by Alex Kava
She’d figure something out. But she needed to stay calm. Breathe. She scanned the room again, moving only her eyes.
That’s when the lights went out.
It took everything she had inside her to not scream. When she felt the first brush of fur against her face she automatically jerked away. She gasped and gulped for air before making herself stationary again.
Quiet. Be still. Don’t show your fear.
She was dripping wet with sweat and fear. How could they not sense that? But something told her they wouldn’t attack unless threatened. That’s when she felt the second swipe across her cheek. Only this time it was claws, not fur.
CHAPTER
81
University of Virginia
Tully had been to Sloane’s office only once before, but it was easy to remember where it was. He bragged about being in the basement of the Old Medical School Building, where no one bothered him. Leave it to Sloane to brag about a basement office and make it sound like a privilege.
Tully noticed a parking sign for George Sloane right out front. One of those anniversary signs the university rewarded professors after so many years of service. An SUV was parked in the slot. An SUV with government plates. Tully shook his head. The guy had his own parking space, a government-issue vehicle. He had tenure at a reputable university and he still wasn’t happy.
Tully didn’t waste time with the elevator. He found the stairs.
Sloane’s office was closed. The door locked. Tully pounded anyway. He pulled out his Glock and started checking doors left and right despite the key-card security pads. All the while monkeys screeched at the other end of the hall.
He stopped and stared at the door that held behind it screaming monkeys and he hoped to God he was wrong about what the monkeys were screaming at.
“It took you long enough,” George Sloane said from behind him.
Tully turned slowly to find Sloane in the hallway, several syringes in his hand.
“I saved some of the virus just for you.” He held up one of the syringes as he slid the others into his jacket pocket.
“Where’s Agent O’Dell?”
“She’s smarter than you…” Sloane smiled. “She found all my references. You didn’t get any of them, did you?”
“Does it matter? Or are you still trying to compete with me?” Getting under George Sloane’s skin might be the only way to set him off. Did he really want to set him off?
“You were never competition. Now, Razzy, I could understand when Caroline slept with him. But I knew she’d never marry him.”
Tully kept his finger on the trigger. The monkeys kept screeching at his back. Sloane wasn’t unnerved by them at all.
“I spent years planning this, months rehearsing and finding the perfect patsy. Every step was deliberate, an intricate piece of a total puzzle. I outwitted everyone, just like I did twenty-five years ago.”
“The Tylenol murders. That was you?”
“I had to get rid of my fucking family. They were in the way. They kept after me to come home and run the family business. Nagging me. Never understanding why I wanted to be an FBI agent. Caroline was the best thing that ever happened to me. I was clearing a way for us to be together and she was off fucking you in Cleveland.” His face turned red at the memory.
“And yet you still wanted her.”
He stared at Tully, a blank stare, surprised that Tully knew.
“You still wanted her and you lost her again,” Tully said. “But not to Razzy or me. She had a chance to choose you again, after all these years, and she chose someone else.”
Sloane shrugged, pretending it didn’t matter. Tully watched him jerk his head from side to side. His eyes darted around as if to shake the memory. When he finally looked back up at Tully he was George Sloane again and not that boy Indy who’d had so many idealistic hopes and dreams.
“Seems it’s you who has a choice now,” he said with a grin. And he pointed to the door behind Tully. The door the monkeys were screeching behind and now thumping around.
“Saving Agent O’Dell or taking me down.”
Tully’s stomach slid to his feet. He was right. Maggie was trapped behind that door.
“You can’t shoot me,” Sloane told him, waving his arms up and down as if giving Tully a free shot. “You don’t have the guts.”
Tully raised his Glock. “You forget. I was always a better shot than you.”
“Yeah,” Sloane said, holding up the syringe with one hand while his other hand reached for the wall, flipping a light switch Tully hadn’t seen. The entire hallway went black. “Are you as good a shot in the dark?”
Tully swiped at the walls on both sides of him. No switches. He couldn’t see anything, The basement hallway was pitch-black. There were no red lights that marked smoke detectors. There were no exit signs. Not even a slice of light beneath any of the doors. Doors that Tully already knew were all locked and required key cards.
He tried to stay calm. He tried to focus, to keep his breathing slow and his heart from pounding in his ears. He needed to listen. How could he hear over the monkeys screaming behind him?
He thought he heard a squeak on the floor directly in front of him. Was that possible? How far away? A foot? Maybe two?
He took a deep breath. Didn’t Sloane use an aftershave? Or was he smelling monkey urine?
Tully braced his back against the wall, staying in one place. Sloane would expect him to move away, back away. He waited for his eyes to adjust to the dark, closing them tight and opening them again. He still couldn’t see anything but total black.
One thing was certain. Tully knew he was coming.
Sloane had probably memorized how many paces it took to get down this hallway. Maybe he’d even made sure all the exit signs would not light up. He said he’d rehearsed everything. Did he have time to rehearse this, too? If so, he’d be able to stab the needle in before Tully could get off a shot.
Their training taught them to aim for the heart. Sloane would remember that. In fact, he’d count on Tully doing just that. Tully had to think quickly. He had to act fast.
He slid down the wall so that he was crouching. And despite the pitch-black, Tully tried to imagine Sloane crawling toward him. He raised his Glock and started firing. He fired low, shot after shot, left to right, a steady stream of bullets. He heard a yell, maybe a thump. He stopped.
Silence.
Even the monkeys had gone silent.
Tully stood up, put his hand on the wall and walked the length of it, swiping at the wall until he found the light switch.
He was right.
George Sloane had been on his hands and knees only ten feet away. How else could Tully explain the head shot that left his old friend dead in the middle of the hallway?
He turned back toward the door. The monkeys had started screeching again. He could hear them rattling against their cages. The door was locked. Key-card pass only. His Glock would have to do, one more time. The monkeys were silent a second time.
It was completely quiet when he eased into the doorway. Out of the dark corner he heard Maggie repeat Sloane’s welcome, “It took you long enough.”
CHAPTER
82
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Newburgh Heights, Virginia
It was too beautiful a day for a funeral.
Maggie sat out on her patio and watched Benjamin Platt in her backyard, throwing a Frisbee to Harvey. He had taken off his cap and dress blue uniform jacket and rolled up his white shirtsleeves. Still, he looked so official with spit-and-polish black shoes and his necktie still in place.
She slipped off her leather pumps and leaned back in the wicker chair, closing her eyes and wishing she could numb the emotions still churning inside her. The entire time she had watched the casket make its way from the church to the plot at Arlington she kept hearing a voice in the back of her head saying, “I can’t believe he’s gone.”
When she opened her eyes again, Platt and Harvey we
re joining her. Platt dropped in the chair beside her and Harvey dropped on the floor at her feet.
“You okay?” he asked. “No more nosebleeds? Headaches?”
“No.” She shook her head. “It’s funny how stress works.”
“You’ve been through a lot. But your blood continues to test negative. And,” Platt said as he reached out to touch her cheek, lightly brushing a finger over the scar that had almost healed, “you’re a very lucky woman that that monkey wasn’t infected.”
She reached down to pet Harvey, pulling away from Platt’s touch when she really wanted to return his gesture. Too soon. What was wrong with her? Too soon could quickly become too late.
“Chicago’s Saint Francis is open again,” Platt told her. “This morning I talked to Dr. Claire Antonelli. She was Markus Schroder’s doctor. It’s amazing that she never contracted the virus.”
“But they ended up with three cases of Ebola.”
He nodded. “The chief of surgery who operated on Schroder. A hole in his glove. Two nurses who took care of Schroder. All of them are responding well to the vaccine. It could have been much worse. There could have been hundreds.”
She glanced at him and smiled.
“What?” he asked.
“So says the new commander of USAMRIID.”
“It’s not official.”
She didn’t push it. He had already told her he might not accept. He loved his work. And although he seemed pleased with Commander Janklow’s resignation, he had told her he had no desire to replace him.
“I’m a doctor and a soldier, not a politician.”
She certainly understood. She loved her work, too. Exposure to Ebola and being locked in a room with monkeys hadn’t changed her mind about being an FBI agent. Risk was part of the job. That’s what she’d tried to tell R. J. Tully. He had been at risk every second in that dark hallway. He had acted in self-defense and that’s what the review board would corroborate. Cases like this, personal cases, left scars. Unfortunately, Tully was learning that.
Risk was a part of the job, Maggie told herself and knew deep down that’s exactly what Cunningham would say. God, she couldn’t believe he was gone. And all because of one man’s petty revenge.
George Sloane had used all his experience and expertise to get back at three men he thought he had lost the love of his life to: R. J. Tully, Conrad Kovak and Victor Ragazzi. While he was at it, he’d take out the woman herself along with his sister, who twenty-five years ago had survived his first attempt to get rid of his entire family.
And because of what Sloane had learned in his profession—that the victim of a crime can often point a finger at who the killer is—he sometimes chose victims indirectly connected to his targets. All of his planning had left Mary Louise Kellerman without a mother and Rick Ragazzi and Patsy Kowak still fighting for their lives, their friends and families quarantined.
What a waste of brilliance George Sloane was.
“Do you have to get back to USAMRIID?” Maggie asked, not wanting to sound like it mattered, then thinking, why not let him know it mattered? She wanted him to stay. She enjoyed his company. Lately she looked forward to it, even catching herself putting aside things in her mind that she wanted to tell him, that she wanted to share.
“I think I put in enough hours recently to warrant taking a day off. What did you have in mind?”
“Are you as good at preparing dinner as you are with breakfast?”
“I think I can scrape up something.”
“How about a beer before you get to work?”
“Sounds good.”
Maggie left him with Harvey and padded barefoot back into the house. She had two Sam Adams bottlenecks grasped in one hand when the doorbell rang. She had invited Tully, Emma and Gwen to stop by so she didn’t even bother to check the peephole.
She pulled open the door to find a young man holding out a pizza box for her.
“Must be the house next door,” Maggie told him. “I didn’t order a pizza.”
He shifted the box and glanced at the name and address on the receipt that was taped to the top of the box.
“Maggie O’Dell?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
She stared at the box, suddenly suspicious of another food delivery until he added, “Italian sausage and Romano cheese? It’s already paid for, lady.”
He handed her the pizza and left.
Maggie closed the door. She held the box in one hand and stared at the receipt. Next to “ordered by” was N. Morrelli.
Italian sausage and Romano cheese. She smiled. Perhaps Nick Morrelli did know her. And he certainly didn’t give up easily.
CHAPTER
83
Benjamin Tasker Middle School
Bowie, Maryland
Ursella Bowman didn’t mind returning from vacation in the middle of the week. It meant she had only two days to clean up the mess her substitute had left for her before she could recuperate on the weekend.
She walked into the mailroom and immediately thought she’d need that weekend much sooner. There were postal-storage bins stacked and the electronic meter had been left on the floor. Why in the world didn’t that woman have any respect?
Ursella started picking up empty boxes and sorting undeliverable mail that needed to be returned. She shoved a collection cart to the side and noticed a six-by-nine padded manila envelope that had gotten stuck between the cart and the wall.
It was addressed to Benjamin Tasker Middle School and it looked like a child’s block printing.
Ursella shook her head as she slipped the envelope into the principal’s mail slot. She hoped it wasn’t something important.
TRUTH OR FICTION?
Notes from Alex Kava
While I was writing Exposed an outbreak of Ebola occurred in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The World Health Organization had more than four hundred suspected cases in the region, but as of this writing it hadn’t been twenty-one days—the time Ebola takes to incubate—so the total confirmed cases and deaths were not yet known.
Could an outbreak like this occur in North America or Europe? Some experts believe it’s only a matter of time. All it would take would be one infected person to get on an airplane. That speculation brought us closer to reality on May 24, 2007, when a man infected with tuberculosis got on an airplane in Atlanta and flew to Paris. He boarded yet another flight to Prague, then flew to Montreal and drove himself back to the United States to turn himself in to the CDC. Imagine if he’d had Ebola.
As an author I’m constantly asking questions lik e this. My research includes digging up the answers and nagging a lot of people who know such things. Sometimes it’s difficult to recognize where the facts stop and the fiction begins. If the reader can’t tell, then I’ve done my job.
I use real-life details in all my novels, but this time I wanted to let readers know what some of the facts are.
The Tylenol murders in Chicago during September 29 through October 1, 1982, remain unsolved to this day. There were seven known victims. One of them was a twelve-year-old girl named Mary Kellerman from Elk Grove Village, Illinois. However, to my knowledge there were no victims in Terre Haute, Indiana.
A scientist and bioweapons expert named Dr. Steven Hatifill, who worked at USAMRIID for a period, was considered by the U.S. Department of Justice to be a “person of interest” in the investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks. Charges were never brought forward.
A vaccine for Ebola does exist. As mentioned in the novel, it was developed by research teams from Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg and Fort Detrick’s USAMRIID. The report of the findings first appeared in the Journal Public Library of Science Pathogens, January 2007. It has not been approved by the FDA as of this writing.
The U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, really does have frozen samples of all the Level 4 biological agents I mention in the book. My apologies for taking any liberties in u
sing the facility for my setting. Suggestions and assertions I’ve made are entirely mine and not any of the staff’s or anyone associated with USAMRIID. I have only the utmost respect for the facility as well as for the scientists and doctors who do amazing work there.
The same goes for the University of Virginia. And as far as I know there are no live macaque monkeys in the basement of the Old Medical School Building on UVA’s campus.
Though undocumented, there have been stories about monkey traders using the islands in Lake Victoria as dumping grounds for sick monkeys and then going back to retrieve those same monkeys to make up shortages in future shipments.
There are many other facts sprinkled throughout Exposed including those about criminal cases. The phrases in the note found in the doughnut box are actual phrases used by the Beltway Snipers. The impression “Call Nathan R” was found on a letter from the Unabomber. Ted Bundy was arrested in Pensacola, Florida, on Davis Highway in a stolen VW. For any of you who find this sort of trivia as fascinating as I do, I’m including some of my research resource materials.
RESOURCE BOOKS
23 Days of Terror, Angie Cannon and staff of US News & World Report, Pocket Books, 2003.
Amerithrax: the Hunt for the Anthrax Killer, Robert Graysmith, Jove, 2003.
The Hot Zone, Richard Preston, Anchor Books, 1994.
Identifying and Understanding the Narcissistic Personality, Elsa F. Ronningstam, Oxford University Press, 2005.
Inside the Criminal Mind, Stanton E. Samenow, Ph.D., Crown Publishers, 1984, Revised Edition 2004.
Physical Evidence in Forensic Science, Henry C. Lee, Ph.D. and Howard A. Harris, Ph.D., Lawyers & Judges Publishing Company, Inc., 2000.
Profilers: Leading Investigators Take You Inside the Criminal Mind, Edited by John H. Campbell and Don DeNevi, Prometheus Books, 2004.
