Patient Zero (2 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This wasn’t one of those times.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They weren’t talking.

So, I sat back and waited.

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

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

“Can I have a drink of water?”

He ignored me and left, locking the door.

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

“Maybe I suck up nicely.”

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

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

“And you apparently think you’re hilarious.”

“You’re saying I’m not?”

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

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

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

“Why I am here, Mr. Church?”

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

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

“No, we couldn’t.”

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

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

“For        ”

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

“It was a big class.”

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

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

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

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

“So what?”

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

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

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

I grinned with Oreo gunk on my teeth.

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

“Do you know my shoe size?”

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

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

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

“To make a point.”

“About        ”

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

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

“Could you have escaped?”

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

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

“Maybe.”

“Mr. Ledger      ”

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

“How?”

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

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

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

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

“Let me guess      the ‘Company’?”

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

“Homeland?”

“Right league, wrong team.”

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

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

“Can you tell me?”

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

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

“DMS,” he said.

I waited.

“Department of Military Sciences.”

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

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

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

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

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

“More or less.”

“No aliens?”

“No aliens.”

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

“Mm-hm.”

“And I’m not a scientist.”

“I know.”

“So why am I here?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Meaning?”

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

“Pays better than the cops.”

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

“Jujutsu.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“ ‘So far.’ ”

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

“Yay for the home team.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

“So, what do I have to do?”‘

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