Patient Zero_ A Joe Ledger Novel Part 45

I nodded. "They don't think so."

"No," he agreed.

"They're marked," I said. "This is what you were talking about. The look on their faces, in their eyes. It'll never go away. Violence always leaves a mark. You taught me that."

He sighed. "We ask so much of the people who protect us. Firemen, cops, soldiers They sign up to do some good, to make a difference, but we sometimes ask too much."

"They're warriors," I said softly. "Some of them will be stronger because of today. For some people battle is a clarifying experience. It forces all of the senses to come awake, it makes you become totally aware, totally alive."

"And some of them will be broken because of today," he said quietly. "Not everyone has a warrior soul. You taught me that, Joe. Some people have only so much courage, only so much tolerance for violence, even when it's for the right cause. For some of these people this may be a breaking point. Today might kill some of those young folks. Not right away, maybe not for twenty years, but a few of them may never shake the memory of what they had to do today, what they were forced to do. They'll know all the logic about how it had to happen, how they had no choice; and for a while that will keep them steady but some of them will never survive this. Not ultimately."

I wanted to argue with him, but I knew that he was right. Being a hero doesn't mean that a person can become comfortable with being a killer, too.

"They're going to need you, Rudy."

"I can't help them all."

"They couldn't save all the people here," I said. Rudy closed his eyes for a moment, then he stood up and looked down at me.

"And what about you, cowboy? Have you reached your limit?"

When I didn't answer, he sighed and nodded. He patted my shoulder then turned and walked over to the group of agents. I watched him go, saw the process of change that happens when he goes from being my friend Rudy to Dr. Sanchez. He always seems bigger, taller. A rock for those who need something to cling to. But I knew the truth: he, too, was marked, and like the rest of us he would carry this with him forever.

So what about me? I wondered. I could already feel the shock ebbing within me. As the adrenaline washed its way out of my bloodstream my deep grief and horror was dipping lower and lower. In the reeds there in the back of my mind the Warrior was already beginning to sharpen his knife again. I knew it, I could feel it.

I looked at the agents, and all of them looked so young and so hurt. Only one looked back at me and held my gaze. He was in his late twenties, not all that much younger than me, but his eyes were older than his face. His expression reflected less shock than the others. He read my face and I read his, and we exchanged a brief nod that none of the others saw, or if they did then they didn't understand it. They weren't of the same species as we were. The young agent turned back and listened to Rudy, but I was sure that he was already working through the experience in his own head. The way I was. The way warriors do. He and I did not need to be marked by our experiences. We were born with that mark.

Epilogue.

IN ALL NINETY-ONE people died at the Liberty Bell Center. Fourteen members of Congress were among them. Terrorists were blamed, of course, but in the official version of the story there was no apocalyptic plague. It was a "nerve gas" that caused violent behavior. The news footage that had gone out live was a public relations nightmare, but although there were eyewitness accounts of Secret Service agents gunning down unarmed civilians, the President was able to trot out a couple dozen top-flight scientists who babbled on and on about the psychotic effects of the nerve gas. No one who had been in the fight at the center was held responsible for their actions. Blame was focused instead on El Mujahid and his terrorist network, and that worked well as a way of channeling the ma.s.sive national outrage. In death he became an even more hated figure than Osama bin Laden. The credit for bagging him was given to the Secret Service. Medals were eventually handed out, though the DMS was kept out of it. A national day of mourning was scheduled for the last day of July.

No attempt was made to create a new version of the Freedom Bell. When DMS agents investigated Andrea Lester's apartment they found correspondence and other evidence linking her to Ahmed Mahoud, a terrorist operative whose body was recovered at the Liberty Bell Center; he'd been one of the infected and Rudy had taken him down with the broken shaft of a pole for the American flag. If that had gotten into the press it would have become an iconic moment, but it was never mentioned.

Mahoud was later identified as the brother-in-law of El Mujahid, and the investigation clearly established that Lester and Mahoud were lovers. She had secretly converted to Islam more than three years ago, long before she was hired to cast the Freedom Bell, and Church speculated that it might have been her connection with the rededication project that inspired the whole terrorist plan. It seemed likely, but we'd probably never know for sure.

Director Brierly initiated a hunt to find Robert Howell Lee. They found him in his bedroom at home. He'd driven home after speaking to me on the phone at the Liberty Bell Center, taken his wife's bottle of sleeping pills from the medicine cabinet, written a suicide note that asked for forgiveness, and swallowed the whole bottle. Brierly's people got there with maybe ten minutes to spare. The EMTs pumped him out and Mr. Church flexed his muscles and made sure that the ambulance was redirected to a secure location. Church was on the first thing smoking, and by the time Lee had shaken off the effects of the sleeping pills he woke up to find Mr. Church sitting by the side of his bed. It would have been better if the pills had worked faster. He later admitted to having known about El Mujahid's more deadly strain of the plague but it was clear he had done nothing to warn the authorities. He said he'd ordered Skip Tyler to prevent El Mujahid from escaping, but even that didn't square with the facts. Lee was a traitor, a coward, and a G.o.dd.a.m.n fool.

Grace and I found Church sitting alone in a deserted anteroom at the FBI field office in Philadelphia, quietly munching vanilla wafers.

"Did you learn anything?" I asked, but he was a long time in responding.

"Mr. Church " Grace prompted softly.

Church drank some water. "He gave us a name." He leaned back in his chair and considered the half-eaten cookie he held between thumb and forefinger. "Sebastian Gault."

Grace blanched. "No "

She told me who Gault was, but even I'd heard of him. Who hadn't? "If this is true "

Church didn't look at her. "It's true. Lee was ultimately " He paused and thought about the right word. "Forthcoming."

"G.o.d. This will hurt a lot of people."

Church nodded. "I called Aunt Sallie. She's initiated a worldwide search for him. Very quiet, but very thorough."

Grace shook her head. "So this was all for money?"

"No," he said. "For Gault it clearly was; but not for El Mujahid. He was doing this for his G.o.d. He said as much to Captain Ledger and Lee verified it. He said that Gault had been funding the terrorists with the agenda of scaring the U.S. into backing out of the Middle East. It's what you thought, Captain, and it probably would have worked. But El Mujahid apparently had a separate agenda and he really was trying to release the plague, and it was worse even than that: he wasn't just willing to die for his cause, he was willing to become a monster. He had no use for Gault's money. What good would it be to him? To what he became?"

"What was he?" I asked. "He clearly wasn't a walker."

"Yes he was. We found Ahmed Mahoud's car. There were two spent vials of a different strain of the pathogen. Hu's labeled it a 'transformative mutation.' It kept the oxygen flowing to El Mujahid's brain so there was no loss of higher function. Hu surmises that El Mujahid planned to share that version with other fundamentalists so that even if the plague got out of hand and they were infected they would still retain awareness, and with awareness, faith." He sighed. "Hu tells me that the version of the pathogen fired from the Freedom Bell was yet another strain. Far more virulent." He looked at me. "If you hadn't ordered Brierly to seal the doors at the Liberty Center "

"G.o.d," Grace breathed. I couldn't think of anything to add to that.

Church pushed the plate of cookies over to me without any further comment. Grace and I both had one.

A pillar of smoke rose three hundred feet above the smoking pit that still burned deep in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan. British Army helicopters circled the vicinity and satellites were retasked to probe the region. Something had happened deep beneath the sands that no seismograph had predicted. There were known spots of deeply buried geothermal activity, but nothing like this had happened in over a hundred years. It would take years to uncover the cause.

About ten days later I found Church in his office at the Warehouse. I'd heard that he was moving back to the Hangar at Floyd Bennett Field.

"Are you closing the Warehouse?"

"No you and Grace can run it. We need a base here."

I liked the sound of that, but I kept the smile off my face. Grace and I had been too busy to share that drink since the Liberty Bell Center catastrophe, but we had a rendezvous planned for tonight. From the secret smiles she'd been giving me I thought we might go beyond the platonic sleepover. I pulled up a chair and sat down. "So, where are we?" I asked him.

Church set down the papers he had been sorting and spread his hands. "We saved the world, Captain Ledger. More or less. And we certainly saved the economy of the United States. We also took down a major terrorist network. We're heroes and we have the thanks of a grateful nation, though no one will ever say so. But along the way we embarra.s.sed a lot of people and made a few enemies. The Vice President's wife would like to see Major Courtland's head on a pike. On the other hand the First Lady wants you and First Sergeant Sims canonized."

"What will all that mean for us?"

"Us?"

"For the DMS," I said.

Church shrugged. "We're still open for business."

I looked him straight in the eyes. "Who are you, Church?"

"Just a government paper pusher."

"Bulls.h.i.+t."

"Who do you think I am?"

"Grace thinks you can keep all of the Was.h.i.+ngton power players at bay because you know where the bodies are buried."

He gave me the bleakest, saddest smile I'd ever seen.

"I should," he said softly. "I buried a lot of them."

That night, as Grace lay in my arms, we talked about things. We were both naked. The beer, untouched, sat on the floor amid a tangle of clothes. Some of the clothes were ripped. Mine and hers.

"So, you're staying with us?" she asked. I knew she meant the DMS, but as usual she'd implied a bunch of other meanings.

"Sure. Rudy signed on. Jerry, too." I paused and flexed my fingers, which were intertwined with hers. "I think I've found a home here."

Grace was silent for a long, long time.

"Me, too," she said.

I closed my eyes and pulled her closer to me.

The medical s.h.i.+p HMS Agatha pitched and yawed slowly in the sluggish rollers that wandered across the Arabian Sea. It was a blistering night in mid-July and the staff had brought some of the more ambulatory soldiers on deck to allow them to get some relief from the sluggish breeze that moved across the wave tops. Some of the men and women were so badly injured that even the breeze gave no trace of relief, and of these the burn victims suffered most. Hot winds, poor air-conditioning belowdecks, and salt spray were each separate tortures.

But the man who sat alone in a wheelchair by the stern rail never voiced a single word of complaint. His face and hands were swathed heavily in gauze and one eye was clouded to a milky whiteness. The doctors had said that it had been virtually boiled in his skull. How the man had made it through the desert was a total mystery. He had no fingerprints left, but a DNA test revealed that his name was Steven Garrett, a medic a.s.signed to a British unit that had been virtually wiped out during a series of suicide raids by insurgents. The burned man was incoherent with pain and once he'd been medivacked to the air station and then shuttled to the Agatha he had lapsed into a total silence. His experiences had broken him, the doctors agreed. Poor man.

The s.h.i.+p steered west toward the Gulf of Aden and then turned northwest into the Red Sea. The burned man watched the sun set over the rocky hills. He closed his eyes and bowed his head.

Next to him sat a slim young man with cat-green eyes and dark hair. He, too, was burned, but not badly. He wore a bandage on his face and one on his neck; and even though his hands were wrapped in gauze he held the other man's hand, like a father would. Or a brother.

The badly burned man looked at him for a while and then stared back at the setting sun.

"Amirah " he whispered.

His companion patted his hand again and smiled. "Shhh," Toys whispered as the s.h.i.+p plowed on out of troubled waters.

The End