Crime Zero (22 page)

sure it escapes the bureau budget cuts?"

She gave a small smile. "Yes."

"But you have access to the secure wing as well, don't you?"

"Well, like most of the senior doctors here, I have keys. I can easily check the rooms. Or I can call Dr. Peters. As I said, he's probably seen them most recently."

Decker raised a hand. "No, don't do that. If I'm right, I don't want to involve you or Dr. Peters in this. Just let me see inside the rooms by myself. No one need know I've even been here, and if the rooms are empty, no harm's been done. Please, Sarah, help me. If I'm being paranoid, I promise I really will book myself in for a checkup." He smiled at her but could see she was taking him very seriously.

After a brief pause she opened a drawer in her desk and reached for a bunch of keys. "Perhaps I should come with you," she said.

Luke was tempted for a moment, but then he thought of Jackson and Naylor. He couldn't endanger one of the few people who had genuinely helped him in his life. "Trust me, just give me the keys to the rooms, tell me when the secure wing will be quietest, and tell no one of my visit here. No one at all even if they ask you directly."

Dr. Sarah Quirke frowned again and then handed over three keys. "The large key gets you into the wing; the two smaller ones open each of the two rooms. Go now; the wing should be deserted."

Decker took the keys and thanked her.

"I don't know what this is all about," she said as he left her office, "but I hope to God you don't find anyone there."

He jangled the keys in his hand and smiled back at her. "I hope to God I do."

It came to Kathy Kerr in her drugged sleep. Madeline Nay-lor and Alice Prince's terrible objective guessed by Kathy's subconscious made no sense, but that hardly mattered. What mattered was that it flouted every reason she had embarked on Project Conscience for in the first place. This made her cry out aloud in her sleep, so loudly that she woke herself up.

As she came to full consciousness, she became immediately aware of a raging thirst, her tongue so swollen she could hardly swallow. Her arms ached from being strapped in the jacket, and she needed to urinate. So she felt relief as much as fear when she heard the key turn in the lock. Rolling over, she opened her eyes and saw the pair of black shoes enter the cell.

"Water," she croaked. "I need water." Still groggy with drugs, she closed her eyes and waited, too exhausted to struggle, hoping she wasn't going to be injected again. "I need to pee as well."

Bending to her level, the man with curly gray hair adjusted his round eyeglasses and smiled his kindly smile. In his right hand he held a bottle of liquid. It had a teat like a baby's milk bottle. "Drink this. It'll quench your thirst. It's rich in vitamins and minerals. I'll feed you some solids later. As for peeing, you're wearing diapers, so please just go ahead. You'll be changed when you're next sedated."

"I'm not a bloody baby," she croaked, stoking her anger in the face of exhaustion. "I demand to speak to someone. You can't keep me here."

"Come, come," he said in his condescending voice. "Don't overexcite yourself. Just drink." Kneeling down, he raised her head and laid it on his lap. Then he placed the drinking bottle in her mouth. The liquid was cool and tasted of orange Gatorade. She briefly tried not to drink, to exercise the only control she had, but she was so dehydrated she couldn't stop herself from sucking on the teat, gulping down as much as she could.

As she drank, she felt him bend over her, so near that his coat brushed her face. To control her claustrophobia, she closed her eyes and tried to ignore his suffocating closeness. Then she felt his hand move to her left breast and start to probe its contours through the fabric of the jacket.

The narrow tiled corridor leading to the secure wing was enough to bring the memories back. A glimpse of the small confined rooms on either side of him made Decker quicken his step. Just being in a place like this and contemplating the possibility of losing control of his mind set his pulse beating faster.

When he had been a patient here, he had been terrified of his obsession with hunting down the evil in others, scared it was an addiction, which somehow indicated he was evil himself. He hadn't even seen his mother in the nine months before she died because he had been so busy tracking down criminals.

Now the fears came flooding back. This time there was a firmer basis for them. He knew he possessed the seed of evil in him.

Banishing these thoughts to the back of his mind, Decker pushed through a set of fire doors to the secure wing ahead, trying to focus all his thoughts on one aim: finding Kathy Kerr and getting her out.

At first she couldn't believe he was touching her breast with any sexual intent. But when Kathy heard the catch in the man's breathing and felt him push his crotch against her cheek, she spit out the bottle teat. "What the hell are you doing?"

"Relax," he said soothingly, smiling down at her as if humoring a troublesome patient. Beads of sweat had formed on his forehead below his gray curly fringe. His eyes, magnified behind the round glasses, had a glazed look that sent a cold rush of fear through her abdomen. He put down the bottle and began to stroke her face, rubbing his fingers around her mouth, tracing the line of her lips. She could taste salt on his skin as he moved his fingers over her slick lower lip. She tried to bite him, but his fingers slowly traced the moistness of her lips, barely touching her gums. Totally helpless, she could feel her chest tighten in panic. Especially when his hand moved to his crotch and began to unzip his pants. This couldn't be happening, she thought. Only a few hours ago she had been on the verge of embarking on the final stage of her life's work. Now she was here in this hell. She struggled as the man began maneuvering her head. Out of the corner of her eye she could see him pull his penis out and begin to rub it.

"I'm warning you. I'll bite anything that comes near me," she shouted.

This seemed to excite him more as he tried to maneuver himself over her face. As his breathing increased, so did her panic and desperation. "Relax," he said. "In a few days you won't remember any of this. You won't remember anything at all."

She closed her eyes and gritted her teeth. Then suddenly his heavy breathing stopped, and from the door behind her she heard a sound that made her gasp with relief.

"Dr. Peters? What-the-fuck-are-you-doing?" Crisply controlled, Decker's words were still thick with anger. She tried to twist around to see him, but he was already moving into the room and pulling her tormentor to his feet. Looking up, she saw Decker hold the man with his left hand and punch him hard in the face with his right. It was an easy, powerful movement the way a professional golfer swings a club. The blow was followed by the satisfying sound of breaking eyeglass frames and a hoarse groan. As Peters crumpled, Decker pumped his knee up into the man's groin. Peters doubled over, holding both hands over his open zipper, his face white. Kathy felt such rage she wanted Decker to hit him again and again, but he didn't; he just let Peters collapse, squirming, to the floor next to her. As he lay there, Decker gestured toward Kathy and barked, "I've been sent by Assistant Director Jackson, on direct orders of Director Naylor, to take her to a new location." Decker's face was expressionless, but his green eyes burned with rage. "I'm supposed to deliver her unharmed. So I hope you haven't hurt her. Because if you have, I'll be coming back."

"No, I've done nothing," the man whimpered, moving his hands from his groin to his smashed nose.

"Then get out of here and leave me to my job."

"But I haven't given her all the injections yet. Director Naylor told me I was meant to hold her here for at least four more days."

"Well, the plans have changed. If you want to check, you can call Jackson or the director. But Jesus Christ, you'll piss me off if you do, and I'll tell them what you've been doing. Now get the hell out of my sight, you sick fuck. I don't want to see you again before I leave this shit hole." With that Decker hauled the man to his feet and threw him out of the cell. Decker waited for a moment, listening to Peters scurry off, before he bent down and silently unbuckled Kathy's jacket.

The hands that had just demolished her tormentor were now infinitely gentle as they rolled her body and began untying her arms from around her body. He focused on the straps and knots, careful not to hurt her as he undid them. All the time she stared at him, terrified he might not be real. As soon as the jacket felt loose, his strong fingers were massaging her arms, pulling her up. "You came," she said, still not believing it. "You found me."

"Of course I came," he said, his face breaking into a grin. "I want to, I need to know what the hell's going on."

"We've got to stop them, Luke," she said. "Something terrible is happening."

"I kinda gathered that," he said, supporting her as her legs gave way. "I know about Project Conscience and their trying to cover up the mistake over Axelman."

"It's worse than that," she said, trying to think straight, realizing what little sense her revelation made. "Axelman's death might have been more than a mistake. I think it was a test for something else, something far worse than Conscience."

"What do you mean?"

Before she answered him, Kathy again questioned the insight that had come in her drugged sleep. Surely they weren't prepared to go that far, she thought.

"Luke, I don't think they want to treat violent criminals at all," she said. "I think they want to kill them."

*

The Peace Plague

Chapter 20.

The New Military Hospital, Baghdad, Iraq. Monday, November 3, 1:07 A.M.

Dr. Uday Aziz knew time was running out. Over the last week the elite Republican Guard had suffered eighteen cases of suicide and sixteen lethal brain hemorrhages. And every indication pointed to the fact that this was just the beginning. All the deceased had been supremely fit, mentally stable soldiers under the age of twenty-five.

Three days ago the furious Iraqi president had demanded through his generals that Aziz and his team uncover what lay behind the problem. The rais would not countenance any delay of the planned offensive on Kuwait to retake Iraq's old province and reclaim the rich oil reserves. The loss of face was unthinkable. Moreover, after tomorrow's U.S. elections there would be a lame- duck administration in power, making it an ideal time to invade. Aziz knew he had to find the source of the problem and identify the solution as soon as possible or risk joining the ever-growing list of deaths.

But it wasn't the rais's threats that drove Aziz as he sat in his office on the top floor of the drab brown stone building that made up the main wing of the New Military Hospital. Tapping away at his laptop, trying to complete his report for presentation to the generals tomorrow afternoon, Aziz was desperate to solve the riddle for more personal reasons. He had never been emotionally involved in his work as a doctor, seeing it more as a comfortable lucrative job than a vocation. Now, for reasons he didn't understand, Aziz felt an almost intolerable responsibility for the deaths, as if he were in some way guilty of them. As each new case was recorded, Aziz knew the only way he could ease this crushing burden was to find a cure.

A desk lamp was the single light in an otherwise dark office. It was after one in the morning, and for the last four days he hadn't returned home to his wife and two children or slept for more than a couple of hours at a time. Over that period he had returned to the first recorded incident two weeks ago and studied the autopsies and relevant tests: a twenty-one-year-old called Salah Khatib who had been shot for refusing to shoot four deserters. Aziz had then charted each subsequent suicide or brain hemorrhage, recording every link between Khatib and the others.

Khatib's urine had yielded the first clue. It and the other victims' had contained an exceptionally high level of androgens, hence Aziz's initial belief that they were suffering from steroid abuse. The hair loss and acne plus pronounced testicular atrophy in many of the men had seemed to confirm this. Suicide was also a known risk of steroid abuse.

But the blood told another story. It confirmed the androgen levels, but it also contained massive amounts of the enzyme monoamine oxidase. MAO is a marker for the level of neurotransmitters in the brain, particularly the inhibiting transmitter serotonin.

Aziz then conducted a full DNA scan on Khatib's blood, using one of the two Genescopes in the military hospital. These expensive gene sequencers were two of only three in the whole of Iraq. The third was in a private medical bunker below the main presidential palace two miles north of Baghdad.

Comparing the DNA profile in Khatib's military records with the DNA profile in the blood taken from his corpse, Aziz found a subtle but significant difference. Seventeen of Khatib's genes had been modified by the addition of a series of control sequences, sequences that were not present in the original genome recorded in his military records and certainly not present in the standard human genome. At first Aziz had been at a loss to understand why this should be the case. Then he had checked if Khatib had received any gene-modifying drugs in the last few weeks. In the man's records among the battery of jabs and inoculations every soldier received, Aziz noted one DNA vaccine, the standard Bio-Shield injection given to any soldier about to go into combat to immunize him against biological weapons, particularly those used by Iraq, allowing the weapons to be used in battle without harming its own troops. Despite the numerous wrangles with the UNSCOM inspection teams, it was common knowledge that the rais had secretly developed a powerful biowarfare capability. It was this that allowed the Iraqi president to consider defying the U.S.-led UN Security Council and invade Kuwait again.