by Megan Crane
He knew he might as well have declared himself reborn. Resurrected, even. Or someone else.
“Okay,” his friend, leader, and brother-in-arms said quietly. “Then get to work.”
Jonas was already driving well over the speed limit, but at that he went even faster.
“Where’s the safe house in Manhattan?” Bethan asked, leaning forward to program the navigation system.
But Jonas waved her off. “I know where we’re going.”
And he drove even faster. Because time was running out.
Once they made it into the city, he stashed the SUV in a parking garage. Then he and Bethan walked out, blending into the sea of humanity that was Midtown Manhattan on a random, sunny workday.
New York, in Jonas’s opinion, had nothing to recommend it. Crowds made him itchy. The tall buildings blocked out the sky, when he liked it visible—and big. There were too many smells, all of them the complicated result of too many human beings packed into too few square miles. Refuse. Despair. Garbage, literal and figurative. Food, mixing with all of that, and body odor, everywhere. He didn’t like concrete. He didn’t like traffic, stoplights, and the neon carnival that was Times Square.
But somehow, today, all of those things seemed to move in him like a kind of poem.
He looked over at Bethan as they stopped, thirty people back in a tight scrum waiting for the crosswalk to get clear of the jolting traffic. She felt his gaze on her the way she always did, glancing over and smiling slightly. But he could see the emotion in her eyes.
All these people. So much life, careless and unheeding, right here on this corner.
Jonas reached over because he couldn’t help himself. Because she was the only person in his entire life who had ever told him they loved him, and he wasn’t ready to deal with that. But he couldn’t forget that she’d said it, either.
He took her hand, loving the way she gripped him back immediately. And the way her smile changed, her eyes getting soft and bright.
The light changed, and they let the crowd carry them along to cross the street that smelled like exhaust and the subway system rattling below. They were jostled, pushed, and crowded, but their fingers stayed tightly laced together. Her hand in his, skin touching skin. The most solid bond he thought he’d ever known.
So many people all around them. All that life.
And Jonas . . . wanted.
He wanted everything.
He wanted the noise. The smells. The wild, pointless laughter. The flashes of joy. The sharp elbows, the muttered curses.
All of it.
Most of all, he wanted Bethan. This. No words, but her gaze catching his in the middle of the crowd, deeper and better than all of those conversations he’d never bothered to have with anyone else.
When they finally made it to the utterly unremarkable apartment building squashed on a side street, Jonas wished the walk had taken five times as long. He wished that they really were off on some kind of last-day joyride.
But that wasn’t who they were.
He led her inside, making himself let go of her hand as they stood in the vestibule. It was overheated and much too small, and the loss of her fingers in his felt like a flesh wound. He keyed in a code, waited for the buzzing sound and the lock to release, then pushed his way inside the second door.
Together, he and Bethan jogged up five flights of stairs to the very top floor, where he keyed in another code to the only door on the landing.
“Wow,” Bethan said as they walked inside. “Isaac really knows how to live. In all these places he doesn’t actually live.”
“I don’t actually know if he owns this one.” Jonas shut and locked the door behind them, then input his fingerprint and security code into the system. “But he likes to keep safe spaces wherever he goes. Or we might go.”
Bethan walked farther inside. Turning a circle, she took in the big windows, the simple but comfortable-looking furnishings. And when she turned all the way back around and faced him again, he almost thought that she would say something. The way she had back in the lab. And he braced himself, because he couldn’t allow it. He couldn’t process it, not yet. Not now.
But instead, her eyes glinted. “Where are the weapons?”
“That’s my girl.”
And she grinned, but she shook her head. “None of that. It’s day three or nothing. You made the rules.”
Jonas nodded, but he discovered that he was smiling, too. And that it didn’t feel new, or unused, or unusual. He knew that was all her doing.
They made short work of the safe house’s offerings. They upgraded their clothing to better tactical gear, because the closets were fully stocked and ready. They found and activated new comm units. Then they both loaded up on weapons, as many as they could reasonably conceal.
By the time they hit the streets again and headed south, it was almost possible to forget that they were running on borrowed time. Jonas reminded himself that forty-eight hours to the onset of symptoms was a madman’s estimate. At best.
They arrived at a converted brownstone in Chelsea a little while later. Once a private home in some distant, historic version of this city, it was now visibly broken up into apartments. It sat on a block lined with more of the same, a line of once-grand brownstones with big staircases out in front of all of them, looking steep and unwelcoming to Jonas’s eye.
“This is the problem with New York City,” Bethan said mildly, gazing up at the building before them, flush against its neighbor. “With a little more time, maybe I could find a way in the back. Otherwise, there’s only the front door.”
Jonas eyed the door. “But no need to announce ourselves.”
He had every intention of picking the lock. But when the two of them made it up the front steps, a harried-looking woman in business attire came out, flinging the doors wide in front of her. Bethan smiled brightly, in a way that reminded Jonas of California, and held the door for her.
And that easily, they were inside the building.
“Do people in these apartments think they’re safe?” Jonas asked when the doors to the outside were shut tight behind them and they both stood there a moment, listening. Getting a feel for the place.
Bethan shrugged. “I think they expect the outer door to be a barrier, but I also think they have numerous locks on their individual apartment doors.”
He didn’t quite make a face, but it was close. “I prefer living in the woods.”
She grinned up at him. “You prefer being the most dangerous thing around.”
“If you can’t be the apex predator,” Jonas said, scanning the small hall they stood in. It smelled like someone’s meal. He headed for the stairs. “You’ll get eaten by the apex predator.”
“You should make that your Christmas card,” Bethan said sweetly, and followed him up.
The address they’d been given indicated an apartment on the second floor. Jonas moved swiftly and silently up the stairs, Bethan behind him. He glanced back and wasn’t surprised to see she had a gun in her hands, ready to protect their rear should anyone approach.
There were two apartment doors on the second-floor hall. Jonas stopped at the first and listened, hearing the faint sound of a television set from within. Then he moved on, soundlessly, to do the same at the second door. Where everything was ominously silent.
Bethan melted into place, covering him. Jonas flattened himself against the wall. Then he reached out laterally to test the doorknob, expecting to find it locked up tight.
But when he turned the knob gently, it gave. The door swung open.
He froze, waiting for a gunshot. A shout. Some indication that someone was on the other side, waiting, and using the open door as a trap. Because what else could it be?
Very slowly, he counted to five in his head.
“Good news,” Bethan said very quietly from her watchful
position. “We’re already infected.”
There was really nothing about that he should have found amusing, he knew. But Jonas still found himself biting back a laugh as he pushed the apartment door the rest of the way open.
He still waited at the threshold, thinking that the opening of the door could be the signal Carter was waiting for to launch his attack. But nothing happened.
Jonas eased himself inside, like the shadow he was. The door opened into a reasonably sized living area, with a kitchen on one end and a dining area tucked off on the other. Jonas checked it all in a quick sweep as Bethan moved around the island in the kitchen to weed out any lurking threats.
Everything was clear. Jonas pointed down the small hallway off the main living space.
With a nod, Bethan went first, moving with equal parts power and grace. First she checked out the bathroom to the left, but it was empty. She glanced back at Jonas before pointing to the left of the two doors that waited at the end of the hallway. He nodded, and she did the same thing he’d done at the front door of the apartment. Waiting, testing, and then quietly pushing the door open.
But the room inside was completely bare. Hardwood floor, two windows at the far end overlooking a courtyard filled with green, and nothing else save a lightbulb in an open light fixture in the ceiling.
There was nothing about this Jonas liked. He backed up, jerking his chin to indicate that Bethan should come back out into the small hallway and then repeat the same steps on the last remaining door.
He noticed everything. He always did, but he’d become so good at shutting off the parts he didn’t wish to acknowledge. Like the assured way she did her job, as if she were made of butter and steel.
She bent her head to the thick wooden door. She listened. Then carefully, soundlessly, tried the doorknob. It gave the same way all the others had.
When she pushed it open gently, carefully, Jonas expected another empty room.
But as the door widened, both he and Bethan froze.
Because the room wasn’t empty.
Tayo Sowande was tied to a high-backed chair in the center of the otherwise completely empty room. His mouth was taped shut with an abundance of duct tape. His wrists and ankles were similarly restrained, taped to the chair he sat on.
There were unpleasant-looking sores—lesions, Jonas corrected himself, if he correctly remembered the anthrax informational packet the containment crew had given them—on almost every part of the man’s skin.
Jonas did not need a medical degree to understand that he was looking at his own future. At exactly how he—and, more incomprehensibly, Bethan—would die. And soon.
He was so focused on that he almost missed the cherry on top of this sick, staged scene.
There was a piece of paper on the floor at Sowande’s feet. Written on it, in block capital letters, it read: TOO LATE.
Twenty-three
Bethan instinctively moved toward the poor scientist, who was so still she couldn’t tell whether he was alive or not—
But Jonas held her back with a hand on her elbow.
“Careful,” he warned her. “SuperThrax isn’t contagious, as far as we know, but all bets are off with an open wound.”
Bethan tugged her elbow away from him. “What do you think he’s going to do? Give me more?”
She moved across the room, going to her knees next to the chair. She pulled out one of the knives she’d taken from the safe house and sliced through the duct tape but didn’t pull it off Sowande’s wrists, afraid there were more sores beneath the adhesive. It was as she was trying to ease the tape off his mouth that the man blinked, then moaned.
“You’re alive,” Bethan said as evenly as possible. “That’s the good news. The bad news is that I expect you’re in a lot of pain.”
“You must not touch me,” Sowande said, sounding panicked. “You must not—”
“It’s okay.” Bethan tried to sound soothing. “We’ve already been exposed. We’re in the same boat.”
Sowande moaned again then, and this time it sounded deep. Broken. As if his pain were internal.
“It’s too late,” he said, tears gathering in the corners of his eyes. “It’s all over now.”
Bethan glanced back over her shoulder. Jonas was talking quietly into his comm unit, and she knew that he was summoning medical help. And notifying the others that they’d found their scientist, at the very least.
“I don’t know if it’s too late or not,” Bethan said matter-of-factly when she turned back to Sowande. “Help is on the way. I assure you they will do all that they can. But you would know better than anyone. What’s the likelihood of survival once you’ve reached this stage?”
“You don’t understand,” Sowande said. Then he swallowed in a painful manner that produced a deep, horrified kind of shudder move inside of her. Because she understood that the lesions she could see on his skin were inside him, too.
And would very soon be inside her.
But this was not the time to lose her ability to compartmentalize. She shoved the inevitability of her own coming doom away and concentrated on the man before her. Or tried to.
“Tell me what I don’t understand,” she encouraged him. “I’ll try my best.”
“No,” she heard Jonas say from behind her. “No sign of the sister or Carter. Or anything else.”
“He has Iyara,” Sowande said. “He will kill her, of course. But first, he wants to test the weapon.” His face crumpled as he fought whatever was working inside of him. Grief. Loss. Fear. Guilt. “I dedicated my life to this research to fight these weapons, and this is how I will go. The destroyer of worlds, despite everything.”
“Listen to me,” Bethan said then, in a voice of command that made the man before her blink. “If we survive, I would be more than happy to sit down with you and have a long conversation about your research and its noncombat applications. But right now we have to know what Dominic Carter has planned.”
“Destruction,” Sowande croaked out, his gaze dull. “Complete destruction.”
“How?” Jonas demanded from behind her. “There are a lot of ways to cause destruction in New York City. Which one did he pick?”
Sowande’s head canted to the side, his eyes fluttering closed. Bethan threw a panicked sort of look Jonas’s way, even as she felt for a pulse and found it. Faint, but there.
“We have a medical team arriving any minute,” Jonas said. “If necessary, we can use adrenaline.”
“What effect will that have on a system that’s already overloaded with SuperThrax?”
Jonas’s fierce gaze settled on her. “What choice do we have?”
Bethan didn’t like that. But then it didn’t matter, because Sowande came around again.
He focused on her with obvious difficulty. “It’s too late,” he said again.
“Tell me where they went,” Bethan urged him. Trying her best not to sound as panicked as she felt.
Sowande shook his head, despairing. “He’s waiting for rush hour in Grand Central. He wants to make a big splash, kill as many as possible.”
And though it cost her, Bethan stayed where she was while Jonas relayed the target to the team. Crouched down, murmuring encouragement to the man until the medical unit arrived. They came in wearing hazmat suits, clearly prepared for what they were about to find.
Jonas caught her gaze and jerked his head. And like that, they backed away from the medical team, let themselves out, and found themselves back out on the street.
“I feel like I’ve seen this movie a thousand times,” Bethan said as they walked away from the building that was now a crime scene. “Madman goes to some New York landmark, causes mayhem. Repeat as necessary.”
Jonas didn’t give her even that half smile, which made the panic in her build. He activated his new comm unit as they walked down the block. “The real question
is, Do we call in the threat to the NYPD? Or do we hold off, because once we do that, they’ll lock it down and our guy might walk away?”
“We’re forty-five minutes out,” Isaac replied, back to sounding fully in control and in command. “But I’m going to call some of my contacts and give them a heads-up. I’ll let you know if I think it’s going to turn into a lockdown.”
“Give us twenty minutes to get into position,” Jonas said, and Isaac agreed.
“I’m patching in to the cameras in and around Grand Central,” Oz cut in from Alaska. “I’ll start running facial recognition and see if we get any hits. But it’s only coming up on four o’clock now. If I was going to target a rush hour, I would wait.”
“That’s what we’re banking on,” Jonas said darkly.
He nodded at Bethan, and they started walking north and east toward Grand Central, a mile away. Bethan had the urge to break into a run, to get there as quickly as possible, but she restrained herself. The last thing anyone in New York needed to see was the two of them running with deadly intent, like the assassins they very well could be, out in the open on an otherwise pleasant spring day.
So they walked, covering the distance in a swift fifteen minutes. They’d just reached the entrance to Grand Central on 42nd Street when Isaac was in their ear again.
“Calling in now,” he said. “Are you in position?”
“Heading into Grand Central,” Bethan replied, dodging a food cart to follow Jonas’s long stride toward the entrance. Then pausing when he did.
“Copy that,” Isaac replied.
And there were too many clocks competing inside of her. There was her prematurely shortened life span, coming at her much too quickly, and now with visuals. There was the countdown to rush hour and whatever horror Dominic Carter intended to dump on all these unsuspecting civilians. And there was whatever response Isaac would get from his call, which could complicate the situation even further.
