Patient Zero jl-1 Read online

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

  “Okay,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Maybe I suck up nicely.”

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

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

  “And you apparently think you’re hilarious.”

  “You’re saying I’m not?”

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

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

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

  “Why I am here, Mr. Church?”

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

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

  “No, we couldn’t.”

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

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

  “For…?”

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

  “It was a big class.”

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

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

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

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

  “So what?”

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

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

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

  I grinned with Oreo gunk on my teeth.

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

  “Do you know my shoe size?”

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

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

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

  “To make a point.”

  “About…?”

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

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

  “Could you have escaped?”

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

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

  “Maybe.”

  “Mr. Ledger…”

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

  “How?”

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

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

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

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

  “Let me guess… the ‘Company’?”

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

  “Homeland?”

  “Right league, wrong team.”

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

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

  “Can you tell me?”

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

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

  “DMS,” he said.

  I waited.

  “Department of Military Sciences.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “More or less.”

  “No aliens?”

  “No aliens.”

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

  “Mm-hm.”

  “And I’m not a scientist.”

  “I know.”

  “So why am I here?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Meaning?”

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

  “Pays better than the cops.”

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

  “Jujutsu.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “‘So far.’”

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

  “Yay for the home team.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Yes.”

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

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

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

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

  “So, what do I have to do?”

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

  “You kidding me?”

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

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

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

  Chapter Five

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

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

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

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

  The man didn’t move.

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

  Nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

  I saw terror and hopelessness there. I saw death.

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

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

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

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

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

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