“I’m calling on behalf of our patron. There’s a problem. Listen to me very closely and take all appropriate action. The Princess and the Boxer have gone off the reservation.”
“What? Why?”
Toys’s mouth made an ugly shape as he said, “They think they’re still in church.”
That wasn’t an agreed code word, but Toys was sure the American would grasp the meaning, and he did. “I never trusted those two from the beginning. Jesus H. Christ.”
“Yes, well, that’s a comfort to all of us, isn’t it?”
Toys disconnected and stared at Gault. “Listen to me, Sebastian if El Musclehead is going to launch the latest generation of the plague in America then we have to assume that Amirah has taken some precautions.”
Gault’s eyes came back into focus. “Precautions?”
“She’s a wacko, I agree, but I can’t believe that she’d want to destroy the entire world. A lot them are true believers, don’t forget.”
Gault sat up straight. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that she probably has a bloody cure for this thing. Or a treatment. Something that will keep it from wiping out her own people. El Mujahid might already have been inoculated, but that’s beside the point. What we have to do is get our ruddy asses to the Bunker, beat some information out of your girlfriend, and then make sure Gen2000 starts cranking out the cure just in case our American friend doesn’t stop the Fighter in time.”
“The Bunker yes.” Gault nodded and his jaw lost some its softness, his eyes grew several degrees colder. “Yes, Amirah will have thought it through.”
Toys cut him off. “Understand me, Sebastian,” he said in an icy voice, “I work for you and I love you like a brother, but you’ve endangered me by letting this thing get out of hand. I warned you about Amirah a hundred times and now she’s stabbed you in the back. If she has a cure then we are going to bloody well get it.” His green eyes glittered. “And then we are going to put a bullet right through that brilliant little brain of hers.”
Gault closed his eyes for a moment as if to block out that image, but when he opened them Toys saw that some kind of change had occurred. The eyes that looked out at him from Gault’s puffy and tear-streaked face were vicious, almost feral in their hateful intensity.
“Yes,” he snarled.
Chapter Eighty-One
Crisfield, Maryland / Thursday, July 2; 6:00 P.M.
THE FORENSICS TENT was set up in one corner of the parking lot. As Dietrich had promised it was an actual circus tent. The silk sides and scalloped dome were painted with brightly colored animals-elephants, zebras, giraffes, and monkeys-and around the base was a life-sized line of capering clowns. Inside, Jerry Spencer was the ringmaster.
Teams of experts had spent the whole day collecting evidence and transporting it out of the building in protective bags. The tent had several hermetically sealed plastic clean rooms that were marked with the logo of the Centers for Disease Control. Men and women wearing white hazmat suits worked in one of these and they had a production line going with one autopsy after another. A refrigeration truck was backed up to that end of the tent and the bodies of autopsied walkers were double-sealed in body bags and stacked like cordwood inside.
There were a dozen experts at the meeting along with Jerry, Grace, Dietrich, Rudy, and Hu. Somehow Church had managed to change into a clean suit. I was still in the soiled fatigue pants and T-shirt I’d worn under the Hammer suit. I must have smelled pretty ripe.
“Let’s start with the bodies,” Jerry said as soon as everyone was seated. He nodded to a tall black woman with golden skin and pale brown eyes.
Dr. Clarita McWilliams was a professor of forensic pathology at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. “We have a total body count of two hundred seventy-four. That breaks down as follows: eleven terrorist soldiers, five scientists and technicians, two unspecified support staff, five DMS personnel, and two hundred fifty-one of the um ‘walkers.’ ” She briefly looked around the room through her half-moon glasses, then cleared her throat and plowed ahead. “There were ninety-one adult male walkers; one hundred and twenty-two adult female walkers; twenty-one male children under the apparent age of eighteen and seventeen female children of the same approximate age. The ethnic breakdown of the walkers stands at one hundred twenty-four Caucasians, seventy-three black, twenty-eight Asian, and twenty-six Hispanic. If you want a more precise racial breakdown it’ll take some time.”
“So what does that tell us?” I asked.
“It’s close enough to a general population cross section,” McWilliams said. “Maybe a little heavy on the male-to-female mix. If there’s a pattern it isn’t yet apparent.”
“What do we know about where these people were from?” I asked.
Dietrich held up his hand. “I’ve been working on that using recovered wallets, cell phones, and so on. Most of these people seem to be concentrated in Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. None from anywhere else.”
“Just like the kids in Delaware,” I said. “Random but all East Coast.”
“Any IDs with the name Lester Bellmaker?” Grace asked. “Or any variation on Bellmaker? Maybe Belmacher or something like that?”
Dietrich scanned a sheet of paper on a clipboard. “Nah. Closest we have there is a Jennifer Bellamy. No Lesters.”
“It’s a dead end,” Church said quietly. “We have to consider that the name is an alias.”
“Aldin seemed to think it was important to give it to us,” I said. “He used his last breath.”
“Time will tell,” Church said. “Anything else, Dr. McWilliams?”
She shook her head. “Medically speaking we haven’t yet found anything that goes outside of what Dr. Hu has already shared regarding these walkers. One item of interest is that less than half of the victims I’ve seen displayed any visible bite marks. Most have injection marks and presumably that’s how the pathogen was introduced.”
Grace asked, “Of the ones with the bite marks have you determined if any of them were bitten postmortem?”
“No. There’s no evidence that these walkers preyed on each other. That suggests that they are attracted only to living flesh.” She looked ill as she said it.
“Like in the movies,” Hu said, but she ignored him.
I turned to Jerry. “What’s next?”
“Frank?” he asked, turning to Frank Sessa, a sturdy man of about sixty with a shaved head, wire-framed glasses, and the callused knuckles of a long-time karate practitioner. Frank and I went way back; both in martial arts circles and through chemical analysis work he did for law enforcement.
Sessa laced his fingers and leaned forward on his forearms. “Your terrorists have some odd choices when it comes to explosives. They used explosive organic peroxide. It’s a colorless liquid with a pretty strong smell. It’s generally stored as a twenty-five-percent solution in dimethyl phthalate to prevent detonation, so whoever rigged the booby traps knew something about temperature control as applied to explosives. This is difficult stuff to work with and way above the level of what I’d expect from a Unabomber wannabe.”
He gave us a technical rundown on how this stuff is made, handled, and used. It was pretty damned disturbing news. “Now, I understand that these walker-things are also dormant at low temperatures,” Sessa said, “and on the surface there might be a tendency to say, well, the place is already cold so that’s why they chose an explosive that is safest at low temps, but I’d hesitate going there. There are plenty of explosives that are not nearly as temperature-sensitive as this stuff. I don’t know who your bad guys are, but to me it kinda looks like someone was showing off. It’s too much bomb for the purpose to which it was put, and they used the wrong amounts in at least two places.”
“What do you mean?” Dietrich asked. I said nothing; I thought I already knew the answer. So did Jerry.
“Well, the amount they had at the door where they were storing the infected people that was too big or too small depending on how you look at it. If the intent was to blow open the door or kill whoever tried to open it, then it was too much; on the other hand if it was intended to destroy the contents of the room it was way too small. If they’d been using dynamite I’d have dismissed it as some fool who doesn’t understand how explosives work, but then we have the computer room. There was a good amount of the explosive, but it was all at one end of the room.
