Patient Zero by Jonathan Maberry Page B

working at computer speed, putting everything he’d seen and everything Amirah had said into context. It was an effort to keep his feelings about all of this off his face.
    “This is unstoppable,” Amirah said with a predatory hiss in her voice. “We can kill them all.”
    “Now, now,” he said, wrapping his arm around her, “let’s not lose focus here. We don’t want to kill them all, darling. What would be the point in that? We simply want to make them all very, very sick.”
    He stroked her breast through the hazmat material.
    She said nothing but he saw her turn away as if to look at some gauges and he was certain she was trying to hide her expression. “You told me to continue with the research, to improve the model. What do you expect me to do with everything I’ve developed? Just destroy it?”
    “Yes, I bloody well do,” he said, but then he stopped, lips pursed, considering; then something occurred to him. “Actually      hold on a bit.”
    She turned back to him, her face showing hurt and suspicion. “What?”
    “I have a wonderful idea,” he purred. “I think I figured out how to use your new monster. Oh yes, this is both juicy and delicious.”
    Still frowning, she said, “Tell me!”
    “Before I do you have to promise me that you’ll use it only as I suggest. We can’t really let this generation of the pathogen out. Not ever. You do understand that, don’t you?”
    She said nothing.
    “Do you understand?” He said it again, slowly, reinforcing each syllable.
    “Yes, yes, I understand. You really are such an old woman at times, Sebastian.”
    “Dear heart      we want to buy the world, not bury it.”
    Amirah gave him a slow three-count and then nodded. “Of course,” she said. “I just wanted you to see what we could accomplish. We’ve created a new kind of life, an entirely new state of existence. Unlife. ”
    He stepped back from her and stared, the devious smile still frozen onto his mouth.
    Unlife.
    God Almighty, he thought.
    “Now      tell me your idea,” she said, breaking through the shell of his shocked and fragile thoughts. “How can you use my new pathogen to help us in our cause?”
    And suddenly Gault was snapped out of his reverie and out of his shock and was completely present in his mind. She had said “cause,” not program. Not scheme, or plan. Cause. That is a very interesting choice of a word, my love, he thought.
    So he told her and he watched her face as she listened; and he paid special attention to the muscles around her eyes and the dilation of her pupils. What he saw told him a lot. Perhaps too much, and it both elated him and hurt him. By the time he was done her beautiful face was suffused with a terrible light.
    Amirah pulled him close and wrapped her arms around him. They held tightly together, ignoring the absurdity of the PVC suits.
    “I love you,” she said.
    “I love you, too,” he said, and meant it.
    And when this is done I may have to feed you to one of your pets, he thought. And he meant that, too.
     

 
     

Chapter Twenty-Two
     
    Balkh, Afghanistan / Five days ago
     

 
     

    1.
     
    THE TOWN OF Balkh in northern Afghanistan was once one of the great cities of the ancient world. Now, even with a population of over one hundred thousand the town is largely in ruins. The Iranian prophet Zoroaster was born there and for centuries it was the center of the Zoroastrian religion. Now, like much of Afghanistan it varies between poverty and desperation, with some rare spots of music, color, and the laughter of children too young to grasp the realities of the life that awaits them.
    South and a little east of the city is the small town of Bitar, a village caught like an eagle’s nest in the spiky crags of a mountain pass. Only one serpentine road led up into it and a worse one wound down. Camels manage it because they’re stubborn, but even they slip once in a while. There are eighty-six people living in Bitar, most of them