cooked up themselves, something they’d twisted so subtly that he thought he had recruited them? What if they’d suckered him into financing their scheme instead of the other way around? Toys had once suggested this as a possibility but Gault had dismissed it with a laugh.
But now what if it was all true?
“Good Christ,” he said aloud, and now his hands were shaking so badly that gin sloshed out of his glass onto his shirtfront.
What if Amirah and El Mujahid were not helping him scam the U.S. government out of billions in research and production money? What if money was not even the point? Was that possible? he wondered, but the answer was so obvious. Toys had been right all along. The truth now burned in front of his mind’s eye like a flare. There was only one thing more powerful than money, especially in this part of the world.
What if this was jihad?
Gault staggered backward and his back crashed against the wet bar. His legs turned to rubber and he sat down hard on the floor, the rest of his drink splashing onto his thighs. He didn’t feel the wetness or the cold. All he could feel was a rising sense of terror as the realization that he had given the world’s deadliest weapon to a wickedly clever assassin and insured-insured-that nothing could stop the release of the Seif al Din pathogen. El Mujahid was not carrying the weaker strain of the disease with him, Gault was certain of that now. The Fighter was taking with him Amirah’s newest strain, Generation Seven. The unstoppable one. The one that infected too quickly for any kind of response. The Fighter would release it and the plague would sweep the Western Hemisphere. Did Amirah think that its spread could be held back by oceans? Or, in her religious madness did she no longer care?
He crawled across the floor to the table and grabbed his cell phone, hit speed dial and waited through four interminable rings before Toys answered with a musical, “Hello-o-o!”
“Get back here!” Gault said in a hoarse whisper.
“What’s wrong?” Toys said sharply, his voice low and urgent.
“It’s ” Gault began, then a sob broke in his chest. “My God, Toys I think I’ve killed us all.”
The phone fell from his hands as the black reality of apocalypse bloomed like a mushroom cloud.
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Crisfield, Maryland / Thursday, July 2; 3:13 P.M.
I SPENT HALF the day with Jerry. Once I’d explained my theories we set about comparing them with what he’d deduced from his forensic walk-throughs. We were both on the same page. I told Jerry to round up all the forensics experts that had arrived while I’d been sleeping and I went off to find Church. Outside I ran into Rudy. He accompanied me to the computer van, where Church and Grace were using MindReader to search for Lester Bellmaker.
“Jerry Spencer’s ready to give a preliminary forensics report,” I said. “I think we should set that up sooner than later.”
“You have something?” Grace asked, searching my face.
“Maybe, but I want you both to hear the forensics first and then we can play ‘what-if.’ ”
Church made a call to set up the meeting.
Grace told us that MindReader had come up with two Lester Bellmakers in North America and six more in the U.K., but so far none of them appeared to have even the slightest connection to terrorists, diseases, or Baltimore. The closest hit had been a Richard Lester Bellmaker who served a tour in the Air Force from 1984 to 1987 and was discharged honorably. That was it. The guy managed a Chuck E. Cheese outside of Akron, Ohio, and no matter how deep Grace searched into his background the guy didn’t ring a single damn bell.
“We’re getting nowhere,” she said.
“And slowly,” Church agreed.
“Could Aldin have been lying to us?” Grace asked, cutting a look at Rudy. “You watched the interrogation videos, and you read the telemetry feeds. What’s your assessment?”
Rudy shrugged. “From what I could see that man was desperate to tell the truth. That much was in his voice. He was trying to make a dying declaration, and he wanted to go out with as clear a conscience as possible.”
“So, he was telling the truth?” Grace asked.
Rudy pursed his lips. “It’s probably fair to say that he was telling the truth as he knew it, but we can’t discount the possibility that he may have been regurgitating disinformation fed to him by the guards.”
“Too right,” Grace agreed. “Which means we could be wasting time and resources on a wild-goose chase.”
“So what do we do now?” Rudy asked.
“Keep looking,” Church said.
Chapter Eighty
Sebastian Gault / The Hotel Ishtar, Baghdad / July 2
THE DOOR to Gault’s hotel room banged open and Toys came rushing in with a pistol in his hand. All affect was gone and in its place was a reptilian coldness as he swept the gun across the room. Seeing Gault on the floor, Toys kicked the door shut behind him and rushed to his employer’s side.
“Are you hurt?” he asked quickly, searching for signs of blood or damage.
“No,” Gault gasped. “No it’s ” He disintegrated into tears.
Toys studied him with narrowed eyes. He lowered the hammer on his gun and slid it into the shoulder holster he wore under his jacket. Then he caught Gault under the armpits and with surprising strength hauled him to his feet and walked him to a chair. Gault sat there, face in hands, sobbing.
Toys locked the door and verified that the electronic bug detectors were still operating, then he dragged an ottoman over and sat down in front of Gault.
“Sebastian,” Toys said softly. “Tell me what happened.”
Gault slowly raised a tear-streaked face to him. His eyes had a look of hopeless panic.
“Whatever it is we can deal with it,” Toys assured him.
Uncertainly and with stuttering words, Gault told him about the call to Amirah and of the dreadful realization that had bloomed in his mind. Toys’s face underwent a process of change from deep concern to disbelief and then to fury.
“That fucking bitch!”
“Amirah ” Gault’s voice disintegrated into tears again.
Without word or warning Toys slapped Gault across the face with vicious speed and force. Gault was flung half out of the chair. Gault stared at him, his tears stilled by the impossibility of what had just happened.
Toys leaned close and in a deadly quiet voice said, “Stop your blubbering, Sebastian. Stop it right fucking now.”
Gault was too stunned to speak.
“Try for once to think with your brain instead of your cock; if you had you’d have seen this coming. I bloody well saw it coming, and I’ve been warning you about that bitch and her husband for years. Christ, Sebastian, I ought to kick the shit out of you.”
Gault climbed back into the chair, eyes still unblinking.
Toys sat back and waited until the immediacy of his rage passed. “How sure are you about this? Is this a guess or do you know?”
“I I don’t know for sure,” Gault managed. “But it all just came to me. In a flash.”
“Came to you in a flash.” Toys sneered. “Mother Mary, save me.”
“I if they ”
“Shut up,” Toys said as he fished out his phone. He dialed a number. A voice answered on the third ring.
“Line?” Toys asked.
“Clear,” said the American.
