or so help me God I’ll lock you in there with him.”

With a little push I let him go and Hu staggered back and then froze in place, legs bent as if deciding whether to run. He blinked a few times then he gave me a quick nod and went into the trailer, twisting by me so as not to make any contact.

I felt a light touch on my arm and turned sharply to see Grace standing right there. Her eyes searched my face and my body. “Are you hurt?”

“No,” I snarled, then bit down on my rage and tried it again. “No, Major, my men and I are fine. But the soldiers detailed here and all the lab techs are dead. So is the prisoner that we nearly died getting for Mr. Church and the docs who were working on him. And all the walkers, too; but one of your soldiers, a young kid… he’s been bitten.”

“Christ,” Dietrich growled. He had murder in his eyes.

Grace was appalled. “How did this happen? I don’t—?” She stopped, aware of the people around us, and gave me a significant look.

There had to be a hundred people in the bay now, some in fatigues, some in civilian clothes, all of them looking horrified and confused. We saw Church moving through the crowd toward us, with Rudy beside him looking frightened and out of place, so I went to meet them. I got right up in Church’s face. “Your security sucks!”

He looked at me for a long moment, and for the first time I saw real emotion bubbling beneath the surface of his professional calm. It was a seething, ice-cold rage. His lip curled back for a moment and then I saw him slam his control back in place, one steel plate at a time.

“First things first,” he said, and his voice was nearly calm. He took out his cell and hit a number. “This is Church. Security code Deacon One. Full lockdown.” Instantly a different set of alarms rang and revolving red lights mounted high on the walls began flashing. He disconnected and hit a second number. “Lock the surveillance office. Good, now I want all security logs and video feeds from the last twelve hours routed to my laptop immediately. The same goes for traffic cams in a twenty-block radius all directions. Code them eyes only. Stay in lockdown until you hear from me personally. And tell Colonel Hastings that I want two gunships in the air right now to monitor the grounds.”

He turned to Dietrich. “Gus, clear this room. Pick six men you trust and hand-lock everyone into their rooms. No electronics. Do it now.”

Dietrich pivoted and yelled at the crowd in a leather-throated roar. The throng of agents, soldiers, scientists, and support staff melted back and pushed through the doorways. Ollie and Skip backed out as well, flicking glances at the bodies, at me, and at Church. Bunny and Top stayed put.

“You okay, cowboy?” Rudy’s eyes were jumpy with shock.

“Ask me later.”

Again Grace caught my eye. I could feel something move between us, some subliminal telepathy, but I couldn’t translate it. Not then, not at that moment. With an effort I broke the eye contact and walked over to my guys. “Top, get the team together in one place and text me on my cell to let me know where.” I gave him my number.

Top murmured, “This don’t smell right, Cap’n.”

“No, it doesn’t. There’s no damage to that door. Someone let those things out, and that means someone just murdered four soldiers and all those doctors. I figure Church is going to start a witch hunt. That’s fine with me, but I’m going to start one of my own. You with me?”

Top’s lip curled back. “I didn’t sign on to get ass-raped, Cap’n.”

“Damn skippy,” agreed Bunny. Muscles bunched and flexed in his jaw. “What do you want us to do?”

“For now, circle up the wagons and sit tight. Keep your eyes open and your mouths shut. You catch wind of anything—I don’t care how small—I get to hear it before you take the next breath. Are we clear on this?”

“Sir,” they both said tersely. Their faces had to be a mirror of my own: horror, fury, and something else, some dangerous and predatory light that should not shine through the eyes of good people. I couldn’t define it any more than I could interpret what Grace had tried to convey, but I understood the sense of it, and I felt it burning in my own eyes.

I took a half-step closer and they leaned forward so that we were almost touching head to head. “Be best if you boys found some black coffee and had a couple of cups.”

“Christ, boss,” said Bunny, “I’m already so wired I’ll never get to sleep as it is…” His voice trailed off as he got what I meant.

“I’ll make sure everybody’s wide awake, Cap’n,” murmured Top. “You won’t find nobody sleeping on this watch.”

“Hooah,” I said.

Top punched Bunny lightly on the shoulder and they left, both of them throwing angry looks around the room as if what had happened had been a personal attack made against them. I watched them go, reading their body language. I’ve been wrong a few times in my judgment of people but not often, and I found it hard to believe that they would have come running unarmed into the bay if either of them had bypassed the security and unlocked Room 12. Even so, I was going to be keeping both eyes open every second of the day and night. As of that moment I didn’t trust anyone in the DMS—except Rudy, and he wouldn’t even know how to bypass a security system let alone one as sophisticated as this.

Rejoining Church and Grace, I said, “So far, Mr. Church, I’m not entirely sold on your supersecret organization.”

He didn’t reply.

Dietrich came over. “Room’s clear, sir. Building is in full lockdown. Gates are sealed and I deployed the entire security force in pairs. No one goes out of sight of his partner. We’re locking people into their rooms.” He paused for a moment, looking worriedly at the lab. “Sir, I checked on this guard team myself thirty minutes ago. I know those boys.” Dietrich paused, and then with sadness in his voice corrected that comment. “I knew them all pretty well.”

“Somebody opened that door,” I said, pointing. “Do you see any signs of forced entry?”

Church said, “Let’s not make decisions in the absence of information. The security video logs are being fed to my laptop. Let’s meet in the conference room and take a look at them. Until then no one speaks to anyone.”

The others headed toward the door, but I lingered with Church. “The DMS finally gets a prisoner to interrogate and then this happens. Funny timing, don’t you think?”

“Yes, hilarious.”

He left and I followed.

Chapter Fifty-Four

Amirah / The Bunker / Tuesday, June 30

ABDUL, THE FIGHTER’S lieutenant, was a grim-faced man with humorless eyes and pocked skin that made him look like a smallpox survivor. He had first bonded with El Mujahid during a series of raids financed by one of the Iranian ayatollahs and together they’d blown up three police stations in Iraq, assassinated two members of the new government and planted bombs that killed or crippled over a dozen American and British troops—all of it in the days following the “liberation” of Baghdad. In the years since then they had cut a bloody path through five countries and the price on Abdul’s head was nearly as large as that offered for El Mujahid.

Now that El Mujahid was out of the country it was up to Abdul to ensure that no one knew about the Fighter’s absence. He made a series of small raids, including two more attacks on remote villages using the new and ferocious Generation Seven strain of the Seif al Din pathogen, and in each case he left behind a CD-ROM or videocassette on which were prerecorded messages from El Mujahid. As the Fighter mentioned specific incidents in the attacks it was that Abdul stage-manage those raids so that they precisely matched all references in the messages.

On the morning following El Mujahid’s “rescue” by British troops, Abdul returned briefly to the Bunker to consult with Amirah after first making sure that Sebastian Gault had left. Now they sat in her study, he in a deep leather chair, she perched on the edge of a love seat. The second half of the love seat was piled high with medical test results and autopsy reports.

Abdul sipped from a bottle of spring water and nodded at the reports. “Is that information on the new strain?”

“Test results, yes,” she said, nodding. She looked very tired and her eyes were red-rimmed.

“Has he said anything more about it?” Abdul never mentioned Gault’s name. He hated the man and thought that even saying his name aloud was an affront to God, not to mention to El Mujahid. Gault and that man-loving scorpion of an assistant of his, Toys. When he thought of what Amirah did and was willing to do with Gault it was very difficult for Abdul to keep a sneer off his face as he confronted this woman. This whore. How could she sleep with that man? Even if it furthered the cause and even if El Mujahid had ordered it, it was so… vile a thing to do. He wanted to spit on the rug between them.

If Amirah was aware of his contempt she hid it very well. She picked up one folder and weighed it in her hand. “This is a detailed schematic of the release device Sebastian has provided for my husband. It is waiting for El Mujahid in a hotel safe.” She smiled, stood, and walked them over to him; Abdul was careful not to touch her hand as he accepted them.

When he finished reading he looked up in alarm. “I’m not sure I understand this. This device is booby-trapped. It’s set to release the plague according to a preset clock instead of an active trigger.”

“Yes.”

“Where did you get this? How did you get this? It must belong to…” He waved a hand, still unwilling to say Gault’s name.

“I downloaded it from his laptop,” she said. “Or, rather, I arranged to have it downloaded while the laptop was out of his possession.”

“He’s never without it,” Abdul said.

Amirah smiled. “He was distracted.” She let it hang there in the air between them and Abdul turned his face away, not wanting this whore to see him blush. When he finally turned back to face her he saw that she was smiling a knowing smile. Witch!

“And you’re sure that he does not know that this material was taken?”

“He doesn’t know any more than he knows I disabled the program that would allow him to blow up this bunker. My computer experts are as good as any in the world. After all, Sebastian paid for the very best.”

Abdul almost smiled at the irony of that. He offered her a grunt of a half laugh, though he was truly very impressed. But he was also troubled. “Does the Fighter know about this?”

Amirah chuckled. “You of all people should have more faith in El Mujahid than that. I sent him the schematic which will allow him to rewire the trigger so that it actually works as it was supposed to work.” She paused, then with a sneer added, “As Gault promised it would work.” His sneer softened to a sly smile. “And I have my own contribution to make to our cause.”

When she told him what it was Abdul felt some of his dislike for this woman crumble away. He was almost smiling when she ushered him to the door.

Chapter Fifty-Five

The DMS Warehouse, Baltimore / Tuesday, June 30; 11:01 P.M.

AFTER THE CLEANUP we met in the conference room. Church, Grace, Hu, Dietrich, Rudy, and me. No one was going to be getting any sleep tonight, so we’re all drinking strong coffee, but despite everything there was a fresh plate of cookies on the table—vanilla wafers, Oreos, and what looked like, God help me, Barnum’s Animal Crackers.

Grace said, “Before we become totally paranoid, are we sure this is a security breach and not an error in protocol? If the door wasn’t forced then one of science team might have inadvertently opened it.”

“Perhaps one of the walkers got loose and the lab staff panicked,” Rudy suggested.

“I don’t think so.” He had his laptop open on the table and turned it around so we could all watch. He hit a button and an image appeared of the loading bay and the trailer designated as Room 12. “This is a continuous feed. Watch.” The image suddenly flickered and then disintegrated into static snow.

“Camera malfunction?” Dietrich asked.

“Unknown. If so then all of the cameras in that part of the building went down at the same time.” He held up a hand. “Before you ask… they’ve since come back online.”

Grace leaned forward, looking intense. “Sounds like electronic jamming.”

“I don’t understand,” said Rudy.

“All surveillance devices are electronic and are therefore subject to signal overload or signal blocking,” Grace told him. “The technology isn’t new and these days there are portable jammers small enough to fit in your pocket.”

“So this is sabotage?” Rudy rubbed his eyes. “This has been too long a day.”

Church ended the video feed. “Considering the timing and location of the signal failure and the subsequent breach of Room Twelve we’ll proceed on the assumption that we have been infiltrated by person or persons unknown. We have to find this person and neutralize him.”

“Or her,” Grace suggested.

“Or them,” I said. “You’ve been doing some heavy-duty recruiting lately. We can’t assume you’ve only scooped up one bad apple.”

“Agreed. We have to evaluate the incident, learn what we can learn from it, both strategically and in terms of our security. We also have to consider the effect this incident will have on morale.”

“Seems pretty damn clear to me,” barked Gus Dietrich, “that these assholes wanted the plague released.”

“Maybe,” said Grace, “or they could have been on a scouting mission and opened the wrong door.”

“You like that theory?” I asked her.

“Not much, no, but it’s worth keeping on the table. Though I think it’s more likely that they wanted the prisoner silenced.”

I downed half my coffee. “Church, you said that there was a way to get that access code. How?”

“There are only three practical possibilities, two of which are highly improbable,” he said. “First, they got it directly from Grace, Gus, Hu, or from me.” He paused for comment, got none. “Second, one of us was careless and left a code scrambler lying about.”

Hu was shaking his head before Church finished. He fished his scrambler out and set it on the table. “No way. Not after the speech you gave me when you gave me this thing. It’s on the side of the tub when I take a shower and it’s in my pajama pocket when I go to bed. Twenty-four/seven I know where this is.”

Grace and Dietrich similarly produced theirs. Church didn’t bother. The point was made.

“What’s the third choice?” I asked.

“That someone else has a scrambler or some compatible device, though that’s a bit hard to accept. These scramblers aren’t on the market yet. I obtained them directly from the designer. He made five of them and I acquired all five.”

“Who has the other one?”

“Aunt Sallie.”

“Who?”

Grace smiled. “Aunt Sallie is the DMS’s chief of operations. She runs the Hangar—our Brooklyn facility.”

“And you call her ‘Aunt Sallie’? Kind of conjures an image of a blue-haired maiden aunt with too many cats. Should I assume that you believe this Aunt Sallie person is trustworthy and hasn’t left her scrambler lying in her knitting basket?”

Dietrich smiled. “If you’re lucky, Captain, no one’ll ever tell her you said that.”

Grace’s smile broadened and it youthened her, stripping away several layers of tension. Even Church looked amused, though with him it was harder to tell. “I think those of us who know her can safely vouch for Aunt Sallie’s integrity.”

“What about force? Could someone have taken the scrambler from her?”

“I would truly love to see someone try,” said Church. Across from him Dietrich was laughing quietly and nodding to himself, apparently visualizing the scenario.

The laughter and smiles, however, died away. I glanced at Rudy, who was quietly observing everyone. I imagine that he, like I, realized that the laughter was a pressure valve. The enormity of what had happened in Room 12 loomed over us.

Church’s phone rang and when he looked at the displayed number he held up a finger and took the call, speaking quietly for a couple of minutes. “Thanks for getting back to me so quickly,” he said. “Please keep me informed.” He clicked the phone off and laid it on the table and any trace of humor that had been on his face was completely gone now. “That was a contact of mine at the Atlanta office of the Bureau. Henry Cerescu, the engineer who designed the code scrambler, is dead. His body was found in his apartment this morning and he’d been dead for about thirty hours. Cleaning lady found him and called the police. No suspects, but the report says that Cerescu’s apartment, which doubles as his workshop, was trashed. A complete report will be faxed to us.”

“Damn,” I said. “Sorry about your friend, Church, but I bet I can tell you what’ll be in that report. Most likely it’ll look like an ordinary break-in by a junkie. TV and DVD player will be gone, there’ll be lots of random damage, a big mess. The smartest way to hide a small crime is to make it look like a bigger one. I’ll bet Cerescu probably had the design schematics of his scrambler somewhere, maybe hard copy or on his computer. The hard drive will be gone, too, and most of his papers.”

“Very likely,” Church said. He took another cookie and pushed the plate toward me. I poked through them and took an elephant and a monkey.

“So where does that leave us?” Grace asked.

“With the certain knowledge that we’ve been infiltrated by someone with an understanding of what the DMS is,” Church said. “And someone who knows me well enough to know how I obtain equipment.”

“That can’t be a long list,” Rudy suggested.

“It isn’t,” Church agreed, “and I’ll be taking a look at that list once this meeting is concluded.”

“It still leaves one or more persons inside the DMS,” I said. “Inside this building.”

“Excuse me,” Rudy said, “but am I to presume that if we are here in this room then we are not on the list of potential suspects?”

Church leaned back in his chair and studied Rudy for a few moments, one index finger tracing a slow circle on the tabletop. “Dr. Sanchez, there are very few people I trust implicitly, and in each case that trust is based on many years of experience, opportunity, and evaluation. As for most of the people gathered here, my trust is based on more recent knowledge. You and Captain Ledger were in the science lab with me and were then escorted to your quarters. Major Courtland was with me and Sergeant Dietrich had just completed his rounds with two other officers. One of them walked him to his quarters.”

“Okay, but doesn’t that indicate that we were not directly involved in opening the door? What makes you sure we’re not accomplices?”

Church bit an edge off a cookie, munched it. “I haven’t said that I have cleared you of all suspicion, Dr. Sanchez, but as you already said, you can presume that if you’re in this room then you are not high on the list of suspects.”

That seemed to satisfy Rudy, at least in part, because he gave a curt nod and lapsed back into observant silence.

“We’ve brought a lot of people on board in the last couple of days,” Dietrich said. “The movers, more than half the security team, the decorators, some new lab techs.” He paused and looked directly at me. “And all of Echo Team.”

“How good was the screening for all of these people?” I asked.

Grace said, “We have three FBI agents on loan to us working as screeners. You’ve met them, Joe. Agents Simchek, Andrews, and McNeill—the agents who picked you up in Ocean City.”

Buckethead and his cronies, I thought. “Okay, but who screens the screeners?”

“I do,” Grace admitted, and I could see a troubled look in her eyes. She knew that I had to be thinking about her oversight with the task force logs regarding me and the second panel truck. She’d been under tremendous stress since the massacre at St. Michael’s. Stress isn’t conducive to a calm and meticulous approach. I kept that to myself for now and I think I caught a flicker of a grateful nod from her.

“I’ve been supervising the actual screens, though,” added Dietrich. “If this is someone who slipped through because of sloppy work then it’s on me.” I liked that he made no attempt to weasel out of anything. Dietrich was Church’s pet bulldog and he seemed blunt and honest. I liked him, and he was low on my personal list of suspects.

“Another question,” I said. “Where are we recruiting from? You gave me files on the Echo Team guys, along with a big stack of other possible candidates. Some of those are generic folders—off the shelf from Staples—but some were FBI, a few were military, a couple were even marked “top secret.” Am I right in assuming that you’re recruiting from all of the military and federal agencies?”

“And law enforcement,” Dietrich added with a nod in my direction.

“How? I thought you guys were secret.”

“Secrecy is conditional, Captain,” Church said. “We all have to answer to someone, and the DMS answers directly to the President.” He paused, then added, “A few days ago I met with the Joint Chiefs and the heads of the FBI, CIA, ATF, NSA, and several other branches. I was asked by the President to give a brief description of the DMS and its mission, and to then make requests that each department or branch of service provide me with a list of candidates for inclusion in the DMS. The files were sent to us, and Agent Simchek and his team of screeners did evaluations and ran each candidate through MindReader. Anyone with even a twitch in his or her records was discounted. I will admit, however, that there was a bias toward individuals with skill sets that are appropriate to the current crisis, and that may be our hole. Simchek and his team may have somehow erred on the side of immediate need. That… or the traitor has a spotless record and rang no alarms.”

“If he was black ops or Delta Force,” Grace offered, “then his records might have been altered or sealed. Field agents’ names are often deleted from records of actions, especially when the agent is active military and the action technically illegal. Assassinations and infiltrations over enemy lines. It’s all plausible deniability, which means this bugger could hide even from MindReader.”

“What kind of person are we looking for?” Rudy asked. “A rogue government agent, a terrorist sympathizer…?”

“Unknown,” Grace said. “All we know is that this person, or persons, unlocked Room Twelve for reasons unknown.”

Church nodded. “This impacts you most of all, Captain. We don’t know how, or even if, this relates to the planned raid on the crab plant. Before the meeting Major Courtland advised me to push it back; Sergeant Dietrich wants to hit it with all the troops and go for a clean sweep. The mission is yours to call, however.”

“Jesus Christ,” Rudy said, “he just came out of a combat situation. Two combat situations—”

I touched his arm to stop him. “No, Rudy. You can get me on the couch later, but right now I can hear the clock ticking big time. If what happened in Room Twelve is not directly related to the crab plant then I’ll eat Sergeant Dietrich’s gym socks.”

“I’ll cook them for you,” said Dietrich.

“Church,” I said. “About hitting the crab plant at dawn?”

“Yes?”

“Fuck that. I want to hit it right now.”

Rudy gasped, but Church nodded. “I figured you would. Choppers are on deck and my computer team is getting your communications gear ready.”

I grinned at him.

“Joe,” said Grace, “are you sure about this?”

“Sure? No. I’d rather hit that place with a five-hundred-pound bomb and scratch them off the to-do list; but now more than ever we need to go soft and see about nabbing some prisoners. I think we should plan immediate interrogations, though.”

“Okay,” Grace said. “My team will be ready to rush the door at the first sign of trouble. But if you want everyone else to remain back at an unobtrusive distance then it still leaves us with a five-to-ten-minute lag for a full-on attack.”

“Joe… that’s suicide!” Rudy barked. “There’s no way that you could—”

“It’s my call,” I said firmly. “And I can’t think of a better plan that we could put into action right now. The longer we wait the more time there is for the spy to get a message out.”

“No messages are going out right now,” Church said. “We have jammers running everywhere in the building. However, we still have to consider the possibility that messages and intelligence may have been sent out before the lockdown.”

I sat back and looked from face to face. “Okay, but we’re going to need a diversion. Here’s what I have in mind…”