Exposed (Maggie O'Dell)

by Alex Kava

  With no windows she relied on her wristwatch and the TV to give her a sense of time. In another forty minutes she knew she would be peeing in a plastic cup again. And what was worse, she found herself looking forward to the woman in the blue space suit’s visit though it included drawing blood or gagging her for a throat culture or peeing into a plastic cup. And each time the woman came into Maggie’s room, Maggie asked to talk to Colonel Platt. Each time, the woman nodded and said, “OF COURSE.”

  On the woman’s last visit Maggie had reminded her that she had been told they would keep her overnight. They had plenty of samples of Maggie’s fluids to know whether or not she had been exposed. USAMRIID had some of the most advanced laboratories in the country. Shouldn’t they know by now what Mary Louise’s mother had been exposed to? She tried not to run through the possibilities.

  In fact, to keep her mind off the possibilities, Maggie resorted to the one thing she knew she could rely on, the one thing that would stop her from thinking about the drafty hospital gown, the electrical hum of equipment and the claustrophobia that clawed at her insides every time she heard the air-lock seal of the door. She tried to do what she did best, work out cases in her mind and start putting together the puzzle pieces, though she had few pieces for this case.

  She took a deep breath and let it out. Where to begin? In the morning she would get the envelope to Agent Tully somehow, or at least the return address. She had good suspicion that whatever was or had been inside that envelope was what caused Ms. Kellerman’s crash. But from everything Maggie had observed in the Kellerman house, both Mary Louise and her mother seemed unlikely victims of the kind of killer…Maggie shook her head. No, that wasn’t right. He hadn’t killed anyone yet. They seemed unlikely victims of a terrorist who could leave a box of doughnuts at Quantico with a death-threat notice tucked inside. Not just Quantico, but down in the BSU department.

  She wondered if Ms. Kellerman was related or connected to an FBI agent or some other personnel at the academy. That was easy enough to check. Too easy, perhaps. This guy wouldn’t go through the trouble of staging such an elaborate “greet and meet” threat with the FBI if he knew they could connect him to the victims. No. Chances were, the terrorist had no connection to Mary Louise and her mother, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t chosen them specifically for one reason or another.

  Maggie tried to remember the contents of the note. It had sounded like bits and pieces thrown together. Or that might be exactly what he wanted them to believe, that they were randomly chosen words, emotionally charged, when, in fact, every word may have been calculated. Something about the phrases he used rang familiar. Perhaps she had simply read too many notes from twisted, evil minds. It was an occupational hazard, letting the words of criminals take up space in a compartment of her brain. Sometimes the words meant nothing. Sometimes they meant everything, valuable clues like secret messages waiting to be decoded. Words like crash.

  Despite her best efforts she kept seeing Ms. Kellerman and the blood-splattered bedsheets. She could still hear the poor woman’s raspy breaths, the wet gurgle in her throat, the rattle in her chest. She could smell the sour vomit. The bedroom reeked of it, but there was something else, something that hinted at raw sewage, like a septic tank had backed up, only the smell had been coming from Ms. Kellerman’s bed.

  The medical term was “crash and bleed out.” Maggie knew there were certain toxins, biological agents and infectious diseases that, once they invaded the body, caused severe hemorrhage. Ricin and anthrax attached to and attacked lung cells. Infectious viruses weren’t particular about what cells they attacked. The invaded cells eventually exploded. The body’s immune system would shut down. Organs began to fail, one by one. In effect, the body did actually crash and bleed from the inside out.

  Both she and Cunningham had misinterpreted the note. When the author wrote that there would be a “crash,” he didn’t mean an explosive device. He meant Ms. Kellerman’s body.

  The phone on the wall rang and Maggie jumped. She spun around to look at it and saw a man standing on the other side of the glass. He held the other receiver to his ear and motioned for her to answer hers. It rang twice more before she crossed the room and picked it up.

  “Good morning, Agent O’Dell.”

  The voice sounded graveled with fatigue, deeper than before, as though he was fighting laryngitis. She almost didn’t recognize the voice or him until she met his eyes.

  “Colonel Platt, I thought perhaps you had forgotten about me.”

  “Never. Though I may not have recognized you in your new outfit.”

  She remembered the thin hospital gown and restrained from clutching at the back to make sure it was closed. She had been pacing without paying much attention. His smile made her face grow warm. Why should she care whether he got a glimpse of her bare backside?

  “I would have brought my overnight case if I knew I was spending the night in Hotel USAMRIID.”

  “My apologies for not having better accommodations for you,” he said as his smile faded and the jovial tone became more serious. “We have to wait several more hours, then I’ll have them bring you some breakfast.”

  “But first we’ll talk.” It wasn’t a question or a request.

  He paused, his eyes not leaving hers. For a second she thought he might recognize the panic that she had carefully hidden. He pointed to a chair on her side of the glass while he sat down in similar one on his side.

  “But first we’ll talk,” he conceded.

  CHAPTER

  29

  Pensacola, Florida

  Rick Ragazzi jerked awake. The noises outside the studio apartment and down below were familiar but that didn’t make them less annoying. He checked the glow-in-the-dark alarm clock on his bed stand. Sounded like Cousin Joey was pulling an all-nighter. He heard two different girls giggle, and Rick shook his head. Joey would never grow up. Sometimes Rick found it difficult to not agree with his uncle Vic who insisted his son would never learn obligation and responsibility until he “knocked up some girl.”

  Amazingly so, “chasing skirts,” as Uncle Vic liked to call it, didn’t seem to affect Joey’s culinary talents. He’d sleep until noon, go work out and be at the restaurant at three ready to take on another dinner crowd. Of course, while Joey was sleeping until noon Rick would be up at the crack of dawn, waiting for deliveries from vendors, paying bills, stocking the shelves, changing out linens, juggling waitstaff schedules and today waiting for the repairman to change the refrigerator’s compressor. Somewhere in between he’d be cutting up vegetables, pounding out chicken and deveining shrimp. His poor hands already looked like a knife thrower’s clumsy apprentice.

  For now he stretched back into the pillows. He had at least a couple more hours before he had to meet the first truck. Saturdays were long days. He’d need the extra sleep, if only Joey and his harem would keep it down. Rick pulled himself up and out of bed just enough to close the window. His knees suddenly went weak and he had to grab onto the windowsill. Something pounded in his head and he felt a chill sweep over him. That’s when he noticed he was soaking wet with sweat. He crawled back into bed, pulling the bedcovers up tight around him.

  He wiped his forehead. It was hot. Now he realized his pillow was damp. Even his sheets were damp. He had a fever. This was crazy. He never got sick. Could have been something he had eaten, though his stomach didn’t hurt. He did have a backache and a headache, more like a dull throbbing inside his forehead. Maybe a twenty-four bug of some sort?

  He closed his eyes and thought about waves crashing, the emerald-green waters and sugar-white sand of Pensacola Beach. He tried to think of the hot sun beating down on him instead of the heat that seeped out of his pores from somewhere inside him. He wanted to dream of cool breezes and riding the waves on a freshly waxed, fast board, curling his toes over the edge, hanging on and enjoying the roller-coaster ride. He was almost there, relaxed and enjoying, until he felt something running down the side of his face and cont
inuing down his neck.

  He reached to turn on the bedside lamp. This was crazy. He never got sick and yet he had a fever and now his nose was bleeding.

  CHAPTER

  30

  The Slammer

  “I want to know what I’ve been exposed to,” Maggie said without wasting any time.

  “We don’t know,” Platt answered quickly and it reminded Maggie of the woman in the blue space suit. Was this USAMRIID’s mantra of the day? All the latest technology and they didn’t know. Right.

  “By now you must have some idea.” She gave him another chance.

  “No, not yet.”

  She thought he might be convincing except that he wouldn’t meet her eyes. Instead, his eyes glanced to the side at the wall monitors, flashed over her head, swept back to the counter, like they were preoccupied but really were evasive.

  “You’d make an awful poker player,” she said and this time his eyes flew back to hers. Now that she had his attention she couldn’t help thinking they were intense eyes, the kind that when focused could see deep into your soul. “Knowing can’t possibly be worse than not knowing.”

  He rubbed at his jaw but his eyes stayed on her, as if now he was searching for something in her face that would guide him. Did he hope for a glimpse of courage from her or was he waiting for his own?

  “I haven’t heard anything from the lab.”

  “But you must have some ideas of your own.” She tried to see if he might be hiding something. He was making this harder than she expected. It had to be bad. By now they would have been able to eliminate a few of the obvious things.

  “It’s pointless to guess,” he said. “Why go through that?”

  “Because you’ve left me with nothing better to do.”

  He nodded, an exaggerated up and down, showing okay, yes, he certainly understood. “You have cable TV.”

  “Basic. No AMC. No FX. How about a computer with Internet service?”

  “I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime let’s find something better for you to do.”

  She thought he was patronizing her, but he looked serious.

  “I spent four days quarantined in a tent,” he said, “just outside Sierra Leone. No cable. Not even basic. Not much to do. Count dead mosquitoes. Wish that you had enough gin or vodka to pass out.”

  “Guess I should put in a request for breakfast to include some Scotch.” She was joking. She could tell he was not. “So what did you do to while away the hours in your tent just outside Sierra Leone?”

  “Okay, don’t laugh,” he said, arching an eyebrow as though to test her. “I tried to replay The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in my head.” He paused and rubbed his eyes as if needing to take a break before he dived into a lengthy explanation. She didn’t give him a chance.

  “Hmm…Treasure of the Sierra Madre, quite the heady commentary about the dark side of human nature. Not a bad movie,” she said, enjoying his surprise. “But not my favorite Humphrey Bogart.”

  He stared at her, caught off guard, but only for a second or two. “Let me guess, you prefer your Bogie with Bacall.”

  “No, not necessarily. If memory serves, he won the Oscar for The African Queen but I think he deserved it much more for The Caine Mutiny.”

  “Crazy Queeg?” He offered her a lopsided grin then readjusted himself in the cheap, plastic chair, rolled his shoulders, stretched his legs as if satisfied with her answer and preparing to stay for a while. “So if you had to choose, who would it be, Bogart or Cary Grant?”

  Without missing a beat, Maggie said, “Jimmy Stewart.”

  “You’re kidding? You’d choose clumsy and gawky over debonair and charming?”

  “Jimmy Stewart is charming. And I like his sense of humor.” She sat back in her own uncomfortable plastic chair and crossed her arms over her chest. “So how ’bout you? Bacall or Grace Kelly?”

  “Katharine Hepburn,” he answered just as quickly with the raised eyebrow again, only this time it seemed to be telling her he could play this game.

  She nodded her approval. “Did you ever watch The Twilight Zone?”

  “Yes, but my mom didn’t like me watching it. She said it’d give me nightmares.”

  “My mom didn’t care what I watched as long as it didn’t interrupt her drunken stupors.” As soon as Maggie said it, she was sorry. She saw a subtle change in his face and wished she hadn’t revealed so much. What was she thinking? Now he was quiet, watching her. He’d say something like, “I’m sorry,” which never made sense to Maggie. Why did people say they were sorry when it clearly had nothing to do with them?

  “Do you remember the episode with the woman in the hospital and her face is all bandaged?” he asked

  He surprised her. It wasn’t at all what Maggie had expected.

  He continued, “She’s waiting to have the bandages removed and she’s worried that she’ll be horribly scarred and disfigured.”

  “And the medical staff is all standing around the bed,” Maggie joined in. “But the camera focuses only on her. Sometimes you see the backs of the staff, but that’s it.”

  “The bandages come off and they all gasp and turn away in disappointment and horror.”

  “But she looks normal.” Maggie said. “Then you see that everyone else’s face is warped and deformed with pig snouts and bulging eyes.”

  “Sometimes normal is simply what you’re used to,” he said. Then he waited for her to catch up with him. His way of telling her he understood. Maybe his way of telling her that no matter how dysfunctional her childhood experiences were they didn’t make her some sort of freak.

  The door behind him opened into his room and a woman in a lab coat interrupted. Maggie couldn’t hear her over Platt’s receiver and the glass was soundproof. He nodded and the woman left.

  To Maggie he said, “Gotta go.” He stood to leave.

  She wanted to go with him. Did they finally know something? Maybe he saw a glimpse of panic in her face, in her eyes, because he hesitated.

  “So Lieutenant Commander Queeg mistakenly directs the Caine over its own towline. Start there,” he said with another lopsided grin. “I should be back before you get to Queeg’s search for the pilfered strawberries.”

  He waited for her smile. Then he hung up the receiver and left. Suddenly her small, isolated room seemed even quieter than it was before.

  CHAPTER

  31

  Platt’s heart pounded with every footstep. He felt the kick of adrenaline in his gut, a mixture of dread and anticipation countered the exhaustion.

  The hallways were quiet, some dark. He avoided the elevators. Took the stairs instead. He needed the motion. He caught himself taking two steps at a time. Slow down, he told himself when he really wanted to break out in a run.

  Dr. Drummond had told him that, “Dr. McCathy needs you on the fourth floor. He said you have to see this for yourself.”

  Best-case scenario, McCathy was being his melodramatic self. Worst-case scenario, McCathy found something worthy of his melodrama, something to justify his pent-up anger.

  Despite what he had told Agent O’Dell, Platt’s limited examination and observations of Ms. Kellerman had led him to draw some conclusions. She had been coughing up blood and had problems breathing, along with red eyes and obvious severe abdominal pain. Her fever had been high enough and had lasted enough days to cause fever blisters inside her mouth.

  Her soiled bedding indicated bouts of vomiting and diarrhea that in the last twenty-four hours had rendered her so weak she hadn’t been able to get out of bed. She was in shock and remained unresponsive and incoherent. Early tests indicated that her kidneys had begun to shut down. If his preliminary assessment was correct, her other organs would soon follow.

  Because of the severity of her symptoms he had narrowed the cause down to three possibilities, three biological weapons that a terrorist might use. None of them would be easy to treat. An anthrax infection, depending on what form, might be controlled with antibiotics. Hopef
ully they might be able to contain the spores to Ms. Kellerman’s house and to those already infected. Ricin would need minimal containment, as well. But if ingested, ricin was a deadly toxin and caused a painful death. The third possibility he didn’t like to even think about. If the terrorist had managed to use an infectious disease like typhoid or a virus like Marburg or—heaven forbid, Ebola, then treatment and containment might be impossible. Ms. Kellerman’s house would be a hot zone and anyone within reach of her or it could be a walking epidemic.

  Platt slowed when he got to the fourth floor. The procedure would be for McCathy to prepare and seal his sample slides while in a space suit inside a Level 4 suite. Once preserved and sealed they would be able to look at the slides without fear of exposure. Platt knew he’d find McCathy now in the Level 3 suite where the electron microscope was kept. The expensive contraption was a metal tower as tall as Platt. It’s beam of light allowed them to see microscopic cells and view them like geographic landscapes.

  Platt changed in the outer staging area from his jeans and sweatshirt to surgical scrubs, latex gloves, goggles, a paper mask and shoe covers. Then he joined McCathy.

  The microbiologist sat at the counter, hunched over the binocular eyepiece of a microscope. When he looked up at Platt his eyes looked wild and enlarged. He wore thick eyeglasses under the goggles. His face and even his paper mask were damp with sweat. His neatly trimmed beard stuck out from behind the mask, giving him a crazy-scientist look that, ordinarily, Platt would have shrugged off as part of McCathy’s melodrama. This time it added to the thump already banging inside Platt’s chest.

  “It’s not good,” McCathy said. “This is absolutely amazing. In fact, it’d be absolutely beautiful if it wasn’t so goddamn deadly.”