by Brad Taylor
She broke away and said, “You going to be here later?”
His face clouded from the drink, he said, “Oh yeah, I’ll be here. All night waiting on you.”
She picked up her food, kissed him on the cheek, and said, “I’ll come back later and check you for a fever.”
“Wait! What’s your name?”
“Elina. But my friends call me the Black Widow.”
The statement caused the men to stare at her in confusion. One man gave a forced laugh. He was soon joined by others, and the laughter grew until the man slapped her on the butt, now sure he was in on the joke.
She left the bar listening to the band of haters shouting and cheering.
57
I waited for the VPN to connect, not liking that I was going to have to give Kurt Hale the same situation report as yesterday: We’d lost both the general and the carrier and hadn’t been able to pick them up again.
We’d spent the last three days pulling out everything we had to get a lead, working around the clock, but had come up empty. We had some possibles that the Taskforce men in the rear were tracking. A tick here and a tick there. Some flight-manifest names they might have been traveling under, but I wasn’t holding my breath.
In truth, I’d been going at the problem with only half of my brainpower, worried beyond belief about Jennifer. I’d spent each day mindlessly churning over whatever I could find to keep the team and me busy, and then each night lying wide awake wondering if she was going to die. Feeling the clock ticking inexorably toward an answer I didn’t want to hear. It was paralyzing.
Two days ago, I’d had forever to convince Jennifer about my worth. To connect. Now I had nothing. I had lost the chance. Something I had taken for granted was gone. Just like missing my daughter’s birthdays.
The closest I’d come had been after I’d killed the man who had assaulted her. When it was done, I’d tentatively bared my soul, letting her know where I stood, not even sure if I believed it myself. We were both so banged up emotionally, it was hard to separate fantasy from feelings. To separate a world I wished existed from the reality I lived. She’d responded initially but then shut down. It didn’t hurt, because I’d understood. I’d waited to give her time to come to grips with her trauma. To realize, like I had, that there may not be gold at the end of the rainbow, but there was a rainbow. And now I’d waited too long. When would I learn?
She was locked in a room waiting to get bloodshot eyes, and I was tracking the damn terrorist who had caused it. It made me rethink again what the hell I was doing with my life.
I’d lost my family while I was out fighting in the name of national defense, and now, because I’d brought her into the Taskforce in a misguided attempt to close some loop, I was going to lose the one person on earth who had ever measured up to my wife. I wondered if she was cursing me in heaven.
Jennifer had quarantined herself, providing updates four times a day. Now that it was day three, without any sign of infection, I was feeling a lot better. She didn’t have the virus. I was sure of it. After the incident, on a VPN, we’d talked to the doctor who’d concocted the death soup, now ensconced at an undisclosed location, and he had said if she made it to day three, she was good to go.
But somebody else was infected, and we didn’t know where that carrier had gone.
I saw a shadow on the screen and Kurt sat down in front of the camera. I gave him a succinct rundown, which wasn’t a whole lot different from the one I’d given yesterday. He didn’t seem particularly upset at the news. More like resigned to the inevitable.
I then found out why. He said, “The council is now split down the middle based on your initial report. Half believes the general just sent it home to Iran. The other half believes there’s a carrier running loose.”
The idea was ludicrous. “They believe the words of an IRGC general over what Jennifer saw with her own eyes? Jesus, Malik was just trying to get us off the chase! I wish I had never even included the conversation in the SITREP.”
“People still can’t believe that Iran would release the virus when it’s not a weapon they can control. It’ll hit them as well. They think it makes more sense as a potential weapon. Something to use as a last-resort threat, to keep us off of them.”
“Sir, Jennifer saw the woman inject herself.”
“We don’t know what was in that syringe. Could have been saline water. Something exactly like what you’re saying: misdirection to keep us from trying to interdict the real virus.”
“You believe that?”
He leaned back, then rubbed his eyes. “No. No, I don’t. I think there’s a carrier, and it’s coming here.”
“What’s the president’s vote?”
He shook his head. “The president is bedridden. He’s gotten worse, and the doctors say it’s because he won’t get rest. The administration has officially released his condition, and there’s overt grumbling from all the pundits about passing command to the VP until he’s better. It’s a mess.”
He seemed a little distracted himself. Not the usual crisp, commanding guy I was used to. He looked tired. Aged.
He said, “They’re covering all the bases, however. The carrier is now designated DOA.”
Which shocked the hell out of me. DOA stood for dead or alive and was a Taskforce designation almost never used. It meant the target was a distinct and urgent threat to national security and could be killed instead of captured. It was very, very sensitive, for obvious reasons, and meant the council truly was frothing at the mouth.
I said, “The vice president authorized that?”
“He did, but just as a mouthpiece. There’s a civilian on the council who’s been screaming about the threat of the virus. He’s some kind of corporate bigwig who owns a plethora of pharmaceutical companies, and he’s become something of a subject-matter expert. Everyone’s listening to him. Even the ones who think the virus is in Iran.”
The answer was disgusting to me. I couldn’t believe there’d be a vote on DOA if anyone had a doubt. I would never make that decision unless I was absolutely sure, which is why their doing so scared the hell out of me.
“So someone on the council, who in his heart is sure the virus is in Iran, is willing to kill a civilian he believes is no threat?”
“Pike, nobody knows what the threat is. They think it’s everywhere and will mitigate it any way they see fit. How’s Jennifer?”
The abrupt shift took me off guard, but I was glad to be on happier news. “She’s fine. No indications of infection. I brought the Gulfstream over from Hong Kong. We can fly tomorrow. I’m pretty sure this place is a dry hole anyway. The carrier is either headed to the US or already there. Just give us the word.”
He glanced offscreen, then returned. “Yes. Fly home tomorrow. Pike, they want to check out Jennifer. They want to make sure she isn’t infected.”
His earlier words about not knowing the threat raised a little sniggle of warning. A touch of something rotten. “What? I just told you she wasn’t infected.”
I could tell he didn’t like what he was about to say.
“She took the final vaccine from the doctor when you were in Singapore. The one that he never got to test to see if it worked. They just want to check her out. It’s for her own good.”
“The whole team took the damn vaccine. So what? She’s not sick.”
“Pike, we don’t know if that vaccine is worth a shit. It never went through any trials. It could work just like the other ones that were tested. If you or the others got the virus, we’re pretty sure you’d be dead. Not the same with Jennifer. They’re afraid she’s become another carrier.”
Whoa. No way. “Sir, she’ll come up hot on an antibody test because of the vaccine regardless. The doctor said that. They can’t prove she’s a carrier, and they won’t be willing to believe it was the vaccine that caused the positive test. It’ll take
a week to prove she’s not infected. A week we don’t have.”
He raised his voice, getting angry for the first time. “We can’t take that risk, damn it. Just get her here. It’ll be okay.”
I sat in silence, knowing this conversation was about to go from bad to worse.
He repeated, “It’ll be okay, Pike.”
“Sir, you were on the call with the doctor, remember? The one thing he said was she would have massive bloodshot eyes twenty-four to forty-eight hours after contact with the virus, vaccine or otherwise. She never had that. She’s not infected.”
“This isn’t a discussion. Get her home.”
“Sir, she’s the only one who knows what the carrier looks like. If they think she might be infected, they have to know the carrier is—and Jennifer is currently the only human being on the planet who can spot her.”
“Look, Pike, I won’t let her get hurt.”
I said, “I know you won’t. I’m not so sure about everyone else. But even you will get her locked up to prevent her from spreading a disease on the off chance she’s contagious. A virus that she doesn’t have.”
He clenched a fist and pounded the table. “I don’t like this any more than you do, but we follow orders. Get her ass home or turn over the team to Knuckles and let them do it.”
I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. Still staring at the screen, looking Kurt in the eyes, I raised my voice. “Knuckles. Get in here.”
Kurt’s face showed surprise. Speaking to him, I said, “You people have lost your minds. I’m not bringing her home to a bunch of handwringers who can’t even decide what the danger is. People who are willing to kill a civilian even when they don’t think she’s a threat. You think I’m going to trust them with Jennifer’s life?”
The door opened, and Knuckles said, “What’s up?”
I stood. “The commander would like to talk to the new team leader.”
58
I sat in the anteroom of our makeshift TOC, waiting for the conversation to play out in the bedroom.
Blood was the only other teammate around. He looked at me quizzically but had the presence of mind not to ask any questions. He saw my expression and was content to toy with the bandage on his arm.
I went through the data on the table, absently flipping through the myriad of different leads we had been following. I saw the forensics report off Ernie’s phone, the one that Knuckles had retrieved from the bushes after he’d used it to bait us.
The report had taken time to compile and we hadn’t been able to focus on it until after my weird meeting with the general. The numbers in it had proven useless. All of them were tied to cell phones we already knew, with the exception of one: Ernie had called a number that hadn’t spiked, but he had hung up before it connected. In essence, it was just an entry in his call log, with no corresponding cellular data.
The number was very close to one of the others we’d been tracking. Outside of the country code—which was for Iran—it was only two digits off from another cell phone we already had. After it had come up empty yesterday the analysts had decided that it was a misdial. That Ernie, in his panicked state, had botched the call, then realized it before it connected. But you never knew. Just because it wasn’t panning out here didn’t mean we needed to throw it away.
I folded up the paper and put it in my pocket just as Knuckles entered the room. He looked like he’d been forced to drink sour milk. He even looked a little green.
He said, “You know what he told me.”
“Yeah. And it’s not going to happen. That’s the only reason I waited here. To tell you that. Let it go. I’m taking Jennifer with me and flying commercial.”
“Pike . . . I can’t let you do that. Don’t make this any worse than it is. Kurt says you can be with her every step of the way.”
“I believe Kurt. I truly do, but he’s not in charge there. He can say that all he wants, right up until he has to tell me the plan’s changed.”
“Come on, Pike. Nobody’s going to hurt her. You act like we’re the damn Iranians. You’re talking about the United States government. They aren’t going to do anything harmful to her.”
I shook my head. “Knuckles, they were going to leave you to rot in Thailand. You. The government isn’t automatically good. I’m sure every Japanese-American believed the government’s words, right up until we threw them into a camp in World War Two.”
“Jesus, Pike! What the hell are you talking about? World War Two? You can’t compare this to what we did then. The threat was overwhelming. We had Pearl Harbor for God’s sake.”
I stood up, closing the distance to him. “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of. It’s not my judgment that’s clouded. It’s theirs, because the threat is overwhelming, and they’re too blind to see that Jennifer is the only one who can prevent it from becoming real.”
He held up his hands, trying to calm me down. “Pike, we don’t get to make our own orders. Let’s get back and get her checked out. The president will be up on his feet in a few days. He won’t let anything happen, and honestly, they have a point. We can’t just wait to see if she makes someone sick.”
“She’s not going to make anyone sick, damn it!”
Unbidden, his comment sent a thought spearing through my brain like a flashlight in a dark room, illuminating the answer on the wall.
Without a word, I stormed out of the suite. I was four doors away from Jennifer’s quarantine room when Knuckles caught up with me.
“What are you doing?”
I reached the door and banged on it, shouting, “Open up.”
I heard, “What do you want? You can’t come in, Pike.”
“Open this door, right now.”
She cracked it and said, “Pike, please. Go away.”
Knuckles stumbled back when her face appeared, showing me he believed she was a threat.
I said, “You’re not sick. You said so today.”
She said, “Yeah, but—”
I pushed open the door and closed in on her. “Kiss me.”
“What?”
I wrapped my arm around her waist and jerked her to me. She fought, turning her head and screaming, “Pike, no! What the hell are you doing?”
I closed my other hand around the back of her head and prevented her from moving. I kissed her full on the lips, holding it until I was sure, her squirming to get out of my grasp. I let her go and she sprang away like an animal, slamming her fists against me, her face wild.
Knuckles stood outside the door, flabbergasted.
I said, “You want to try to stop me, go ahead, but remember, if Jennifer’s a carrier, I’m now fucking highly contagious.”
59
Patrick Rathbone awoke with a splitting headache. Not entirely unusual, but the size of the pain was a little out of the ordinary. Called “Bone” by his friends, he spent most nights drinking more than he should.
He staggered to his feet, kicking the clothes from the night before in his small, one-bedroom apartment. He put his hands to his head, attempting to quell the raging hammers pounding his skull.
I really need to stop the boozing. At least on weeknights.
Four years out of college, he was still trying to find his way. With a degree in finance, he liked to tell everyone at home that he worked on Wall Street. Which, technically, he did.
He’d tried to enter the world of money but had failed. Like a hayseed blonde taking a bus to Hollywood, he’d expected to make his way on his charisma alone and found the job market not exactly embracing him. You needed an in from someone already there. Or, lacking that, a skill that few possessed. He had neither, and now he was a special assistant to an equities trader he longed to emulate. But getting coffee and dry cleaning wasn’t the way to break through.
He knew that, of course, but like souls everywhere, he toiled away believin
g that tomorrow he’d get started on his life. He’d allowed the bonfire of his earlier ambition to die down to a smattering of embers, along with his circle of friends, who were just as lost as he was. All living in the Big Apple but none tasting the fruit that was promised.
Today, he needed to get his ass to work before he was fired for not showing up with a triple latte.
He staggered to his sliver of a bathroom, his head splitting open in pain. He placed both hands on the counter and stared bleary-eyed into the mirror, shocked at what he saw.
His eyes looked like the sign of the devil. Red orbs staring back, crisscrossed with veins, scaring him.
Jesus Christ. What did I drink last night?
In truth, he hadn’t tied one on hard for two days, when that hot Eastern European girl had said she’d give him a blow job. Of course, that bitch had left him hanging.
He took a shower, hoping it would make him feel better. By the time he was done, he felt worse. Like the hangover to end all hangovers. He staggered to his small dresser and began dragging out clothes, losing track of what he was trying to do.
He pulled on his socks, feeling like he was walking dead. He shook his head, focused on getting to work. On saving his job. He took two steps toward his tiny sliding closet and fell to his knees, the pain in his head overpowering. A wave of nausea overcame him. He spewed vomit for a full ten seconds, then began hacking and wheezing. He crawled through the bile, his stomach clenching over and over, a small part of him incongruously embarrassed at the mess.
A larger part spiked in fear. He knew something was wrong. This wasn’t the drinking. He crawled to the phone, oblivious to the strings of phlegm trailing from his nose and joining the stream of puke dripping from his mouth. He dialed 911.
By the time they answered, he was unconscious.
60
