The Genesis Plague - Michael Byrnes [116]
‘Virus,’ the elderly Arab echoed grimly. ‘Yes … virus,’ he said holding out his hands and staring at them with vacant, yellowed eyes.
‘Shut up!’ Meat demanded, kicking the old man.
Jason stifled Meat with an abrupt hand gesture.
‘The others you killed … were they Arabs?’ Flaherty asked in a low voice.
‘They were.’
A pause.
‘So it’s true,’ Flaherty said in a grim tone. ‘It only kills Arabs.’
‘For our sake, I hope so.’
‘Stokes was pretty proud of the fact that this virus could specifically target Arabs,’ Flaherty reiterated. ‘Let’s not go making any assumptions. I hope you’ll be fine. Are you okay?’
Jason wasn’t so sure. ‘You said this thing can spread through the air?’
‘What?’ Meat said, startled by the bits and pieces he was overhearing. ‘You mean just breathing it—’
‘These men you’ve killed …’ Flaherty said, thinking it through. ‘You’ve got to get rid of the bodies. Burn them or something. Until we find out what’s really happening, we can’t risk letting this thing get out in the open.’
‘Agreed.’
‘There’s something else too. However Stokes was planning to spread the virus, it’s in that cave. He referred to it as a “delivery system”. I don’t know how or what that might mean, but he implied that it somehow uses nature, not warheads. Our friend Crawford has been in on this thing all along. And he’s determined to finish this, understand? So you’ve got to wrap things up there quickly and find a way to get back to that cave and stop Crawford.’
‘I’ll do that,’ Jason said, ruing the fact that he didn’t force the issue of calling for backup earlier. ‘Hey, is Stokes dead?’
‘No. But he will be soon. And not from the bump on his head. Seems there was a mutiny among the ranks. Frank Roselli, the USAMRIID guy, managed to infect Stokes with some military-grade anthrax. Talk about poetic justice. Anyway, when Stokes comes to, I’ll see if we can get anything else out of him.’
‘Great work, Tommy. I’ll take it from here.’
65
‘How long till Candyman gets here?’ Meat asked, uncapping another of the five-gallon gas cans they’d liberated from the shed where the stolen truck had been hidden.
‘Ten minutes,’ Jason replied with little emotion. His vacant eyes fixated on the elderly Arab whose chant had come to an abrupt halt, thanks to a single shot Meat had pumped through the top of his head. All things considered, the execution was truly a mercy kill. The old man had offered no resistance.
In every way, the mission added new meaning to the phrase ‘take no prisoners’. The death toll Jason had witnessed over the past nine hours was as deep as it was wide. Undoubtedly, the demise of Al-Zahrani and his militant underlings was to be celebrated - and in time, would be. After all, he reminded himself, these men were terrorists of the worst variety: extremists hell bent on indiscriminately destroying civilization; brainwashed by radical interpretations of the Qur’an and the Hadith; convinced that sacrificing innocent lives was sanctioned by Allah.
But for Jason, a disturbing truth was fast coming into focus: terrorism was a two-way street. If Stokes were to succeed in unleashing his wretched apocalypse on the Middle East, the combined acts of terror carried out by the minuscule minority of Muslim extremists would seem trivial in comparison. And the fact that evangelical fanaticism stoked the pastor’s fervour was all too similar to the enemy Jason had been fighting all these years. What could have pushed Stokes over the brink of sanity? he wondered. Jason knew firsthand that war could easily blur the lines. Even as he stood over the grand trophy of this conflict - the body of Fahim Al-Zahrani - he felt no true sense of victory.
‘Come on, Google,’ Meat said. ‘We don’t have much time. Soak him really good.’
‘Right,’ Jason said. He uncapped another gas can and began dousing Al-Zahrani and the mattress, trying to avoid breathing.
‘It’s a fucking shame, really,’ Meat said, motioning to Al-Zahrani.
‘How’s that?’ Jason said, pouring out the last of the gasoline.
‘We’re about