Germ

by Robert Liparulo

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I’ve very serious. Divulging what we say to anyone—the media, your mother—will result in your arrest and imprisonment. Is that clear?”

  Her stomach tightened. Did he say mother simply to stress the comprehensiveness of the prohibition, or was he saying something? Did he know about her mother, her being alone, her illness? Was he threatening her?

  “We’ve got killers after us, and you’re telling me you’ll throw me in jail for talking?”

  “I can’t say more without your indicating that you understand the confidential nature of our conversation and the consequences for violating this confidence.”

  She suspected he was more interested in establishing his credibility with her than binding her to a gag order.

  “I understand and agree.”

  “And what is your whole name?”

  She told him.

  “Now, please, let me speak to Dr. Parker and his brother.”

  She hesitated. Was he trying to establish that they were together? Was there any reason to keep it secret? She couldn’t think of any. She handed the phone to Allen.

  He listened, then said, “Allen Douglas Parker.” Listened. “I agree.” He handed the phone to Stephen, who went through the process, then held the phone over his shoulder for Julia to take.

  “Okay, now—”

  “My name is Kendrick Reynolds.”

  “Kendrick Reynolds?”

  Allen’s eyes got big. He mouthed the name.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “Of course. Former secretary of state. Former director of the CIA. Advisor to, what, eight presidents?”

  “Ten,” he corrected.

  “Billionaire,” Allen added.

  “I assume,” the man claiming to be Kendrick Reynolds said, “you can confirm my identity through the computer files you stole.”

  “You said you can help us.”

  “I can protect you.”

  “The way you protected Goodwin Donnelley and Despesorio Vero?”

  “My point exactly. They were on their own, away from my protection. Their fate does not have to be yours.”

  “And how do we help you?”

  “I believe you have something Despesorio Vero was bringing me.”

  “To you? He showed up at the CDC. I heard tapes of his calls. He never mentioned you.”

  “I am the only person who can stop Karl Litt.”

  “From doing what?”

  “Honestly, I do not know.” He sounded even more tired than previously. “But considering Karl’s … expertise, I have some ideas.”

  “Such as?”

  “A biological attack on the United States.”

  “And who is Karl Litt to you?”

  “A bad investment.”

  “You’re in business with him?”

  “He worked for the government at one time. Now he doesn’t.”

  Allen touched her shoulder. He whispered, “Could they be tracing the call?”

  She nodded. “Give me a number where I can reach you.”

  “Ms. Matheson, you can end this now. Thousands of lives—”

  “A number or we never speak again.”

  She waited. After a long moment, he recited a number and a security code. She closed the flip phone and dropped it out the window.

  sixty-one

  Kendrick Reynolds cradled the handset and looked at his assistant. Captain Landon watched him carefully, unsure of Kendrick’s mood.

  “Interesting,” was all Kendrick would say. He pulled a breath through the mouthpiece of his God-head pipe, found it had gone out, and plucked it from his mouth.

  Maybe it was for the best that Julia and the Parkers knew precisely who they were dealing with. He didn’t know about Stephen Parker, but reports on Allen Parker pegged him as some sort of medical Einstein, and just now Julia had made her intelligence abundantly clear. These were the kind of people who didn’t believe in “the man behind the curtain”; they wanted names and faces and resumes.

  Now they have mine, he thought.

  That both frightened and exhilarated him. If laying himself bare before people who had the evidence not only to destroy his future but to dismantle his past resulted in finding Litt and burying that very evidence against himself—well, this could turn out to be his most brilliant play yet. What a way to end his career. Absently, he ran a finger over the face of God.

  Of course, Matheson and the Parkers themselves were loose ends that would need tying up. But for now, he needed only to get his hands on whatever it was Vero had left and Litt was trying to get back. Something, definitely. The woman had all but admitted to having it.

  His eyes refocused on the captain. “Anything?” he asked.

  Captain Landon checked his monitor. He pushed a button and spoke into a mouthpiece clamped to his head.

  Kendrick wheeled himself back, spun his chair, and positioned it near a recliner. He reached out and got hold of a wooden cane. He rocked his body out of the chair, leaning heavily on the cane. Aiming for the room’s exit, he took two halting steps. His third was more sure.

  “Sir?” the captain called behind him.

  Kendrick didn’t look back or stop his gait; he was shuffling but moving along at a good clip.

  “The cell phone has stopped moving. Our team will intercept it in twenty minutes.”

  Kendrick waved his free hand. “Ah! She got rid of it. We can only hope she calls.”

  Seventy seconds later, he made it to the door and stepped through.

  “Do you trust him?” Stephen asked. He was still steering the van through the streets of Atlanta. Being a moving target gave them a small measure of comfort.

  “Not as far as I can throw this van,” Allen said.

  “I don’t know,” Julia said.

  “Look,” Allen snapped, “he wants the evidence kept secret and claims Vero was bringing it to him. That means he’s involved.”

  “He’s offering to help,” Stephen reminded him.

  “What else would he say? ‘I want to kill you for the evidence and because you know too much. Let’s meet’?”

  “He may be our best chance of getting out of this mess intact.”

  Stephen wasn’t completely convinced of his own words, Julia could tell, but he wanted to examine all the possibilities.

  “Our best chance of getting killed, more likely,” Allen said. “For all we know, Kendrick Reynolds is behind this whole thing. It makes sense: He’s got the money and the power to do everything we’ve witnessed. Finding us. Sending cops to kill us—Julia, you said it had the government’s fingerprints all over it; this guy’s as government as they get. Hiring ‘the world’s best assassin.’ Come on!”

  She let Allen’s voice fade into the throaty drone of the engine. Deep in concentration, she stared out at the city, at its eclectic people and architecture, at its silent clash of old and new, beautiful and ugly. She was vaguely aware of sunlight slicing through the van at a different angle each time Stephen rounded a corner; of the rising temperature, turning the air muggy and soporific; of an increasing sense of being nothing more than a bit player in a tragedy already written and rolling along toward an unknown climax. All of it could have too easily congealed into an atmosphere of hopelessness.

  For that reason, Julia accepted this new wrinkle, this stranger bearing gifts or traps, as a challenge. If Kendrick Reynolds turned out to be what he claimed, a friend, then she’d lose nothing by waiting a little longer, learning a little more. If he was another face of the monster that pursued them, she was hell-bent on knowing that before their next encounter. His offer of assistance could be an oasis or a mirage. She wasn’t going to stop looking for water until she knew for sure.

  At last she said, “He may be able to help us, but he wants us to help him too. He’s asked us to turn over the data from the memory chip. He’s in a much better position to know what any of it means. Maybe sharing it with him will give him the ammunition to fight
our foes for us. Then again, what if his seeing the evidence means he no longer needs us or wants to help us? We’ll have lost a bargaining chip. I think we need to know more before we make that decision.”

  “So, what?” Stephen asked. “Investigate more?”

  “That’s my two cents,” she said. She picked up another cell phone and began readying it for use.

  Allen tapped the top end of a pack of Camels against the dash. He glanced back at her. “Now what?”

  She powered up the laptop. “Atropos is still looking for us. The airport records show his plane is still in Chattanooga, right?” He nodded. “Then let’s go to Chattanooga.”

  sixty-two

  Silently, Allen slipped out the door between two hang

  ars and began making his way toward the tarmac. Thick shadows had already filled the man-made canyon he traversed, but the orange glow of dusk still blazed at its far end like fading embers. The fingers of his left hand skipped lightly along the corrugated metal side of the hangar he had exited; his left arm cradled a package hidden beneath his beige Windbreaker.

  He crossed the narrow alley and stopped with his back pressed against the other building, two feet from the corner. He scratched savagely at his beard, flipped his salt-and-pepper ponytail off his shoulder. Three quick breaths, then he edged to the corner and peered around.

  Beyond the hangars stretched three rows of parked airplanes. Most were compact, two-and four-man rides, tied down to keep them from flipping in a stiff wind. Here and there private jets gleamed above their propellered brethren. And past them all, well away from the rest, sat the one he had come for—a white Cessna Citation CJ2, tail number N476B.

  He was about to swing out into the open when he glanced in the other direction—toward the majority of buildings, the terminal, and the control tower—and saw a white pickup truck speeding along the taxiway toward him, amber strobes flashing atop its cab. He stepped back into the shadows.

  This is not a good idea, Allen thought as the truck flashed past the alley.

  Trouble was, it was their only idea that didn’t involve putting their tails between their legs and scampering away like scared dogs. He scratched at the fake beard again; the spirit gum Julia had used to affix it was drying, and it itched.

  He poked his head around the corner again and caught the truck hooking a U-turn in front of the parked planes. Within seconds it swept past him again, heading toward the terminal and busier parts of the airfield.

  It had been Julia’s excitement that had hooked him. As little as he thought of her plan, he wanted to disappoint her even less. She was just so … darn cute. He smiled wryly. How many times had his libido led him blissfully over the cliff of bad ideas? Too many to count. And now this doozy.

  In his mind’s eye, he saw Julia’s smile—faltering when she caught his looks of concern—as she laid it all out, grabbing things from her gym bag to show them, drawing invisible diagrams in the air with her finger.

  “If I’m reading the guys who’re after us right, they’re

  control freaks,” she had explained as the van moved toward their first destination, S & L Law Enforcement Provisions, Inc. “Allen, they knew everything about you before Vero’s body had even cooled. Your address, Stephen’s. They found out who transported Goody from the bar to the hospital, who assisted you in the ER—and had them killed.”

  For a moment, her lips had pressed together bitterly. Not in anger, Allen thought. Not entirely. He suspected a heavy dose of sorrow motivated the gesture. She didn’t even know the EMTs or the nurses, but their senseless deaths grieved her.

  “The point is,” she continued, “I don’t think they’ll be able to stand a new, unknown player in the game.”

  “Player? What new player?”

  She cocked her head innocently. “You.”

  “Me?”

  “You’re taller than the average male Caucasian, but not remarkably so. If we disguise your features enough, they’ll think you’re someone who knows them, but they won’t know you.”

  “And how will they learn about this ‘new player’?” he asked, condescending.

  “He’s going to try to break into their jet.”

  “Atropos’s jet?”

  She nodded.

  Allen crossed his legs, then his arms. “Why break in?”

  “Two objectives. If no one’s there, see if there’s anything that’ll identify who hired him.”

  “What do you mean, if no one’s there? If I do this, there’d better not be anyone there.”

  “If Atropos or whoever he has working for him—a pilot maybe— does see you, then you want to leave this …”

  She leaned over, rooted in her gym bag, and held up the gauntlet.

  “But you can’t just leave it,” she continued. “You have to pretend to lose it accidentally, drop it while running away or something.”

  Allen shook his head. “Why give it to them at all? You really are an exasperating woman.”

  She set the gauntlet on her lap, and again she fumbled around in the gym bag. When she straightened, empty-handed, Allen presumed she’d misplaced something. Then he noticed the item resting in her upturned palm. It was about the size of a dime, but several times thicker, black. He leaned closer.

  “A satellite-assisted tracking device,” she announced. “Goody was going to place it on Vero so we wouldn’t lose him. I have the equipment to track this puppy to hell and back. It’s a beacon of the gods—as close to omniscience as we’ll ever get.”

  She examined the device, used her fingernail to rotate an almost invisible switch set into its case. Then, picking up the gauntlet, black and muscular and hideous, she carefully slipped in her hand, the tracking device on a fingertip.

  “I’m going to put the SATD into one of the fingers. If I’ve guessed right, Atropos will want to find out who was walking around with one of his own special weapons and who made an attempt to breach his plane.” She withdrew her arm, then shook the gauntlet a few times to make sure the device wouldn’t fall out. “The only clue he’ll have is the gauntlet.”

  Allen nodded. “He’ll have it examined it for fingerprints.”

  “I’m counting on that to keep him from finding the SATD too soon. He’ll want to preserve any fingerprints that may be inside. Kendrick said Atropos is freelance; he goes where the jobs and the money are. I think he’ll turn to his current employer for help in finding out who this new guy is. And I bet Litt has the means to lift and analyze a fingerprint. By the time they discover the tracking device, I’m praying that it’s smack in the middle of their home base.”

  “So he takes it to them, and we find out where they are,” Stephen said from the driver’s seat. His deep voice was frigid, all business.

  “Wait a sec,” Allen said. “Why can’t we simply attach it to their plane? Wouldn’t that be safer?”

  “We can’t be sure the Citation will go all the way to their base. What if they land at a major airport and take another form of transportation to their final destination?”

  “And even if they don’t use the plane,” Stephen said, “if they send it by courier or something, we’ll still find out where they are.”

  Despite himself, Allen felt excitement lift his mood. “Want to bet it ends up at whatever swank address Kendrick Reynolds calls home?” he asked. “Or at one of the agencies he controls?”

  Stephen cranked the wheel, jostling the van over what felt like a canyon wall. Allen turned to see the cop supply store’s front window looming large in the windshield.

  “First, Allen, we make sure you’re well protected,” Julia said behind him. “Then we make you look like someone Atropos doesn’t know.”

  sixty-three

  Now, disguised as Julia’s “new player,” Allen tried not to think of how completely alone he was. Julia and Stephen were waiting in the hangar, in the comfort of a Lear jet they’d secured as a staging area for this “operation,” as Julia called it. He mustered his courage and edged to the corner of t
he hangar. He peered first left, at the parked planes, then right, toward the distant terminal.

  All clear.

  He stepped out of the shadowy alley and into the waning light, heading toward Atropos’s Cessna. He walked along the front of a hangar, past the huge closed doors, moving fast. At the last hangar before a long stretch of tarmac, he heard music and saw that the sliding doors stood about five feet apart. As he approached, Freddie Mercury’s mournful vocals swelled:

  Mama, just killed a man

  Put a gun against his head

  Pulled my trigger, now he’s dead …

  A loud clang, followed by a string of expletives, slipped out the door. Allen hurried past the opening without looking. A sign jutted from the corner of the hangar: CAUTION—AIRPLANE CROSSING. He walked under it, casting a furtive glance to the left at an abandoned-looking building fifty yards beyond the end of the hangar. Wooden crates, oil drums, and tires formed a huge wedge against one side.

  For about sixty seconds he felt utterly exposed—empty tarmac stretching away to a runway on his right; on his left, only crumbling asphalt, followed by a field of dry weeds for a hundred yards to the perimeter fence. Behind him lay the hangars, and way past them, the terminal. He resisted the urge to look over his shoulder. Instead, he tried to identify the planes he was approaching: a Beechcraft Bonanza, a Piper Cherokee, a Gulfstream IV—sweet. Then he was among the planes and felt the burden of exposure fade away like the remaining light.

  The Cessna loomed larger with each plane he passed. It was parked at least fifty paces from the last plane. Worse, it was canted toward the terminal, toward him. A person sitting in the cockpit would have to be blind to miss his approach. But he needed to get right on top of the thing for Julia’s scheme to work. To get there, he hoped to come off as an aviation geek with a weakness for big-ticket jets; later he’d be the menace Julia thought the assailants would respond to.

  He stepped up to the last plane before the Cessna, putting it between himself and his target. It was a Piper Saratoga, the model that carried John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, and his sister-in-law to the bottom of the Atlantic. He pretended to examine the nose propeller but was actually scrutinizing the Cessna. The cockpit windows were too high, the interior too dark to know whether he was being watched in return. Through the six oval port windows on this side, he caught movement, a flicker as though someone had walked past all of them. Again light flickered against them, and he realized something inside was strobing softly, a television or computer screen, or maybe a security device.