He made a beeline for the girl, scanning the room as he moved. Mercs Three and Four sat sprawled arm-in-arm on a couch against the left wall. Three made a feeble attempt to get up, but couldn’t seem to muster enough strength to do more than move his feet into position. He failed to even lean forward, then gave up, his head flopping back against the back of the couch. He moaned while he breathed. Carl heard Merc Four’s ragged breathing, but she was unconscious.
Of all the dozen mercs guarding the Reyes mansion, only two surviving mercs lay on the floor. One was unconscious and had blood-soaked wraps around his skull, his upper right thigh, and his right arm near the armpit. Parts of his black fatigues had been cut away when the dressings were applied, but the dressings were so thoroughly caked with dried blood, Carl got the impression the man hadn’t been attended to in several hours.
The other merc also lay face up, but his eyes were wide open and he wasn’t breathing. His limbs were splayed out and his body was twisted like he’d had some kind of severe seizure. One hand was frozen with its fingers clawing at the concrete floor, while the other clawed at the air near his head. The other three mercs that Carl had left with Agent Palmer to support the next op were sprawled on the floor of the office. Two were dead, eyes wide open, and the third was curled into the fetal position. He moaned and shuddered with each raspy breath.
Only David Blick seemed in control of his faculties. He sat alone at the desk against the wall opposite the door. He looked like he was just waking from a deep sleep and rose from his chair a full two seconds after Carl pulled open the door. Carl had already crossed the room and squatted beside Julia.
“Stay away from her,” the man shouted, pointing at Julia. “She’s infected! We’re all infected.”
Carl ignored him. He felt an overwhelming need to hug the girl as she gazed up at him with her innocent brown eyes. He pulled her up by the shoulders and her head lolled back as he settled her into his lap. He picked up a half-empty bottle of water that had been knocked over sideways. Julia moaned as he snuggled her against his chest and she watched him as he tilted her head back and brought the bottle to her mouth. He fed her tiny sips, but she was barely strong enough to swallow. Most of the water dripped down her chin.
Though Julia was almost a teen, she reminded Carl of a heart-warming memory from thirty years ago when he’d fed his newborn baby, Mark, a milk bottle. Like a baby, Julia seemed so helpless, and her arms sat limp in her lap. But she gazed into his eyes with such love as he coaxed tiny bits of water into her mouth. He smiled and kissed her forehead.
Blick said, “You’ve just signed your own death warrant, Mr. Johnson. You now have twenty-eight hours to live.”
Carl glanced over at the pilot. “Where’s Agent Palmer?” The man issued a head nod toward the restroom and Carl said, “She’s sick too?”
Blick nodded. “Everyone is sick. You are too, now.”
“Sick with what?”
“A virus.”
“I’ve only been gone a day,” Carl muttered, “What the hell kind of virus takes everyone down that fast?”
Carl turned his attention back to Julia in his lap. He pulled a small packet of liquid power gel from one of the mercs’ discarded combat vests and tore off the tip. Then he slowly squeezed the five-hundred-calorie meal little by little into Julia’s mouth and let her drink a few more sips of water.
Like a wilted flower receiving a little bit of rainwater, Julia regained some strength as he fed her. Slowly, she became able to take deeper breaths. She raised one of her hands and rested it on Carl’s thigh. He was deeply concerned about her weak condition. He was no doctor, but he couldn’t fathom how she and the others had deteriorated so severely. They were all fine yesterday.
He laid Julia back on her mother’s lap and tried to get Luisa to take some gel and water, but that task was hopeless. She floated in and out of consciousness, but when she was awake she barely had the strength to keep her eyes open. She needed to be in a hospital. They all needed to be given water and food intravenously, but as soon as they were admitted to any hospital, the Unit would discover their location. Any computer record containing any of their names, or maybe American foreigners in general, would raise a red flag. Best case, the Unit would send in a small hit squad posing as medical staff to assassinate them. Worst case, they’d bomb the entire building and kill everyone in the hospital. Maybe they’d get the Navy to launch another cruise missile. Maybe they’d tell the military decision-makers they thought the target was a terrorist compound.
Carl stood and shook his head. He’d gotten careless and now he was infected. It was a stupid mistake; one that Aaron McGrath would never have made. Love was never an excuse to sacrifice the mission, and Carl had done exactly that.
“Where did you all catch this bug?”
David Blick had sat back down at the small metal desk and laid his head on his folded arms. He didn’t answer.
Carl realized the only way he could save this team was to find some kind of private hospital that wouldn’t report their presence or their condition. Maybe the superintendent could help. He hadn’t betrayed them to the authorities, so maybe he knew someone who would quietly set up a special care wing in their home. Any amount of supplies could be purchased with a sufficient amount of money.
The Gulfstream pilot, Colonel Vesario Reichert, entered the office and froze in the doorway just as Carl had.
“Christ Almighty!”
Carl had just stood up when he heard the bathroom door squeak open. Agent Palmer stumbled out. She was still dressed in her black combat gear, but her skin was flushed a deep red and a sheen of perspiration covered her face and neck. She wobbled toward a chair against the wall, but it was clear to Carl she was going to miss the chair.
Carl and Reichert reacted at the same moment, crossing the room to her, but Carl palmed the air in front of the colonel. “Stay back. She’s infected. So am I.”
Carl grabbed Palmer and bore most of her weight as he helped her into a chair against the wall near the bathroom door. As he kept her from falling over, she whispered in his ear.
“It’s you, Carl. You’re the carrier.”
Chapter 42
1030 hours MST Saturday
Northern Mexico
Carl looked at the agent, but she was nearly unconscious. Next to her chair was a simple, metal foldaway table with a laptop on it. The computer was closed and several sheets of paper with neatly printed writing on them sat on top of it. Palmer’s head lolled chin-to-chest and she muttered incoherently, so Carl picked up the handwritten pages and started reading. His breath caught in his throat several times as he read what Agent Palmer had to know was her last mission report.
Melissa Mallory is Patient Zero
Virus designed to become active upon ingestion of a sedative
Virus spread by touch
Victims become contagious within minutes of exposure
Attacks central nervous system, leads to complete neurological failure
Phase 1: 28-hr gestation, 25% fatalities, 75% coma
Phase 2: 72-hr period, 100% fatalities
Antidote effective any time before death
Antidote deadly if given to uninfected
He read deeper into Palmer’s report again. The part that chilled him was that months of clinical trials on hundreds of human test subjects—homeless people and prisoners with no rights—had been conducted to perfect the virus and to maximize its lethality. Then, a sixteen-year-old girl was used as bait to carry the contagion to the president. There was something about the virus that was nagging at the back of his brain. He turned back to the first page and stopped on the second bullet.
Virus designed to become active upon ingestion of a sedative.
“So that’s how they did it,” he muttered to himself.
Melissa had been injected multiple times over the last week of her captivity with designer stimulant drugs. Those made her severely agitated at the trade site, made her need a sedative to settle her af
ter her rescue. The president’s doctor had unknowingly started the viral outbreak.
Carl had some of that sedative also. Melissa wouldn’t take a shot, so Carl told the doctor to mix it with juice. Then, Carl drank a sip of that juice to prove to her it wasn’t poison because she wouldn’t drink it otherwise. He sat with the girl in his lap for a few minutes before she went to sleep. He held her hand and touched her cheek.
The activation of the virus was nearly instantaneous, according to the reports, and the results of the clinical trials were definitive. Every exposed test subject—every single one of them—either died after twenty-eight hours or went into a coma. There were no anomalies and there were zero exceptions.
So why am I not sick? How could Agent Palmer think I’m the carrier?
As he reviewed the chain of events in his mind, he recalled very clearly that no one had touched Melissa after she had the sedative. But she was already infected with a latent form of the virus when she consumed the sedative activation agent.
I had the activation agent inside me before Melissa gave me the virus.
Carl looked up from the report and focused his gaze on the seated pilot. “Mr. Blick, when did you get infected?”
The man answered without raising his head, and his muffled voice echoed softly off the metal desktop. “I helped carry one of the wounded mercs when they arrived late last night. About twelve hours ago. I’ve got a little less than sixteen hours until I enter Phase Two. Well, that is, if I don’t die in Phase One.”
Carl looked at Reichert. “How are you feeling?”
The colonel shrugged. “I’ve had a badass headache since last night, and had a bout of nausea this morning before you got to the airport.”
“She says I’m the carrier,” Carl said. “I shook hands with the superintendent here when I gave him his fee.”
Reichert nodded. “I shook his hand this morning.” Reichert looked at Agent Palmer.
Carl knew he was realizing he would soon be in the same state as she was. Carl reviewed Palmer’s summary sheets again. He said, “There is an antidote over in Mexico City. It’s in an office building, in the same lab where the virus was developed. I have to go get it.”
Blick said, “Look around, Mr. Johnson. Your team is incapacitated. How do you plan to run an op with no combat support?” The man looked at the colonel and shrugged. “All you have is Colonel Reichert and myself, and I’ve been out of the military over twenty years. I can’t even remember when I last fired a handgun. And my gut tells me the people who created this virus are not going to want to part with the antidote.”
“I’ll have to convince them otherwise.” Carl added, “You know what they say when we’re up against long odds. We’ll either find a way or we’ll make one.”
He heard his own words, but he knew he was merely posturing with empty bravado. He had no plan. His gaze settled on the old television mounted on top of the gray metal file cabinet in the corner next to the desk. It caught his eye for two reasons. First, it was a museum piece, a chunky cathode ray tube device he hadn’t seen in well over twenty years. Second, it featured a CNN news report describing a military quarantine of Washington, DC. The US Capitol was described as the site of a massive viral infection.
Carl turned up the volume, but the commentary was in Spanish so he turned the volume back down. He read the English ticker at the bottom and found that he, Carl Johnson, was being blamed for the outbreak. The report said there was no country to retaliate against with the massive might of the US military, no terrorist organization to attack, because the outbreak was a domestic attack. The plan was cleverly implemented by the American Terrorist, a disgruntled citizen whose son was accidentally killed in an FBI raid the previous month.
Carl’s picture was flashed up on the screen. He recognized it from one of his real estate websites. The crawling ticker claimed Johnson had been driven insane with grief and blamed the president and everyone else in the government for the death of his son. Johnson had reportedly kidnapped and infected the president’s daughter, who then spread the infection.
Carl stuck his hands in his pockets, looked down at the floor, and shook his head. Three weeks ago he did blame the president and the FBI and the rest of the government for his son’s death. More recently, he’d come to understand the government wasn’t his enemy.
The real, now-captive kidnapper, Alfonso Reyes, had used inside information to fight his way past Melissa Mallory’s Secret Service security detail with a heavily armed assault squad well over a month ago. All of the girl’s security detail had been killed in the kidnapping assault.
How could anyone believe a grieving father would ever be able to defeat the elite protection professionals of the Secret Service and kidnap the First Daughter? And where would a man with no previous biological experience, no underworld contacts, and no money find such a viral agent or fund its development?
But no one was asking those questions, at least not yet. The media and the FBI had their target. Carl Johnson was guilty because his adversary said they had irrefutable evidence of his complicity. No one was questioning the evidence. Eventually, his background would be scrutinized by the intelligence agencies and they’d find the holes, but the president would be long dead by then. And that, Carl realized, was the genius of the plan. The adversary did not have to prove his evidence even existed.
Even as the futility of his situation tumbled through his brain, he watched the vice president’s sound bite interview. The scrolling English ticker at the bottom of the screen said the man promised to get to the bottom of this deadly attack on America. He promised no lengthy trial for the American Terrorist, but instead advocated quick and extreme justice.
“But that justice will have to wait,” he said. He was going to immediately assume the duties of president, since the country was effectively without leadership. The clip above the ticker showed President Mallory shaking hands and sharing cheek kisses with nearly everyone in Congress after she addressed the nation. She had unwittingly spread the virus to virtually the entire legislative branch of the government, and within a few hours, those people had infected the remainder of the executive and judicial branches.
Much of the senior military staff was also incapacitated. Twenty-five percent of those infected had succumbed to severe strokes and seizures in a massive die-off twenty-eight hours after the speech. The rest—one hundred percent of everyone who had touched the president or who had touched someone who had touched the president—were infected and in comas.
Vice President Breen was quoted on the CNN ticker as saying he would show the world the US was “strong and stable, and that the country was not weakened by the attack.” Then he issued a strong warning against any nation that sought to take advantage of the terror attack. The military was put on high alert, and the borders were sealed until the spread of the virus was contained and the crisis had passed.
All air traffic was grounded, and any aircraft attempting to leave or enter US airspace would be shot down to prevent possible spread of the virus. Martial law was in effect across the nation, and the population was ordered to remain off the streets. Washington DC was on lock-down, as was Las Cruces and Holloman Air Force Base. In addition, numerous outbreaks were being reported in Albuquerque and its neighboring cities that were within easy reach by air travel—Dallas, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Denver.
The ticker said Vice President Breen and the CDC were doing everything in their power to defeat this terror attack. Already, existing vaccines were being tested on the virus. Based on initial test results, a vaccine would be available to the public within a few days.
A few days…
According to Palmer’s summary sheet, the president would be dead in a few days. Shirley Mallory been infected just over two days ago. She survived the first culling of the twenty-eight-hour Phase One period and now she remained in the seventy-two-hour Phase Two period of coma. That meant Mallory and her daughter had less than forty-five hours to live. The US government leadersh
ip who had survived Phase One had maybe sixty hours to live. Everyone else Carl had touched also had about that long. Carl closed his eyes and shook his head. The war had been over before anyone had even known a battle was raging.
Or had it?
Carl turned to face Colonel Reichert. “Vice President Walter Breen is our adversary. He’s the one person who stands to benefit most from President Mallory’s death. But Melissa’s kidnapping isn’t only about assassinating the president. This is nothing less than a total take-over of America in a bloodless coup.”
To the rest of the world, Vice President Breen was a hero. He’d survived the terror attack. The ticker said he’d been out with stomach discomfort the day of the president’s speech. Now, he had taken swift and decisive action. He promised salvation and victory in just a few short days.
The colonel started to speak, but Merc Four began coughing. Her body stiffened in a brief and violent seizure, then relaxed. For a moment, Carl thought he had witnessed her death, but she took a shuddering breath and coughed again.
“On the plane you said something had changed, and I think it was you,” Reichert said. Carl looked at him and nodded, so the man said, “Agent Palmer said the adversary wanted to blame the gruesome murder of Special Agent Cummings and the other civilians on you to keep attention focused on you and not on him.”
Carl nodded. “You’re implying that was a critical part of his plan, which makes sense. According to Palmer’s data,” Carl waved the set of papers he held, “The president is expected to die in seventy-two hours. All Breen has to do is wait until then to become president, but now he’s rushing it.”
Reichert shrugged. “He must be vulnerable. He must think you can hurt him.” The colonel paused. “And there’s something else, too.”
“What’s that?”
“There’s no way a cure could be synthesized in,” he did the two-finger quote-unquote gesture, “a few days. I have a friend at USAMRIID, the army research center that works with the CDC on viruses that can be weaponized. We always discuss what-if scenarios and how the CDC battles natural or man-made biological pathogens.
American Terrorist Trilogy Page 54
