Patient Zero (25 page)

Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 3:15 A.M.

THE BUILDING WAS quiet as a tomb and as cold as a meat locker. I hated that because of what it implied. All I could hear was the faintest hum from the refrigeration compressors on the far side of the warehouse. Our gum-rubber shoes made no sound as Ollie and I crept along, hugging the wall, looking for security cameras, moving from shadow to shadow.

I knew from the schematics that there was a central corridor that ran the length of the building; that much was in the original floor plans, but the hallway in front of us didn’t look long enough to go the whole way. We had no plans that showed renovations made since the plant went into receivership. The corridor ran straight for maybe three hundred feet and then vanished in shadows that looked solid enough to be a wall. There were heavy steel doors set about every ten yards and as we moved up to the first one we checked every inch of the floor, walls and ceiling for cameras and saw none.

The first door we came to was set with a simple keycard lock. Nothing that would slow us up for very long if we were in a hurry.

“Bug,” I said, and Ollie fished in his pocket and removed two tiny devices. The first was the size of a postage stamp and painted a neutral gray. He handed it to me and I pulled off a clear plastic cover to expose the photosensitive chemicals, and then pressed it to the side of the metal door for three seconds. When I finished counting Mississippis I pulled the strip off and saw that it was now the same color as the door. I turned it over and removed the tape from the other side, exposing a strong adhesive, and then pressed it to the door at about knee level, below where the eye would not naturally fall when opening a door. I examined the results and Ollie and I exchanged a raised-eyebrows look. Unless you knew exactly where to look the thing was invisible, blending in completely with the paint on the door. The little chameleon bugs were supposed to have incredible pickup and could relay info up to a quarter mile.

“Nice,” Ollie said as he handed me the second device, a silver disk the size of a nickel. I removed the adhesive backing and placed the device on the underside of the keycard box. The bug would do nothing until someone used a keycard to open the door and then it would record the magnetic code and transmit it immediately to the DMS where it would be processed through MindReader and the code signal would be sent back to us. We each carried master keycards that could be remote-programmed by the DMS techs. Within ninety seconds of someone using a keycard here we’d all have cards with the same code. Our master keycards could store up to six separate card codes. Church really had nice toys, but I hoped it worked as well as promised.

I tapped my earpiece. “First one’s in place.”

We moved down the hallway and repeated the process at each door. Counting both sides of the hall, there were eleven doors in all; then the hallway ended at a T-juncture, with shorter corridors branching at right angles.

“Split up?” Ollie suggested.

I nodded. “Break squelch once if you find anything, twice if you need me to come running.”

“Roger that,” he said and melted away.

This part of the building was badly lit, with fluorescent lights hanging from their wires like debris caught in some gigantic spider web. The ceiling was cracked, water dripped from a damaged pipe somewhere in the walls. The floor was wet and the smell back here was awful. I edged forward carefully; debated switching to night vision, but the light was enough so that I could pick my way. My foot touched something and I looked down to see the bloated corpse of a dead rat lying there, its eyes and mouth open, tongue lolling. I stepped over it and moved forward until I reached the first door. It was closed and blocked by a row of dented trash cans filled with all kinds of junk: old coats, bent umbrellas, broken toys, newspapers, soiled diapers. Even with the cold there were flies buzzing everywhere and the stench intensified. I held my breath while I placed the chameleon bug and keycard scanner and was grateful when I could move away.

There was more trash in the hallway. Odd stuff. A deflated football lying on a brand-new left sneaker. An open briefcase whose papers had spilled out and become soaked with rust-colored water. A smashed cell phone. Two Frisbees and a push-up bra. Half a dozen iPods. Dozens of letters—most of them junk mail and bills—still sealed and stamped. The broken body of a headless Barbie doll. An overturned shopping cart filled with aluminum cans.

The sight of the junk scattered in the dark and rusty water gave me the creeps. Bad thoughts were forming in my head and the sane half of my brain was telling me to do an about-face and get the hell out of here. I moved along the hall to bug the last three doors before the hallway ended at another bend. With my pistol in both hands I hugged the near wall and then quick-looked around the corner, dodging my head in and back and then analyzing the flash image. What I saw sent an icy chill rippling down my spine.

Oh man,
I thought.
Don’t let me be right about this.

I rounded the corner, still checking for cameras and threats, pistol barrel following my line of vision so that it pointed everywhere I looked. In front of me was a big set of double doors. It wasn’t the door or even the stench that made me feel like there wasn’t enough air to breathe. The floor was heaped with lots more clothes, more personal items, more human detritus; some of it looked new, undamaged. It looked like stuff that had been taken away from ordinary people. A lot of ordinary people.

The door was sealed with a heavy padlock that was cinched tight through heavy metal rings that had been welded to the steel doorframe. And the door, the surrounding walls, and the floor were all smeared with some viscous substance that had dried to a chocolaty-brown color. I bent close and saw that hidden by the smeared goo were wires that trailed up the wall and disappeared into small holes that had been drilled through the concrete. I turned and followed the wires down the wall and along the hall for five feet to where they vanished behind a fire extinguisher that was mounted at chest height. Booby trap. Pretty well hidden, too. The question was whether the charge was inside the extinguisher or inside that locked room. Or both.

Screw this. I backed carefully away, then stopped and looked at where the water lapped against the bottom of the door. The rust color was richer and redder by the door as if something inside were feeding pigment to the mix.

Understanding hit me like a punch and I rose quickly and backed away from the door, feeling my heart hammering as an atavistic dread sprang up in my chest. I stared at the stained water and the smears on the walls as the full horror of it sank in. The dark muck smeared on the doors was not mud, and the water wasn’t stained with rust.

All of it, every square inch of it, was blood.

Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 3:23 A.M.

I TOOK A step forward and leaned as close to the door as I could without touching it. Beyond was silence. And yet      it was a strange silence, like someone holding their breath on the other end of a phone line. You’re sure they’re there but you can hear anything. I didn’t like this one damn bit and moved back to the bend in the hall. No sign of Ollie and no sounds from his direction. That silence didn’t feel good, either, but it wasn’t the same as what I’d sensed—or imagined—from beyond that grisly door.

I crouched down behind the trash cans and tapped my earpiece to open a secure channel to the DMS. “Deacon, do you read? This is Cowboy,” I said, using the code names we agreed upon before we saddled up. Rudy had suggested mine. Knowing the military sense of humor, it could have been a lot worse. I knew a guy back in the Rangers who got hung with the code name Cindy-Lou Who.

“Reading Cowboy; this is Deacon.” The headsets were so good it was like Church had snuck up behind me again and was whispering in my ear.

I quickly reported what I’d found, including the locked door and the blood.

“Leave it for now. All video went black as soon as you entered the building. We’re receiving zero wireless intel. Audio signal is fluctuating but still operational. Assume jamming devices. What’s your team status?”

“Scarface is taking a walk down the hall. Joker is on surveillance; rest of team is at door-knock.” I decided to give my team the nicknames I’d mentally hung on them when I met them. Joker, Scarface, Sergeant Rock, and Green Giant. “Note this: the ambient temperature whole building is just above freezing. Climate controlled. Confirm understood.”

“Understood confirmed.” There was a brief pause and I could guess we were both looking at that from the same angle. Church said, “It’s your call, Cowboy. Come home, go for a walk, or throw a party.”

“Roger that.” I paused and considered my options. “Will continue to take a walk. All options open, however. Confirm Amazing is on station.” Amazing, shorthand for “Amazing Grace.”

“That is affirmative.”

“Cowboy out.” I tapped the earpiece again to connect to the team channel. “Scarface. What’s your twenty?”

There was no answer, not even a squelch click.

“Scarface      this is Cowboy. Do you copy?”

Nothing. Shit. I looked down the corridor but it was as empty as before. It told me nothing.

“Green Giant and Sergeant Rock on my six, quick and quiet!”

“Roger that, Cowboy.”

I started moving as fast as caution would allow, retracing my steps down the hallway, happy to get away from that terrible door. At the T-junction I paused and looked to see Bunny’s hulking form moving quickly toward me with Top Sims two steps behind him.

“Scarface went down there and doesn’t answer,” I said, and quickly filled them in on the locked and barred room and the detonation wires in the walls.

Bunny frowned. “Trap?”

Top Sims turned to him. “If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck      ”

“This is fubar, boss?” Bunny asked, looking up and down the hall. “That little drama at the front door could have been as much a fake-out on their part as ours.”

“Probably was,” I said, “but until we know for sure we have to try and complete the mission as assigned. Gather intel and get out with a whole skin.”

“I dig the ‘whole skin’ part a lot,” said Bunny.

“Hooah,” Top agreed, then he gave me a hard look. “Ollie going missing with no shots fired is a little strange, don’t you think?”

“A bit.”

“We still don’t know who the mole is, Cap’n,” he pointed out.

“Roger that, First Sergeant, but I’m not going to hang a label on
any
of my men until I know for sure.”

Top kept his stare steady for maybe ten whole seconds before he grudgingly said, “Yes, sir.”

“Not to piss in the punch bowl here,” interrupted Bunny, “but isn’t this all a bit beside the point right now? Begging your pardons, I mean, ya’ll being senior to a lowly staff sergeant.”

“Shove that where the sun don’t shine, farmboy,” Top said, but he was grinning.

Bunny rubbed his eyes. “Man      this is getting to be a long-ass day.”

I nodded in the direction of the corridor where Ollie had gone missing. “Primary mission rules still apply. Watch and wait. No shooting except on my say-so, and even then watch your fire and check your targets.”

We went right at the T-bend and then left to follow the hall. We were three quarters of the way down the hall when one of the side doors abruptly opened and a man in a white lab coat stepped out, head bent as he frowned over notes on a clipboard, four feet from Top.

There was nowhere to hide, no time to run. The man looked up from his clipboard and his eyes snapped wide. His mouth opened and I could actually see his chest expand as he drew in a sharp breath in order to scream, but Top rose up lightning fast and kicked him hard in the solar plexus with the tip of his steel-reinforced left shoe. It was a savage kick and the man’s whole body folded around Top’s foot like a deflating balloon and then he dropped to the floor with a strangled squeak.

We swarmed him and had plastic cuffs on his wrists and ankles before he could manage to drag in a full breath of air. His dark skin had gone purple. Top went to the door through which the man had passed and looked in, then turned to me and gave a negative shake of the head. Bunny grabbed a handful of the man’s shirtfront and screwed the barrel of his pistol into the furrow between the man’s eyes. “Be quiet and stay alive,” he whispered.

The guy was still bug-eyed from the kick and his eyes bulged even more when he realized that there were three big and well-armed men clustered around him. We had the power of life and death over him and he knew it. Total and unexpected helplessness can be an event that purifies the soul. It sharpens one’s mental focus.

I leaned close and said in Farsi, “Do you speak English?”

He shook his head—as much as Bunny’s pistol barrel would allow—and then rattled off something in what I think was Myanmar, what they used to call “Burmese.” Not one of my languages. “Do you speak English?” I said in my own language.

“Yes      yes, English. I speak very good.”

“Lucky for you. I’m going to ask you a few questions and if you answer me truthfully and completely my friend here will not shoot you. You understand?”

“Yes, yes, I understand!”

“What’s your name?”

“Nujoma.”

“Indian? Burmese?”

“Yes, yes, I come from Rangoon. In Burma.”

“How many people are in this building?”

“I am only a—” His voice cracked and he tried it again. “I am only a technician.”

“That’s not what I asked. How many—?”

“I      I cannot. They will kill me      ”

I grabbed him by the throat. “What do you think
I’ll
do if you don’t answer me?”

“They have my wife. My children. My sister. I cannot.”

“Who has them? Where? Are they here in this building?”

“No. They took them from my home. They have them.”

“Who took them?” I demanded again. He shook his head.

Bunny tapped him on the forehead with the barrel. “Answer the man’s questions or the day’s going to end in a way you won’t like.” But Bunny’s threat was of no use. The man’s eyes filled with tears and he clamped his mouth shut, giving tiny shakes of his head. I looked into his eyes and felt like I could see all the way down into the man’s soul. He wasn’t a terrorist; this guy was just another victim.

I shifted back a few inches to try and decrease the sense of threat, and when I spoke I softened my voice. “If you talk to us I promise that we’ll see what we can do to help your family.” But he shook his head, resolute in his terror.

“Tick-tock,” Top muttered.

“Okay,” I said. “Juice me.” Top fished a hypodermic from his chest pocket, removed the plastic cap and passed it to me. The technician’s eyes flared wider and tears spilled down his face. As I positioned the needle over his throat he began murmuring something in his native language; I bent forward, hoping to catch a word or phrase but then realized from the rhythm of his words that he was mumbling prayers. I plunged the needle. The tranquilizer knocked him cold in three seconds and he slumped to the floor.

“Bunny, take him back to the door. Tell Skip to alert Church that we have his prisoner. If he’s been infected with the same control disease as the others then we’ll need to question him before he kicks. Drop him and get back here asap.”

“You got it, Boss      but man, I’d hate to be in this guy’s shoes. I wouldn’t want Church questioning me.” He hoisted Nujoma over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry and ran down the hall, his pace showing no indication that he was carrying at least a hundred and fifty extra pounds.

Now that we were alone I touched his arm. “Top      you seem to have a bug about Ollie. Why him?”

He kept looking down the hall. “Bunny was with us in Room Twelve. Says a lot. Ollie came in with everyone else. I don’t like it that he was slow to respond.”

“So was Skip.”

“Skip’s a kid. Whoever this mole is he’s got field experience. He’s slick enough to have pulled a fast one on Church and the whole DMS. Besides, Ollie’s done a lot of work for the Company.”

“The CIA? How do you know that?”

“He told us when we were trying to sort out who should be team leader. He said that he’d done extensive covert ops work. He’s a spook and I don’t trust spooks.”

“It could be anyone,” I said. “The DMS is ass deep in spooks and spies.”

“Yeah,” Top agreed slowly, “it sure could be anyone. For all you know it could be me. If I’d opened that door, then going back to Room Twelve with you and Bunny would have been perfect cover. Go in and pop a few caps. Who’d suspect me?”

“Yet you cleared Bunny because he was there. Double standard, Top?”

“Maybe I’m trying to confuse you, Cap’n.”

“You’re not. So, where’s that leave us?”

A smile blossomed on his dark face. It changed him, knocking years off, but even so it never reached his eyes. “I guess it leaves us both up shit creek, Cap’n. Personally, I don’t plan to trust nobody.”

“Trust is a hard thing to come by in this world.”

“It surely is.”

We let it drop and turned our attention to the room the Burmese lab tech had come out of. I snapped on the lights and we looked around at banks of computers. Big ones that whirred constantly. The temperature of the room was even lower than the rest of the building; a wall-mounted thermometer read thirty-five degrees. I examined the nearest computer, which was about the size of a Coca-Cola machine. The make and model were on brass plates screwed to the casing. I tapped the mike.

“Cowboy to Deacon, over.”

“Deacon.”

“Does the name IBM Blue Gene/L mean anything to you?”

“It does. Why?”

“I’m standing in a room full of them. Advise.”

“Cowboy, be advised you are holding winning lottery ticket.”

“Nice to know. Infil starting to get noisy. One guest catching Z’s. Green Giant taking him to back door; Joker is minding that location. Advise.”

There was a slight pause and I could imagine Church nibbling the edge of a vanilla wafer as he considered his answer. “Team status?”

“Scarface is MIA. Conducting search. My call is this: radio silence ten minutes plus one second then kick the doors. Cowboy out.”

The second I switched back to the team channel Bunny’s voice filled my ear. “Cowboy, Cowboy, this is Green Giant. Be advised Joker is MIA.”

I looked at Top who was frowning. “Repeat and verify, Green Giant.”

“Verified, Joker is MIA. No time for code, boss. Our long guns are gone and the back door is sealed. Some kind of security shutter rolled down over it. We’re in a box.”

“Drop your cargo and get back here on the double!” I snapped. Top and I rushed out into the hall, guns ready.

“That’s two down,” Top said.

We turned to see Bunny running up the hall like an offensive tackle after a slow quarterback. He skidded to a stop. “I left the prisoner at the door and called it in. No sign of Skip.”

I hit the button for the DMS channel. “Cowboy to Deacon, Cowboy to Deacon, request immediate hard infil. Kick the doors, repeat, kick the doors.”

But all I heard over my headset was the hiss of static. The signal was gone.

A sudden noise made us all jump and we formed a fast circle, guns pointing out. Somewhere deep inside the building there was a sound like the dying sigh of a giant as big turbine engines shut down, slowing their whine as they decelerated.

“What the hell was that?” Top growled.

“I think the refrigeration units just shut off,” Bunny whispered.

Then there was a loud blast as wall-mounted vents snapped from open and hot air shot into the corridor.

“Uh-oh,” Top said softly. The air coming out of the vents was intensely hot and within seconds the temperature in the hall had gone up ten degrees, then fifteen. It continued to climb.