On his rampage of revenge, he had threatened innocent civilians. He murdered a federal agent in the most gruesome way imaginable and lured dozens of other agents into deadly ambushes. He used children as hostages to achieve his objectives. He beat an innocent woman almost to death just to punish her father, the man he held personally responsible for his son’s death. And he did it all in the name of justice and revenge. Worse, he felt at the time perfectly justified in doing those things. But everything he had done paled in comparison to what he was about to do. Carl recalled Agent Palmer’s advice.
Be the American Terrorist. Be. Carl. Johnson.
Carl was not so naive as to believe the vice president’s plan could contain the virus to the shores of the US. Too much time had passed since Carl’s infection—almost fifty-five hours—and he’d unwittingly touched a lot of people in those hours. Those people had touched many others. Some of the second or third generation infected would have traveled on airplanes over the last two days before they exhibited symptoms. Each would become a new Patient Zero in a multitude of states and countries, starting fresh micro-epidemics around the globe.
Vice President Breen’s plan centered on containing the person his team and the Triad believed to be the original Patient Zero—Melissa Mallory—and he had probably succeeded in doing that. Melissa Mallory was supposed to be unaffected long enough to accomplish the Triad’s goal of infecting the government before Breen’s people pretended to discover her illness and isolate her.
It wouldn’t take long for the international health monitoring community to recognize the similarity of symptoms in all the micro-epidemics, and they would mobilize and quarantine affected hospitals or cities or even countries. With infected people not showing immediate symptoms, though, Carl doubted that governments could set up quarantines fast enough to contain the spread of the virus.
Carl had no doubt the international cooperation between agencies equivalent to the CDC would contain major outbreaks. Yet, in small communities—such as the one where the municipal airport, Nuevo Casas Grandes, was located—the medical response would be delayed. The small town hospitals might not report the symptoms immediately. They might not even recognize the relevance of the symptoms or might initially misdiagnose patients and actually send the infected back home to spread the virus even farther.
Breen and his people expected the virus to be contained to specific parts of the US as detailed in their plan, but Carl, the true carrier, had been trying hard not to be found and he’d been very successful. Many people—maybe tens of thousands of successive generations of infected around the world—would continue to get sick and die before the antidote could be distributed outside of the two initial hot zones of DC and New Mexico, if Breen waited for President Mallory to die.
Now, Carl was using the virus he carried as his own personal weapon. Vicente Orizaga was merely his first victim. He had to force the vice president to use the antidote before the president died, and there was only one way to do that. He was going to hit the Triad in their own back yard.
The elevator made the short trip from the roof to the top lab office swiftly. As it slowed to a halt, Carl steeled himself for action.
“Let’s get this done quickly,” he said. “We don’t want anybody getting nervous or suspicious. If they detain us inside the building, neither of us get our dose.”
He followed Vicente Orizaga out of the elevator. Suddenly, the accountant was all smiles and Carl was surprised at the instant change in the man. He was like an actor in front of a camera. He greeted the security personnel and the receptionist cheerfully as he signed a register and engaged them with lively banter in Spanish.
A gray-haired woman approached in a business suit and white smock. She looked like a lead scientist, a senior project manager, and Carl instantly knew he was facing the woman most responsible for developing the virus and the protocols for infecting Melissa Mallory. Maybe she was the one who invented the bug. He suddenly felt an overwhelming hatred for the woman and an intense desire to kill her.
As he gazed at the woman, he realized she was speaking to him…in Spanish. Yet, she had a look of fear in her eyes. She knew him as Alfonso Reyes and she knew his reputation for charity and violence. He played on her fear. He gave her his best steely-eyed gaze and shook her hand. Then, he motioned Orizaga to proceed down the hall. He followed the pair down the short corridor toward a steel vault door with a numeric keypad. The project manager punched in a long series of digits—too long for Carl to even attempt to memorize—and led them into the section of the lab where the bug work was done. She gave Orizaga a lecture in Spanish, likely a status update, but Carl tuned out their voices and studied his surroundings, looking for egress points.
He’d only seen two security guards so far; one at the reception desk just inside the private elevator and the other just down the hall at the vault door. They were dressed in black tactical gear. They wore side arms and carried Uzis strapped over their shoulders, but Carl figured the rest of the security force was probably sequestered on another floor or even down on the first floor where any serious threat might come from.
When the heavy vault door swung open, Carl found himself entering a small, twenty-foot-square anteroom. The guard entered with them and pressed the heavy door closed. The room held a desk with a keyboard and monitor, but it had no other apparent function, in Carl’s opinion, other than for them to wait while the project manager entered her code again to open a transparent glass door in the wall opposite the vault door. This time the guard remained in the anteroom. When Carl followed Orizaga and his project manager into the first lab chamber, the countdown in Carl’s head hit four hundred seconds remaining.
The lab room was about sixty feet wide—the full depth of the building—and had thick acrylic walls. The entry door was sealed into the wall with a clear gasket that reminded Carl of the solid silicone gel commonly used on aquariums. The air pressure of the room was slightly negative so that when the door opened, Carl felt the air flow past him from the anteroom into the lab. He knew the air was sucked from all the hazard rooms and filtered through specially designed filters to make sure no particles escaped. Maybe the air was burned in a high-temperature furnace filter and then sent through coolers for recirculation. He’d heard of that kind of thing before.
The walls of the anteroom were lined with dozens of shoulder-high, stainless steel specimen refrigerators with glass windows in the doors. They were all stacked with identical trays containing small metal canisters. There were a couple of glass-top tables in the center of the room, but no real medical equipment—no Petri dishes or electron microscopes or centrifuges or anything else Carl thought would be necessary to do real virus development work. There was only a single monitor and keyboard, no doubt tied into a central computer network somewhere.
Carl decided the room was for storage of doses of the antivirus ready for local deployment. The back wall of the room was a shiny, stainless steel bulkhead with a massive steel oval hatch that Carl thought belonged in a high-tech submarine from the future. The shiny surface of the door had an electronic keypad and had hydraulic hinges on the top and bottom of the right side. Carl approached the two-foot-square acrylic viewing window dead center of the door and at eye level, through which he could see into the large lab room.
Centered right below the window was an orange placard with the three black sickles on its surface—the universal biological hazard sign. Carl grunted. That was where the real work was done. Contagion—Melissa’s virus and the airborne version—were beyond that bulkhead.
Orizaga issued more instructions to the manager and her technician, who had been in the storage room before they arrived, opened up one of the refrigerators. Carl turned and watched the young man pull out a single metal case and set if reverently on the glass-top table in front of them.
Three hundred seconds remaining.
While the tech maneuvered the case open, Carl studied the scene on the other side of the bulkhead door. There was a sma
ll, clear acrylic airlock five feet beyond the steel hatch. That decontamination room held wall-mounted shower nozzles, red coiled hoses, and other items he didn’t recognize. Several orange spacesuits hung on specialized hanger assemblies against the left wall.
The entire far wall of the decontamination and changing room was floor-to-ceiling acrylic, through which Carl could see three workers in orange spacesuits going about their business of studying or perfecting virus samples. The hatred for these individuals because of what they’d done to Melissa Mallory boiled up inside Carl again, but he quieted his feelings by reminding himself these people all had less than five minutes to live.
Carl turned away from the window and focused his attention on the glass table in the center of the room. The shiny metal case the tech had laid out was about the size of a laptop computer, but about six inches thick. It had rounded edges and corners and had rubber feet on the bottom and on the sides, along with a handle for carrying the case like a briefcase. Carl got the impression the sturdy case didn’t need to be handled as gingerly as the technician was handling it, but the young man’s care lent importance to the contents.
The top of the metal box featured a small biohazard placard exactly in the center of its lid. The only other anomaly on the top surface of the case was a two-inch-wide electronic display screen on the top. The tiny screen held a temperature readout with a mechanical gauge. The low end of the scale was forty-five and the high end was fifty-five. No doubt the box was designed to keep its contents in that temperature range. The black line indicator read forty-nine degrees.
The tech had popped two clasps on the metal case and pivoted the top open. Inside was a foam liner with four rows of five items that looked like the tips of tiny test tubes. Carl reached over and pulled one of the tubes and examined it. It was a small acrylic vial and was stoppered at one end with a rubbery synthetic material, and it had a thin hard plastic ring around the stoppered end. Two tiny metal pins extended a quarter-inch from the center of the rubber stopper. The vial was filled with a light blue liquid.
The project manager continued her dialog in Spanish with Orizaga. No one paid Carl any attention at all. He replaced the tube in its slot and pulled out a small metal object that had its own preformed depression in the middle of the foam liner.
It sort of resembled a Star Trek hypo-spray device, except it had a handle with a trigger that fit comfortably in his palm. On the back end of the device was a circular receiver into which each acrylic vial could fit. There was a tiny LED counter just below the circular receiver, so he figured there was a tiny gas module in the injector handle that provided pressure to inject the contents of the vials. The LED read twenty, so Carl figured it was a counter for how many doses remained in the injector’s charge.
He replaced the injector into its space. He’d seen these kinds of devices on TV, but when he got his immunizations back in his air force days, they still used needles and syringes. But that was thirty-odd years ago.
One hundred eighty seconds.
It was time to move. He closed the lid and snapped the latches closed and handed it to Orizaga. “It’s time to go meet our client.”
Orizaga took his cue and spoke in Spanish to the project manager. She nodded curtly and reversed the procedures to take them out of the lab room and the anteroom vault door. The door was big and heavy and slow. By the time they were back in the reception area the countdown in Carl’s head was at a hundred twenty.
Carl and Orizaga emerged from the rooftop elevator at the twenty-second mark and Carl could see David Blick tapping at an imaginary wristwatch. Carl wanted to burst into a sprint for the last fifty feet, but one of the security guards had accompanied them to the roof, so he merely tapped Orizaga on the arm and the two of them did a slight jog to the helicopter like they really weren’t in a hurry.
Blick had the rotors buzzing at lift-off speed, so when they approached the helicopter, the rotor wash threatened to sweep them off their feet. Orizaga, who didn’t know the urgency of Carl’s countdown, faltered until Carl tackled the man and heaved him into the cabin. Carl leaped in almost on top of him.
Ten seconds.
“Go!” Carl hollered.
His shout was wasted because Blick had the chopper in the air before Carl finished uttering that single-syllable command. He knew Blick was a veteran of dozens of dust-off missions for TER teams, and he proved his skill once again.
“Hold on to something!” Blick had seen the full supply of TER-provided C-4 Carl stashed in the duffel bag—a dozen bricks. “We’re dead if we don’t get below the blast wave!”
Orizaga got himself into a seat and looked at Carl, bewildered. “Blast wave?”
For a moment, Carl thought they were going to escape. He saw the security guard glance at the black bag remaining on the roof and spoke hurriedly into a radio. Then, the security guard pointed his Uzi at the fleeing helicopter and Carl heard bullets pinging against the metal skin of the aircraft.
Blick flipped the helicopter almost belly-up as he cleared the edge of the building, then dove nose-down toward the street. Carl had not yet gained a seat, so he was pinned against the starboard cabin door. He looked up into the fiery blast as the top two floors of the building simply disintegrated. Huge chunks of concrete and metal blasted hundreds of feet outward above them, riding on liquid plumes of red and orange flames.
The pilot pulled out of the dive only a few feet above the street, just as Carl pushed away from the starboard door. He tumbled to the back of the cabin, bouncing off the two rows of leather chairs. He clamored to his feet as Blick coaxed the aircraft higher into the air. It was then that Carl noticed a deep rumble in the engine that hadn’t been present a few seconds ago. He faced front and glanced up at the ceiling. He cursed as he noticed half a dozen holes with daylight shining through them. The guard had shot them through the belly and out the roof.
Carl nodded at Orizaga and moved forward, pointing at the open door. “Secure that door, please,” Carl shouted over the air noise blasting into the cabin. Carl pivoted as Orizaga looked over at the door, then he throat-chopped the man. Hard. Right in his Adam’s apple. When the man reached reflexively to his injured throat, Carl snatched the antidote case from him and tossed it onto his own seat. He heaved the man out of his seat and held him by the front of his shirt.
“This is for Melissa,” he said. “And for my son.”
Vicente Orizaga’s eyes widened and he opened his mouth, but he couldn’t scream because of his damaged throat. Carl shoved him backward out the door. Holding the vertical safety bar next to the doorway, he watched the man fall five hundred feet to the ground, arms and legs flailing the whole way. The man bounced and tumbled a bit on impact. Carl slid the door closed and went to the copilot’s seat.
Blick said, “You sure cut it real close back there. I figure we had maybe a two-second margin.”
Carl nodded. “Thanks for not leaving me.”
Blick looked over at him through light-blue eyes, and Carl had the feeling the pilot was reappraising him. Carl knew the man initially blamed him for the deaths of TER operators who may have been his friends or associates. Now he saw a grudging respect in the man’s eyes.
“Without the antidote,” Blick said. “I’m dead anyway. Figured I might as well stay for the fireworks show.”
Carl nodded and looked over his shoulder. The top two or three floors of the seventeen-story glass and steel building were missing, creating a ragged scar that billowed a dark plume of smoke into the sky. What remained of the stricken tower seemed to sink, slowly at first, as the structure collapsed and crumbled to the ground. A huge cloud of gray smoke, dust, and debris exploded outward through the streets like a volcanic pyroclastic flow, and in seconds all the surrounding buildings were hidden from view by thick gray dust.
Carl turned forward in his seat and put on his seat harness.
“I get that you wanted to steal the antidote,” Blick said. “But I don’t see the value of taking out the building.”
“That’s because you don’t know what they were playing with inside that lab.” Carl paused for a moment. “Pretty soon the vice president will have something new to think about.”
Chapter 45
1530 hours MST Saturday
Northern Mexico
Carl held his breath as the helicopter thumped down hard on the tarmac outside the hangar where he’d left the Gulfstream and his other team members. The mild rumbling he’d felt leaving the rooftop had become an ear-wrenching, continuous squeal of metallic death as the pilot struggled to keep the aircraft airborne. Carl clutched the case of antidotes in his lap. Whatever else happened, he didn’t want to lose the case. When it became clear the chopper wasn’t going to explode or fall over sideways and grind its rotors into shrapnel, he let out his breath and unbuckled his seat harness.
“Mr. Blick,” he said while opening the case. “Your job here is done. Get as far away from here as you can and don’t look back. If they find you, you’re in for a tough time.”
“Right. E-and-E 101.” When Carl tented his eyebrows in confusion, Blick added, “Escape and evasion.”
Carl nodded and stuck a vial into the receiver on the back of the injector handle. He pushed up Blick’s short sleeve shirt and pressed the device against his bicep, near the shoulder. He squeezed the trigger and the device hissed for a couple of seconds as pressurized gas forced the blue serum out of the injector vial and into Blick’s arm.
American Terrorist Trilogy Page 57
