by Cassie Cole
Karen gave him a patronizing smile. “A standard antibiotic regimen is all you need.”
“Okay, score. So, uh, when do I need it? Because I’m already feeling a little clammy…”
“Stop whining. First symptoms aren’t for a few days.” Karen pulled up the calculator app on the computer and punched some numbers. “Alright, I’ve got a rough estimate of how much fluoride to add. Any objections? Speak now or forever hold your peace.”
“I trust you,” Cairo said.
“Yeah, me too,” Hunter said with a nervous chuckle. “So about those antibiotics…”
I bent to examine the microscope on the table. Karen went to the wall with the horizontal pipes running across them and squinted at the valve. “Good. It goes by pressure rather than volume, so I need to—”
She cut off. I turned back to her.
A woman stood behind Karen, with one arm around her neck and the other holding a gun to her temple. The door next to her, where we’d entered, was still open. Karen’s eyes were wide and scared.
I aimed my gun at the same time as Cairo and Hunter. We had the intruder surrounded in an arc. She rumbled with laughter.
“Here they are,” she taunted. “The Americans we’ve spent so much time and energy pursuing.”
“La perra roja,” I said, making the nickname a curse.
“Lower your guns or I kill her. Do it now.”
I aimed my rifle at the floor, but still held it at the ready. Hunter and Cairo did the same.
“I should have told you,” Karen whispered. “I was so focused on the fluoride…”
“Fluoride?” Aina asked. She kept her body perfectly flush behind Karen’s, using her for cover so none of us could take a clean shot if we did raise our weapons.
Karen’s laugh was bitter. “Your plan sounds grandiose, but it’s silly. The plague is a bacterium. Humans have been wiping out bacteria for half a century thanks to Jonas Salk. A little extra fluoride in the water will neutralize it completely.”
Aina hesitated. “You’re lying.”
“Nope. Fluoride can effect bacterial metabolism through a bunch of different mechanisms. It’s an enzyme inhibitor, it blocks peroxidases…”
“Who the hell are you?” Aina asked.
Karen’s eyes moved, though she couldn’t see the CLF leader. “I told you: I’m a microbiology graduate student. You should have listened to me.”
Aina glanced over at the valves on the pipes. “It doesn’t matter. You have done nothing yet. And I will not allow you to ruin my plan. Years of calculation and research has gone into this!”
“Guess it wasn’t enough,” Hunter said.
Aina pointed with her chin. “You three will throw down your weapons and surrender. The disease will spread as designed. And Catalonia will be free.”
“We’re not doing shit,” Hunter said. “And we have you outnumbered.”
The pistol barrel jammed into Karen’s temple. “Then she dies. And she is the only one down here who knows how much fluoride to add, yes?”
It was a stalemate. If Aina killed Karen, she had no chance of escaping and her plan would be stopped. But we couldn’t do anything without risking Karen’s life. And judging by the grin spreading on Aina’s face, she realized it too.
Hunter and Cairo glanced in my direction. Waiting for orders. I didn’t have any to give them.
Thousands of lives were at risk on the streets above, but I couldn’t bring myself to risk Karen’s life.
I love her.
The thought made me tremendously happy and despaired at the same time. I loved this woman. I wanted to be with her.
I didn’t know what to do.
“Don’t let her,” Karen said. To me.
“Shut up,” Aina warned.
Karen’s eyes were locked onto mine. “Logan, we have to stop them no matter what…”
“I said shut up!”
I realized what she was saying. We had to stop Aina, even if it meant Karen would die. Her life didn’t matter compared to saving the innocent lives in the city.
She was putting the greater good above herself.
My heart ached for her. It didn’t have to be this way. Did it?
I tightened my hands on the rifle and glanced at Cairo on the far left. He gave me an imperceptible nod.
Here we go, I thought.
49
Karen
I had to save everyone.
There were so many men, women, and children in the festival. Innocent people who were just trying to celebrate on a beautiful Spanish day.
I was just a stupid microbiology student.
“You said it yourself, Aina,” I whispered. “The math is simple for someone with the stomach to see it through.”
“I will kill you,” she hissed into my ear.
“Increase the fluoride valve to 25%,” I told the SEALs.
“Karen, stop,” Hunter begged. He was terrified. All three of them were.
But I had to do this.
“After 20 seconds…”
“I said shut up!” Aina pressed the gun harder into my temple. “Another word and you’re dead.”
I took a shuddering breath. There was only one more instruction to give.
“Lower it back to 3%”
A gun fired in the small room.
My ears rang.
But it wasn’t me who fell to the ground.
A tendril of smoke rose from Ariel, Cairo’s rifle. The smell of gunpowder filled the air. Aina collapsed behind me like a ragdoll. Her pistol hit the ground and slid away.
I suddenly felt lightheaded, and sick to my stomach. My knees gave out.
Hunter rushed forward to grab me before I could hit the ground. “Easy there, sweet cheeks. Be a real fucking shame if you passed out and hit your pretty head.”
“Thanks,” I muttered as he held me in his arms. His rifle pressed against my left arm. “You… You guys saved me.”
“I’m the one that took the one-in-a-hundred shot,” Cairo said. He wiped sweat from his forehead. “There wasn’t much of Aina sticking out behind you.”
I patted his rifle barrel. “Thanks for saving me, Ariel. The Little Mermaid is my new favorite Disney movie.”
“Thank God you’re a better shot than Karen,” Hunter teased.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Uh, do you not remember shooting at us when we came in?” Hunter replied. “We stormed in here thinking you needed our help, and you squeezed off a round in our general direction!”
“I… I forgot.”
Logan bent over Aina before I could get a good look at her. He glanced at me, then covered her upper half with one of the bags used to carry in the plague tanks. Then Logan pulled out his walkie talkie.
“They’re in the water treatment pumping stations. Check all the water pumping stations under the city!”
With his arm around me, Hunter escorted me over to the pipes along the wall. “Do the honors, Karen. End this.”
I twisted the valve to the fluoride intake to 25% pressure. I counted to 20 in my head, which was an approximate guess based on quick math, and then turned the valve back down until the dial was about 3%. There was no visible difference in how the water looked, no magic light that changed from red to green to signify everything was now safe.
“That should do it,” I said.
“I knew you were special.” Hunter tried to lean in to kiss me, but I planted my palm on his face and shoved it away.
“Get those lips away from me. You’ve got the plague.”
All the color drained out of his face. “But you said…”
“I’m teasing.”
“Dude, that’s not funny!” Hunter said. He looked like he was about to cry. “Are you sure I’m not…”
“You’ll be fine after a thorough antibiotic regimen. Don’t be a baby.”
“Baby!” Hunter protested. “Being afraid of the plague makes me a baby?”
Logan hugged me so tight I thought my
ribs would crack. “I thought we lost you,” he whispered into my hair.
“And I thought I was going to be infected with the plague,” I said. “They were going to hide me away while my symptoms got bad, then release me as a message to the American government.” I shivered at the thought of the plague spreading through my body, swelling my lymph nodes grotesquely. It had almost happened to me. I’m sure it would give me nightmares later.
“I don’t think I would be attracted to you if your ass turned black and fell off,” Cairo said. “No offense.”
I hugged him and said, “I’d use it as an excuse to get ass implants. Big fake ones like Nicki Minaj.”
Hunter gave my ass a little smack. “It’s not the same. You can’t beat the real thing.”
“So, help me understand something,” Cairo said. “How’d you get free?”
“I was tied to a chair. I smashed it against the wall to break it.” I held up my injured wrist. “Now that the biological weapon has been neutralized, I could use some medical attention.”
Logan took my hand gingerly, giving it little squeezes with his fingers. “It doesn’t look broken, but it could use some ice and a wrap.”
“Yes please.”
“So they just left you alone in here?” Cairo asked.
I snorted. “Actually, funny story. Remember the guy who roofied me in the club? Who you got in a fight with, thus getting us kicked out…”
*
The warm daylight was comforting after being underground. We climbed out of a manhole—which was no easy task with one hand—into the middle of the festival. Everyone was playing and having fun, though a few people looked at us with confusion. Especially the three SEALs holding assault rifles.
Nobody knew how close they were to disaster.
We were taken to the Madrid PD to fill them in on what happened. Logan introduced me as their microbiology counter-terrorism consultant. The police chief didn’t question it. I explained to him what the CLF had done, the steps I’d taken to neutralize the threat, and what the people of Madrid could expect. As soon as I was done explaining everything, he left to gather his own biological warfare experts. Plans were drawn up to test the water, and to gather a random sampling of people from the festival to test. If my fluoride solution didn’t work completely, they would know within a day and could take the necessary steps to make sure nobody was hurt.
“Thousands,” Logan said.
“Huh?”
“That’s how many lives you saved today,” he explained proudly. “Thousands of lives.”
“Shit, more like tens of thousands,” Hunter said. “Maybe even millions if it spread all over Europe.”
“A bacterial disease like the plague could never spread that rapidly in modern times,” I said, but their words still made me swell with pride.
They ended up catching eight more CLF henchmen at the other water pumping stations. Once word got out that Aina was dead, the guys in custody began spilling the beans on everything they knew: hideout locations, CLF sleeper cells in various cities on the Iberian peninsula, and even other terrorist plans that were in the works.
And just like that, a terrorist organization that had taken years to grow was dismantled in an afternoon.
The four of us were kept in a waiting room. A man with a medical kit gave me a bag of ice for my hand, then came back 30 minutes later to wrap it. By then it only hurt a little bit. Men and women from the ECDC—the European Center for Disease Control—came and talked to us. The four of us were tested for the yersinia pestis bacterium. None of us tested positive—a fact which caused Hunter to bear-hug the little ECDC lady and carry her around the room like she’d won the Superbowl—but we were still given a thorough antibiotic regimen as a precaution. We napped in our chairs while waiting, my head resting on Cairo and Hunter’s head resting on me. Logan made a bunch of phone calls, glancing over at us occasionally. He smiled more in those few hours than I’d seen him smile in the entire week combined.
I called Linda to let her know everything was okay. She was on her way from Mallorca back to Madrid for the next day of the festival, so I left out how terrorists had tried to give everyone at the festival the septicemic plague. The last thing a ditsy girl like her needed was to worry about that.
“You’ll be on the flight back to Wilmington?” she asked on the phone.
I glanced at my SEAL escorts. “I think so.”
Eventually we were cut free. Black SUVs waited for us outside to take us somewhere. I was too tired to think about it as I buckled my seat in between Cairo and Hunter in the back seat.
“I’ll be curious to hear what information they get from all the CLF they apprehended,” Cairo muttered. “I’m still a little freaked out about how they found Karen at the safe house, and all the times before that.”
I cleared my throat. “Yeah, about that…”
The three SEALs laughed and groaned and sighed as I told them about the GPS tracker Phillip had placed in my phone’s charging port. But they were mostly relieved at having an explanation rather than choosing to be mad at me.
“This is why you don’t trust random dudes at the club,” Logan scolded.
I put one hand on Hunter’s knee and the other on Cairo’s. “Nothing good ever comes from hooking up with guys at the club.” I grinned at each of them. “Can I have my SIM card back now?”
The SUVs took us to a small runway, where we boarded another private plane back to Barcelona. A US Navy helicopter was waiting there. It flew east over the city I’d called my home for the past five months, then over the water.
I didn’t want to leave. The last five months here had been incredible. Barcelona felt like my home. Going back to Wilmington meant returning to a life I no longer wanted. I wished there was a way to continue my studies here.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
Cairo pointed. A tiny speck of grey was barely visible on the horizon. As we neared, it grew larger and larger to the point that it was the only thing we could see through the helicopter’s window.
“The USS Harry S. Truman,” Logan said with fondness while looking at the aircraft carrier.
“It’s huge!” I said. “I’ve toured the Battleship North Carolina in Wilmington, but this is like… twice as large.”
“Modern carriers have about three times as much displacement as older battleships,” Logan said. “We’ve got a debriefing on board.”
“Just what I wanted at the end of a long day,” Hunter muttered. “Chatting with a bunch of pencil-pushing intel officers.”
“We’re not meeting with intel officers,” Logan said ominously. Hunter and Cairo must have known what he meant because they didn’t say anything more.
We landed on the aircraft carrier and were escorted into a room below that was small and cramped. The metal walls were dull but clean, and everything smelled like steel. But maybe that was just my imagination.
“Are we in trouble?” I asked.
“You’re not in any trouble,” Logan said. “Us, on the other hand…”
He paced the small room. Cairo closed his eyes and rested his head against the bulkhead. Hunter crouched forward, tapping his foot nervously.
The woman who eventually came into the room wore a crisp black uniform with gold buttons and stripes on the wrists. Her hair was tied in a bun underneath a white combination hat covered in gold leaf. Each of her shoulder insignia held four silver stars. I didn’t know what they were called or what rank they signified, but I knew it was high.
The three of them immediately stood and saluted. I wasn’t sure what to do so I stood and held my hands in front of my waist.
The older woman looked at each of us with hard, but weary, eyes. Nobody spoke for a long, uncomfortable amount of time.
“Lieutenant Commander Carpenter,” she finally said to Logan in a voice that dripped command. “I don’t know whether to award you the Distinguished Service Medal, or disband SEAL Team 13 once and for all.”
“Admiral Harbaugh,�
�� Logan began.
An Admiral. I looked at the woman with shock. I’d expected someone high-ranking, but an Admiral?
Hunter looked like he was going to vomit.
Admiral Harbaugh pulled one of the chairs away from the wall and sat. She crossed one leg over the other and smoothed out her crisp pants. “I would like it if someone told me what the hell is going on. All of it.”
Logan looked at his two SEAL teammates. “It all began last week at a Barcelona nightclub…”
It took almost a full hour for him to explain everything. Everything. The club, the sexual encounter with me, the CLF kidnapping me because they thought I was a CIA agent. It quickly became apparent why Hunter looked like he was going to vomit: because they had violated their orders by going to the club that night, and then tried to cover it up by keeping me close.
When he was done, the admiral turned her hard gaze on me. “What happened to your hand?”
“I smashed it against a wall to escape my restraints.”
“You’re an expert in microbiology?”
“Microbiology graduate student,” I said in a weak voice. “And yes, my thesis is on warm water cell growth rates in response to external contaminants.”
“So the CLF just happened to kidnap you? The one type of person with the knowledge to swiftly stop their attack?”
Hunter’s grunt was part laugh. Logan gave him a flat stare until his smile disappeared.
“I was at the right place at the right time,” I said. I didn’t know whether to call her sir or ma’am, so I quickly added, “Admiral.”
She looked like she couldn’t believe it. Her eyes bore into mine, searching for anything I was leaving out.
“Admiral Harbaugh, I’ll understand if you want to disband the 13th,” Logan said. “But you must know that the decision to bring Karen with us and cover up our mistake was made by me, and me alone. I deserve a dishonorable discharge. But these two do not.”
Hunter and Cairo sat very still in their chairs.
