inside and pulled out a bottle of green tea for him and a Coke for me.
Rudy tapped my bottle with his. “To life.”
“Amen to that. Look, Rude, Church just got finished interrogating the prisoner.” I told him about what Church had said to Aldin.
“Will he save the man’s family?”
“I think so. I heard him make the call and I don’t think he was bluffing.”
“That’s comforting.”
“That’s all you have to say? The guy’s a self-admitted monster, for Christ’s sake!”
“Joe, you’re tired and you’ve got symptoms of postincident stress, so I’m going to cut you a lot of slack. You’re all upset because Church threatened the man’s family, that he used psychological manipulation, that he-”
“He did more than that, Rude. He tore that guy to pieces.”
“Physically?”
“No, but-”
“So, all he did was scare the man into cooperating. No physical torture, no thumbscrews, no sexual or religious humiliation.” He shook his head. “I wish I had been there to see it. It sounds brilliant.”
I stared at him. “Christ! Don’t tell me you approve of this?”
“Approve? Maybe. Admire, certainly. But turn it around, cowboy, and tell me how you would have extracted that same information. Could you have gotten the man to speak without resorting to physical torture? No, what you’re upset about is that you don’t know whether he was bluffing about the threats to the man’s family. You soldiers and cops talk very tough. Over the last twenty-four hours I’ve heard a lot of ‘kill ’em all’ and ‘let God sort ’em out’ stuff; lots of ‘we’re heartbreakers and widow-makers’ trash talk. To a large degree it might even be true, but a fair amount of this stuff is team cheers to get the players ready. Down on the real level you’re each human and there’s no way you can truly separate yourselves from the realities of war. You might have had to hurt Aldin physically in order to get him to talk; you might even have had to do permanent physical damage to him. Doing that would be hurtful to you, but it’s a battlefield thing, ultimately not much different than a sword thrust or a kick to the cajones. What you’re reacting to here is that Church inflicted damage on a completely different level. He hurt the man psychically, emotionally. Tough as you are I’m not sure you can do that, and you are very sure that you can’t. And yet Church did not so much as slap this man across the face.”
“Okay, okay, I get the relativity of it, O wise Yoda,” I griped, “but that still doesn’t cover all of it.”
“I know,” Rudy said, nodding, “you’re afraid that Church might have been serious when he threatened that man’s children.”
I stared into the open mouth of my Coke bottle. “Yeah,” I said. “He called himself a monster.”
“Yes, but let’s both hope that he really isn’t that kind of monster.”
“And if he is?”
Rudy shook his head. “I’ve said it before, cowboy. It must be terrible to be him.”
Chapter Seventy-Two
Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 6:50 A.M.
RUDY WENT BACK into one of the trailers to conduct some postevent sessions with the remnants of Alpha Team. I spotted Grace standing at the aid station and headed over. Her eyes were red-rimmed but for now her tears were done. Maybe she’d cried herself dry, the magazine empty. I hoped Rudy would take some time for her soon.
As I approached she looked up, and in the space of a few seconds several emotions crossed her face. Grief, of course; but also pleasure and a little surprise, maybe as she realized that she was smiling at seeing me. Just as I was smiling to see her, and the sight of her was sending a warm and tingly wave through my stomach. The realization gave me a little jab of surprise, too. I felt it down deep. Understand, I’ve always held office romances in some degree of contempt, regarding the lovers as perpetrators of bad judgment, but as I became aware of feelings for Grace-however new and unformed they were-I couldn’t work up the slightest flicker of self-contempt. The angel on my right shoulder was getting his ass handed to him by the devil on my left.
“How are you,” I asked. “Or is that the single stupidest question ever asked since Nero asked his friends if they’d like to hear a little music?”
“I’ll get by,” she answered, handing me a cardboard cup of coffee. “I’m not going to let myself think too much about it about my team.” She sniffed and tried to smile. “I plan to have a complete breakdown when this is all over.”
“If you want company for that, let me know.”
She gave me a penetrating look and nodded. “I may take you up on that.” She changed tack. “Your friend Detective Spencer’s been asking for you. Or, to be precise, he’s been asking where the effing hell you are and what do you think you’re playing at having him dragged out by a goon squad while he’s on medical leave. Words to that effect. He’s not the mildest of men.”
“Jerry’s okay. Good cop.”
“You must know that we interviewed him.” She paused. “That’s why Mr. Church and I were at the hospital. At St. Michael’s. We’d had our eye on Spencer since he first joined the task force, and after he was shot we followed his ambulance to the hospital and ‘borrowed’ him once he was free of the ER doctors.” She shuddered. “I don’t like to think what would have happened if Mr. Church hadn’t been on site when the infection began spreading through the hospital.”
“You think it could have been worse?”
“I know it would have been.” She gave me a strange smile. “It’s funny, but in all the time I’ve known him, in all that the DMS has done since I’ve been seconded here from Barrier, it’s the only time I’ve ever seen Church take direct action.”
“I get the feeling that he’d be pretty effective. He has the look. What was he, Special Forces?”
“I truly don’t know what his background is, and I’ve covertly tried to find out. I think he’s used his MindReader system to erase his past. No fingerprints, no DNA on file, no voice-print patterns, nothing. He’s a ghost and these days no one’s a ghost.” She shook her head. “When the walkers came flooding down the halls heading toward the lobby Church didn’t get angry, didn’t even show the shock he had to be feeling. He simply took action. I was outside by then, establishing a perimeter, so I only had glimpses of him through the big glass doors in the lobby. He didn’t seem to do much, but as the walkers reached him they fell, one after the other. I’ve only ever seen one person move with that kind of ruthless efficiency.”
“Oh? Who’s that? Maybe we should recruit him.”
“We did,” she said, locking my eyes with hers.
“Ah,” I said, feeling enormously uncomfortable. “I guess I need to add ‘ruthless efficiency’ to my resume.”
“You know what I mean. You don’t hesitate. It doesn’t seem to affect you.”
The image popped into my head of the walkers in the hallway climbing over each other to get to me and how my hands almost slipped as I slapped a magazine into my gun. And then a second and more terrible picture began flashing on the big movie screen in my head: my hands reaching out to Grace in the lab and the moment of hesitation I felt as I worked up the nerve to break her neck to spare her from becoming a zombie.
“Believe me, Grace, it does. Really and truly. I nearly lost it a couple of times over the last day. No joke.”
Grace shook her head. “ ‘Nearly’ doesn’t count. But even so Church is different, colder. He’s less ” She tried to put a word to it and couldn’t.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I saw a little bit of that today.” I told her about the interrogation, but like Rudy Grace seemed unmoved.
“What did you learn?” she asked.
“Not a lot, though Church is still working on him. The code name for the walker plague is Seif al Din. Translates as ‘the Sword of the Faithful’; but it has a second connection, and that may be the biggest tidbit we got out of Aldin. He confirmed that El Mujahid sometimes takes the name of Seif al Din. Kind of like Carlos being the
