The Holy Grail
By
Christopher Cartwright
Copyright 2018 by Christopher Cartwright
This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. All rights reserved.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Prologue
George Washington University Hospital, Virginia – Yesterday
Ben Gellie held his breath as the needle went into his right arm.
He exhaled, and blood ran freely into a little specimen container. It was the seventh such blood test the small team of doctors in their white coats had taken in the past twenty-four hours. The doctors had told him that they’d found something unusual and that he needed to wait until they ran more tests. Outside of that, they had ignored him.
He was tall, clean-shaven, and wore a suit and tie on most days. A junior law graduate from Harvard, he was currently interning at the State Department. With his handsome boyish good looks and thick, wavy hair, he had no trouble getting girls. It was deciding to keep them that he’d struggled with over the years. Despite his lazy, carefree lifestyle, and capricious morals, he had naturally succeeded in all aspects of his life. An A-grade student and a natural athlete, he excelled at academia and sports, and had been offered full academic and sports scholarships to study at Harvard.
Some might say he squandered it the first time round. He wouldn’t, but it’s all about perspective, isn’t it? He’d lived like a jock-rock star – his life was about fun and picking up chicks. After completing a bachelor of science and a semester of pre-med, he decided to turn toward pro football. In his mid-twenties, he was the NFL’s first pick at the drafts. But something went wrong before the season even started. Life was good. He was moving quickly toward the goals everyone seemed to have – wealth, fame, women… if he stayed, he could have had anything he wanted.
But he didn’t want any of it.
Except, maybe the women.
He broke his contract, which the media had a bit of a field day with for a while. Wherever he went, people recognized him. They asked about what happened and why he quit. He got sick of telling the story that he just didn’t feel like playing the game anymore.
Things died down once the main season started, and once more he returned to the anonymous life of mere mortals.
Ben did odd jobs for a few years around the country. Nothing exciting and nothing difficult. He just wanted to get away from it all for a bit and clear his head. In the fourth year, he returned to Harvard. He was right back where he started, only this time he intended to set his sights somewhere else.
He had loftier goals than the mere creation of money.
His eyes were set on the White House. No, not as a president – he knew he was too lazy and had had too much fun in life to ever be granted such a high office. Rather, his goal was setting up a future as one of the powerful people working to develop the laws and improve the country. In many ways, a successful lawmaker had more freedom and power to do some good for the country than the president.
His recent position as an intern at the State Department was the first step in that direction, and as with everything else in his life, it was turning out just how he expected – perfect.
His mind returned to his problem at hand.
Could all of his good luck have finally caught up with him?
Ben had come in to donate blood. He’d been inspired by the motorcycle accident of a friend, who had received excellent care from the hospital. Ben had wanted to help. He reflected that, in some ways, his life had always seemed unbalanced.
Was it all just too easy?
Something was wrong with his blood results, and he was worried he was about to see the universe set things right.
At first, he’d asked questions, but the doctors merely went about their business as though he were nothing more than a guinea pig. Maybe it was some kind of bureaucratic mix-up, where everyone assumed everyone else had explained things to him.
Then, as the time went on, he became agitated and worried.
His mind raced across a number of possibilities he’d never previously given any thought to – heart disease, genetic disorders, multiple sclerosis, mental illness, and the big one, cancer.
Am I going to die?
He thought about that possibility for a moment and then dismissed it out of habit. Did cancer even show up in the blood? He didn’t know. He knew very little about modern medicine, but somehow, he doubted that so many doctors would have been concerned if he had something that was going to inevitably kill him.
And why should that bother them?
They’re doctors; they’ve been trained to treat sick and dying people. There were more than a dozen doctors. A dozen! Why did they look so worried?
No, they had found something else in his blood.
Something much worse.
What’s worse than death?
Ben swallowed hard, refusing to let the fear take control of him. The answer came to him swiftly.
The death of millions of people.
He wasn’t isolated, so if he had some horrible disease, it wasn’t airborne. He wracked his mind, trying to remember any type of blood-borne disease that might infect millions of people. All he could think of was HIV, but that didn’t fit the picture. There were too many resources dedicated to him, and this certainly wouldn’t be the first case of HIV the hospital had seen.
Hell, any number of his friends, family, or colleagues at the State Department m
ight have the infection, and he wouldn’t have even known about it. Besides, they weren’t in the eighties anymore. There wasn’t as much stigma associated with HIV. With access to modern immunotherapies, people were living full lives with the disease, so there was no reason for all of the subdued panic he was seeing. But the doctors worked frantically, their faces tensed with fear.
What were they afraid of?
If he was sick, he certainly didn’t feel it.
Maybe the results showed him to be a carrier of the disease, but not infected. They had those types of diseases, didn’t they? Even that didn’t make any sense. Apart from gloves, the doctors weren’t wearing personal protective equipment. No masks, no impervious gowns – just their medical scrubs and nitrile gloves.
He’d watched enough movies to know that if he was indeed patient zero in some new, horrible strain of virus, he would have been quarantined in a negative airflow, sealed room, designed to keep any viruses from getting out. Anyone who came in to visit him or treat him would have been wearing a fully encapsulated hazardous material suit like the ones you see on all those disaster, end-of-the world-movies.
Ben shook his head. None of it made any sense.
He’d heard of some doctors trying to avoid telling the patient hard truths until it became unavoidable. But he couldn’t even begin to imagine what they might have possibly found. He tried to imagine the worst possible case scenario, but none of those would have been out of the norm for anyone who worked in an emergency department.
The friend who had been involved in a motorcycle accident had gone out riding on a warm day in February, thinking that the roads were clear. He’d hit a patch of black ice under some trees. The hospitals in the area were running short on Ray’s blood type, AB-negative – the same as his own and the rarest type. Ben did not hesitate – he came in immediately to donate his blood. Before they’d let him do that, he needed to have a blood test to make sure he didn’t have any pathogens that could be spread to the next recipient. Ben had quickly signed all the forms they shoved in front of him, even though he knew it meant the needles would be next. Ben hated needles.
An hour after the tests, another doctor had come in and asked to take a second blood sample, telling him that it was a routine follow up to the first one. It wasn’t long after that he was visited by a small army of doctors, none of whom would tell him what was going on.
Was he going to die?
Just what had he signed off on, anyway? He felt stupid not to have fully read the documents they had handed him to sign – he was a law graduate, after all! At the time, the legalities hadn’t worried him – he simply wanted to help the hospital after what they had done for his friend.
“This is the last test,” Ben told the doctors around him.
“I’m sorry, we have a few more samples that we need to take,” one of the doctors standing next to him said.
She was a petite blonde woman who looked very young, with pretty blue eyes, dimples, and a soft, sweet voice. His mind instantly hated the thought of quarreling with her – but he was fed up, damn it.
“No more,” he said, shuffling to the side of the recliner chair. “Not until you at least tell me what’s going on.”
“I’m sorry, sir.” Her smile was impish and made him wish to hell he’d met her under vastly different circumstances. “My name is Emma Thompson, Doctor Thompson. I’m in charge here. It’s vitally important that we take a few more samples.”
“How much longer, ma’am?” he asked.
“I really can’t say.”
“An hour, a day, a week? What?”
She smiled again, revealing a perfect set of evenly spaced, white teeth, and a tongue ring that suggested, besides her innocent persona, she concealed something much more playful. “I really can’t say, sir.”
“Bullshit,” Ben said, having had enough of the lies. “I know damned well that you’ve found something in my blood and are trying to hide it from me. When I came in here to donate blood after my friend’s motorcycle accident, I asked the nurse if there was anything I could do to help. She told me I could help the hospital by donating blood because they were getting dangerously low on supply. Now I’ve been turned into a test subject. Last time I ever do anything altruistic. Either tell me what I have or I’m gone.”
“I’m sorry, sir, we can’t do that.”
“Then I’m going to walk out of his hospital. And I am never going to donate blood again.”
This didn’t seem to affect any of his army of doctors in the slightest. Maybe they were used to people making protests that they didn’t back up with action.
Ben Gellie wasn’t that type of person.
He stood up, pushed the doctors aside, and headed for the door. He’d taken his shirt off earlier to make it easier for them to draw blood; if they didn’t care about him wandering through the hallways in just his undershirt and trousers, he didn’t, either.
Several hands reached for him, trying to pull him back down on the exam table. Ben just shrugged them off, knocking their hands away. His reflexes were lightning fast. Always had been. Since high school, he’d been the best at every sport he’d ever played, even without any practice.
The two biggest doctors reached for him, pushing past the ones still trying to grab his shirt.
Ben hooked an ankle behind the leg of the bigger one and pushed him into a cluster of white coats. Four people fell down like bowling pins. The other big one grabbed for him. Ben ducked under his arm and charged toward the door like a linebacker.
The doctor let out a whoosh of air as the door knocked the wind out of him, then sank down.
Ben grunted, grabbed the guy’s coat and swung him to the side so he wasn’t blocking the door.
“Sir!” said the pretty blonde doctor. “Please calm down. None of this is necessary.”
Ben reached for the door handle.
It even started to turn.
Then someone grabbed him from behind. It was a gentle hold on his right shoulder. “I’m so sorry that we scared you,” the pretty doctor said.
He turned toward her. “Apology accepted. Now let me the hell out of –”
Then he hissed through his teeth. The sweet, innocent-looking, pretty blonde doctor had just jabbed him with another needle straight into his shoulder.
She pulled the needle out and backed away quickly. A small dot of blood stained the white cloth. He turned to run. No one stepped in his way. A moment later, he felt a sudden warming sensation in his shoulder.
It rapidly spread up his arm, into his torso, down his legs, and into his head.
He blinked, trying to regain some focus. “What have you done to me?”
“We haven’t done anything to harm you, Mr. Gellie,” came the soft, reassuring voice. “We’re here to protect you, that’s all.”
Ben looked directly at her. She had a kind, beautiful face. She was sexy too. “You look like a nice girl, Emma. I sure wish we met under different circumstances. I think you would have liked me.” The words came out slurred, as if he’d been drinking.
The warming sensation spread into his neck. Several hands grabbed him, holding him steady.
Someone said, “Get a chair, he’s going down.”
“Gently, now! You don’t want to hurt him.” The blonde doctor said, “He’s too valuable.”
His knees gave out.
Ben tried to focus, but his head kept spinning. He tried to take a step, but he was no longer in control of his limbs. He tried to grit his teeth, but even his jaw failed to obey.
Someone else maneuvered his body, lifting him back onto the recliner chair. They swung his legs up, and his head gently hit the supportive backing of the recliner.
The pretty blonde face was the only sight he could still see. She smiled, apologetically. “I’m sorry. This has to be done. There was no other choice – you’re too dangerous.”
“Why?” he asked.
She began speaking. Something about Bolshoi Zayatsky – wherever the hell that wa
s. She spoke honestly and for a moment he was certain he was about to get all the answers he desired – but couldn’t seem to understand a word of them.
Instead, he felt a certain peace envelop his consciousness, before swallowing him whole.
Lights out.
Chapter One
Interrogation Room, Pentagon, Virginia
Ben Gellie woke up in a new room, one that didn’t look like it belonged in a hospital at all. For one thing, you expected a hospital room to have a bed in it. This one didn’t. All it had was a single recliner, in which he was sitting, feet up.
Another thing you expected in a hospital room was a sink. Maybe an IV. Something that went beep…beep all night long. Maybe a poster on the wall saying, “Hello! My name is ______, and I am your nurse today! Please press your call button if you need anything!”
Instead, it had three blank walls, a closed door, and a pair of plastic Tuff-Ties, the kind that security used to restrain prisoners.
There were, however, more doctors.
It took a while for his head to clear enough to figure out that this was a different setting. That was probably a good thing. If that pretty blonde doc had shown up again, he might have lost it.
How did I get here?
Once he was awake enough to start asking, he did so, for all the good that it did him. None of the new doctors answered him either. They’d expanded their scope from blood tests – although they took a few more samples, just in case the dozen or so they’d already taken turned out to be duds. They took his vital signs, a chest X-ray, and a brain CT scan.
By the time the man in black showed up, Ben had given up protesting, or even asking to use the bathroom. It wasn’t doing any good.
“Hello, Mr. Gellie,” the man in black said.
Ben remained silent, his eyes taking him in at a glance.
He was enormous, built like someone who should have played pro football, and had a broad, blocky face, with deep-set eyes and protruding ears. “My name is Special Agent Ryan Devereaux.”
Ben ignored him. It was pointless. He was going to do yet another test on him, and nothing Ben could say or do would prevent him.
“I have some questions for you.”
“Great,” Ben said, rolling his eyes. “I have some questions for you. Let’s trade.”
The Holy Grail (Sam Reilly Book 13) Page 1
