Patient Zero (8 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Detective Ledger? This is Keisha Johnson.”

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

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

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

I said something clever like: “Um      what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DMS: Captain Costas, in your professional opinion do you believe Joe Ledger to be reliable?

COSTAS: Reliable? That’s a funny question. Reliable in what way?

DMS: If he were to become part of a special branch of the military?

COSTAS: You mean like Homeland? Something like that?

DMS: Something like that, yes.

COSTAS: Let me put it this way. I’ve been in the army since I was eighteen, and a Ranger since I was
twenty. I’ve been in combat in the Mog and in Desert Storm. I’ve also served in training schools for Rangers and I’ve learned to trust my judgment on which men are going to become very good and which are likely to be only passable.

DMS: And it’s your belief that      what? That Ledger was one of those who would become very good?

COSTAS: Hell, I knew that about him before he went to Ranger school. No, what I saw in Joe during his time in my company is that he was going to be great. Not good      but truly great. You don’t see his kind very often, not unless you’ve been in a lot of war zones. I have been in a lot of war zones and I can tell you right now that Joe Ledger is a hero waiting to happen.

DMS: A hero?

COSTAS: Trust me, if you can inspire him, if you can tap into the core of that man, into what he believes      then by God he’ll show you things you’ll never see in another soldier. I guarantee it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He answered on the fifth ring.

“Jerry. Hey, man, how’s the chest?”

“Joe,” he said. No inflection.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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