Read Online Code Zero by Jonathan Maberry - Free Book Online Page A

ago.
    Noor Jehan was no longer a little girl, and she was no longer in India. Now she was deputy director of the Sigler-Czajkowski Biological and Chemical Weapons Facility, a highly specialized and highly secret government base. She headed a team that stored and studied some of the most virulent diseases and destructive bioweapons on earth. A place so secret that it was only occasionally mentioned in eyes-only reports, and even those were appended to black-budget R and D filings. In those reports the facility was known only as “The Locker.”
    Noor was now Dr. Jehan, with a Ph.D. and an M.D. and a list of credits and titles that, even abbreviated, wouldn’t fit on a standard business card. And although she clearly remembered her intuitions and premonitions, she now kept that kind of belief on a small shelf in a mostly disused corner of her mind. The rest of her life was dedicated to hard research, to things that could be measured, weighed, metered, and replicated according to the plodding but beautiful process of empirical science.
    And yet …
    This morning—early, somewhere in that blackest part of the night when the body is chained by sleep, unable to move or even glance at the clock—Noor Jehan had received her third exceptional premonition. This one was stronger than the fantasy of drowning when Amrit had died. It was more real than the deadly bulk of a bus splintering its way through the walls of her schoolroom. No, this was so thoroughly real that when Noor finally woke in the golden light of a steamy Virginia morning, she was not sure whether she was now awake or still dreaming. Because the dream felt more real than reality.
    In the dream, Noor had been right here in her office on level six of the Locker. The alarms were all going off, the lights were flashing red and white, slapping her eyes with painful brightness. People were running and screaming. The wrong doors were open. Doors that could not be simultaneously open were nonetheless ajar. The air had become a witch’s brew of toxins and weaponized versions of poliomyelitis, Ebola, E. coli , superstrain typhus, half a dozen designer strains of viral hemorrhagic fever, aerosol Mycobacterium leprae , and other microscopic monsters. All free, all released from containment systems that had been designed with what many had thought were an absurd number of safeguards and redundancies. Foolproof and failproof.
    In that dream, Noor heard shrieks coming from shadowy corridors and through the open doors to side rooms. She was screaming, too. She dreamed of fumbling with the catches and seals and dials of her hazmat suit, but none of the seams would join. Then she heard the sounds of footsteps. Staggering steps, shuffling steps. The disjointed and artless footfalls of dying people; her friends and staff wandering in their diseased madness, wasting the last minutes of their lives in a shocked attempt to find a way out. But there was no way out. Soon the biological disaster protocols would reach a critical failsafe and then the main and rear doors would thunder down—each of them two feet thick and composed of steel alloys that could withstand anything but a direct hit from a cruise missile. The failsafe systems would ignite massive thermite charges that would flash-weld the doors in place. After that, cluster bombs built into the very walls would be triggered, detonating fuel-air bombs. Everything, from the strongest man to the tiniest microbe, would be incinerated.
    And it would all be abandoned. No one would ever dig through the mountain or try to cut through that weight of steel to try and breech this place. The Locker would officially cease to exist because, in point of fact, everything of which it was composed—human staff, lab animals, equipment, computers, furniture, and the stores of biological agents—would be carbon dust.
    The dream persisted. It kept Noor down in the darkness where she had to feel and hear and smell it all. It was like being forced to