by Lis Wiehl
Once the doors opened, he removed his thumb drive and entered a locker room, where researchers and technicians could change into surgical scrubs. He moved forward through a double airlock and entered a work area with a half dozen desks and computer stations, all of them unoccupied. Nothing here was of interest to him. He crossed the room quickly to another door with another Access Restricted sign molded to it. When he used the thumb drive to enter, he found a second set of air locks, and beyond that, a room filled with pressure suits for entering the lab properly.
He donned a suit, attached the temporary oxygen bottle (noting he had fifteen minutes of breathable air), then stepped into the ultraviolet room. There he activated a bank of decontamination lights on a timer. If he had been concerned about bringing microbes into the lab, he would have raised his arms and rotated, but he saw no need to bother. Instead, he waited. The ultraviolet lights shut off after a minute, and he moved into a chemical decontamination room. Nozzles on the wall there showered him with bleach, then blasted him with jets of hot air to dry him off. He’d once heard a BSL4 technician call the process “going through the car wash.” The term seemed completely apropos.
Finally the doors opened to the BSL4 lab itself.
Quinn detached the portable oxygen bottle and attached his pressure suit to the lab’s air supply via a yellow oxygen tube coiling down from the ceiling. He had to stop again, his head throbbing anew. This time he needed to brace himself against a centrifuge to keep from falling. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, objects seemed to be swimming and floating. He squeezed his eyes and slowed his breathing. The throbbing lessened, and when he opened his eyes after a moment, he was able to focus. He had to hurry because he knew he was running out of time, in every sense of the word.
At the far end of the room Quinn saw a glass wall, and beyond it an octopus-like array of surgical arms similar to the surgical robot “DaVinci” that he’d briefly trained on in medical school. Beyond the robot he saw, through a glass door, a rack of test tubes inside an industrial freezer unit. The Doomsday Molecule. It had to be.
He went to the robot’s operation console and turned it on. A message window on the LCD screen asked him to insert his thumb drive. When he did, the screen flashed the words ACCESS DENIED.
He tried manually entering one of Guryakin’s access codes, then another. He tried again and again, until he’d entered all sixteen.
ACCESS DENIED
Quinn took a deep breath. He wondered, What would Tommy do if he were here? He’d probably just throw something through the window, Quinn thought, and then laughed as he realized that was actually a very good idea.
The heaviest thing he could find was a tank containing liquid bleach under pressure, to be used in emergencies when immediate localized decontamination was required. He lifted the tank over his shoulder, aimed the blunt end at the glass, and rammed the window as hard as he could.
A crack appeared in the Plexiglas, and simultaneously a piercing alarm sounded.
He had perhaps a minute. Maybe less. Company was on the way.
He rammed the glass again. The second blow cracked it even further, and the third blow brought it crashing down. Tommy would have escaped unscathed somehow, but Quinn wasn’t Tommy, and he wasn’t able to get out of the way of the glass fast enough to avoid a shard that ripped into his suit and pierced his thigh.
It hurt, but it didn’t matter.
He pulled the shard of glass from his leg, cast it aside, ignored the bleeding, and climbed through the broken window, then used the tank again to break the glass door to the freezer. He removed the rack of test tubes, emptied the contents of each onto a sterile tray, set the tray on the floor, and was about to hit it with the bleach when he stopped. He had to be sure that this was the Doomsday Molecule.
He took the tray back through the broken window. The alarms made his head throb. He found an electron microscope and quickly prepared a slide, ripping off his gloves because they made his movements clumsy and time-consuming.
The virus he saw most closely resembled the rotavirus, looking a bit like a dimpled golf ball with hairs, except that the hairs were moving. It was an ugly thing, and it was alive.
He took the sample and the tray, placed both in a sink, and then emptied the bleach tank into the sink. When he finished, he made another slide and inserted it into the microscope. This time, the golf ball had collapsed like a month-old jack-o’-lantern, and the filaments that had been motile before were still.
It was dead.
Quinn smiled. He’d killed it. The Doomsday Molecule was dead.
He stepped back and noticed that his right shoe had filled with some sort of liquid that made a squishing sound when he walked. The bleach, probably. He ripped the pressure suit off and saw that the bleach was red. Not bleach. Blood.
He took a moment to collect his thoughts, then sent Dani a text: VIRUS LOCATED AND DESTROYED.
He stumbled out of the BSL4 lab, back the way he came. Back through the car wash. He made it as far as the locker room before he had to stop, his head pounding.
He leaned against the wall to brace himself, and instead slid to the floor.
Well, this certainly isn’t good, Quinn thought. You appear to be dying. You’ve got to tell Dani and Tommy what you’ve learned. Think!
He found his phone and dialed 911. When the dispatcher answered, he gave her his name and location and said he’d accidentally stabbed himself in the leg with a piece of glass.
“Yes,” he repeated. “Linz Pharmazeutika campus in Wilton. Building C. Yes. It’s the first building on your right after the gate. I will do my best to meet you in the lobby.”
He struggled to his feet and kept going, realizing that now he was only seeing out of his left eye and had no depth perception. All he could do was keep going for as long as he had the power to move. The vision in his left eye was getting dimmer.
At the elevator, he kicked the chair aside and allowed the elevator doors to close, pressing a button marked G. When it reached the ground floor, he kept the elevator doors closed by pressing the button to override the automatic opening. He tried to think. He heard someone pounding on the doors. His head throbbed. More pounding. He saw the tip of a crowbar trying to pry the elevator doors apart, but he kept his thumb on the button. He waited as long as he could. Just keep moving. One foot in front of the other, for as long as you can.
He allowed the doors to open.
“Put your hands in the air!” someone shouted. It was the security guard, and he was aiming his weapon at a spot between Quinn’s eyes.
“What’s all the excitement?” Quinn asked. He realized three other security guards had their guns drawn and pointed at him. “I’m unarmed.”
“Shoot him,” a voice said. He recognized the voice as Guryakin’s.
Then someone shouted, “Wait!”
When Quinn looked up, he saw the lights of an ambulance flashing in front of the building and a pair of EMTs pounding on the door.
He turned to Guryakin.
“Checkmate,” he said.
Then the pain in his head increased, and the room started to spin and whirl.
Quinn’s legs gave way as everything went black, and he felt himself falling.
34.
December 23
7:04 p.m. EST / 1:04 a.m. HNEC
Cassandra looked out the window of the stateroom. The door was locked. Had she been locked in her own stateroom, she might have made her way down from the balcony, but here, her only escape option was through a twelve-inch porthole. And supposing she made it through that, there was nothing but a fifty-foot drop to the sea. In the distance she saw the tender carrying the crew. Bauer had sent them away as she’d asked, even though she was pretty sure he’d changed his mind regarding his romantic plans for the evening. If nothing else, it seemed apparent now that he didn’t want witnesses.
Worse, he’d taken her phone and thrown it overboard, leaving her without Henry’s wise counsel or any way to call
or signal for help.
She searched the drawers of the room, the closets, the bathroom, looking for anything she might use to defend herself, signal for help, or aid in escape. With a match or a candle, a can of hairspray could be turned into a makeshift flamethrower, or at least that’s how it worked in one of the movies she’d made. There was nothing, not even a lamp she could pull the wiring from and strip away the insulation from the ends to fashion a crude Taser to electrocute the first person to walk through the door. That had worked in a different movie. In the movies she was good at playing the resourceful damsel in distress. In real life, it wasn’t so easy.
It suddenly occurred to her that a piece of glass could be fashioned into a knife with an edge sharp enough to cut someone’s throat. She hadn’t done that in a movie—that one, she thought up all on her own.
The glass in the porthole was too thick to break, but there was a mirror in the bathroom. She was glad she’d decided to wear her Jimmy Choos instead of flats—the heel was the only thing she could find hard enough to break the mirror.
She had the shoe in her hand and was about to strike the mirror with her shoe when the intercom by the door beeped, and she heard a voice.
“Cassandra, this is Udo. You don’t have to press any buttons. Just speak and I’ll hear you.”
“What do you want?” she asked.
“Only to say good-bye,” Bauer said. “I had thought I would have you taken off the boat at the next port of call and put in jail for trying to steal from me, but Vito has convinced me that at this point in the campaign, we can’t afford the publicity that would bring. Apparently I’ve misjudged you. It’s sad, because for a while I was even considering sharing my wealth with you. You didn’t have to steal it. You could have had anything you could ever possibly have wanted. I don’t know who put you up to this, and I don’t really care. At any rate, Vito’s going to handle it.”
“Handle it?” Cassandra said. “You think—you don’t know! You’re not in on it!”
“What is it that I don’t know?”
“You don’t know what that drug is going to do. You think all it’s going to do is make you rich. You’ve been duped. Just like every other stooge they’ve duped for the last thousand years.”
“I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about,” Bauer said. “Nor am I interested in finding out. Vito will handle it.”
“He’s going to kill me—you understand that, don’t you?”
There was a long pause.
“Well, yes, I suppose he will,” Bauer said. “The captain of a ship is an absolute ruler, both judge and jury. I’ve made my decision. What the people who work for me do is not my concern, as long as they help me attain my goals.”
“He doesn’t work for you,” Cassandra said. “You work for him. And you don’t even know it.”
But the intercom was dead.
She returned to the bathroom and closed the door behind her, then covered the mirror with a towel to avoid being stabbed by any flying pieces. She struck the mirror once. Nothing happened. She struck it again and the mirror shattered, several large pieces clattering loudly to the tiled floor. She lowered the towel carefully, catching several long shards in it. One was perfect for her needs, about twelve inches long and two inches wide, with a sharp point at one end. She wrapped the wide end in a washcloth to give it a grip that wouldn’t cut her.
She heard footsteps in the hall and moved to the door, turning the lights off to give her as much advantage as possible. When she heard a key turning in the lock, she pressed her back against the wall next to the door and raised the piece of mirror in her right hand, high above her head. She held her breath. She calculated that the mirror might break if she rammed it against the skull, and decided that her best shot would be to plunge it into Vito’s eye and hope she could push it in far enough to dice his brain.
The door opened.
Someone said, “Cass?”
She brought the glass shard down with all her might—then stopped herself just in time.
“Laurent?”
“There you are,” he said. “Come on. I’ve got a boat waiting.”
“What happened to your accent?”
“Don’t worry—they taught me a bunch of different accents at Langley.”
“You’re CIA?”
He held out his hand to her. “Matthew Shorter,” he said.
She shook his hand.
“We’ll have plenty of time to get to know each other on the Zodiac. This way. Leave your shoes. High heels and inflatables don’t go together.”
He stuck his head out into the corridor to make sure no one was coming, then beckoned to her to follow. They were amidships, headed aft, when she stopped.
“What’s wrong?”
“We can’t go,” she said.
“What?”
“There’s something in his safe.”
“We can’t open his safe,” Shorter said. “I tried. You tried—”
“We don’t have to open it,” Cassandra said. “I just have to make sure nobody ever sees what’s in it.”
“Cass …”
“You can go without me if you want,” she said.
He looked at her, pleading. “Just so you know, I’m not armed,” he said. “They are.”
“We don’t have to be armed,” she said. “Are you coming?”
“I’ll give you five minutes,” he said. “Then we’re leaving.”
She led him down a gangway, having memorized the way when Bauer gave her the initial tour. At the bottom of the stairs, they turned to starboard until she came to the door to the galley.
“This is no time to be thinking of snacks,” he said.
“Look in there,” she told him, pointing. “I need a potato.”
She climbed up on top of an eight-burner range.
“What?”
“Just do it. Get me a potato. A big one.”
She reached behind the range as far as she could until she found what she was looking for, a rubber hose about an inch in diameter, leading from the stove to the propane supply.
But her arm was too short to grab hold of it. She looked for something to hook it with, a ladle perhaps, or a set of tongs. Her gaze fell on the kitchen knives. During the tour, Bauer boasted to her that his chefs used only the sharpest knives, made by a German company, Wusthof, that had once made the finest military swords and bayonets.
Cassandra grabbed the one with the longest blade, a serrated bread knife, and returned to the stove. She blew out the pilot lights first, then reached behind the stove and used the knife to saw through the hose. After a moment of sawing, she heard a hissing sound. She kept sawing until the hose was severed.
“All I could find was a sweet potato,” the CIA agent said when he returned. “What do I smell?”
“Propane,” Cassandra said, taking the sweet potato from him and placing it in the microwave next to the stove. She set the timer for twenty minutes.
“That’s more time than we need,” she told her new friend. “For the first eight minutes or so, it’s going to cook.” She closed all the doors to the galley. “Then it’s going to catch fire and ignite. The propane tank on a ship this size has got to be at least five hundred pounds. A ten-pound tank is big enough to blow up a house.”
“How do you know this stuff?”
“I grew up on boats,” she said. “My mom dated a guy who made a living blowing up people’s boats for the insurance money and making it look like an accident. Let’s go.”
They moved quickly to the fantail and the helicopter landing pad. She was at the top of the spiral staircase leading down to the inflatable Zodiac, the CIA man halfway down ahead of her, when she heard footsteps behind her. She turned.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Vito said.
“I have no—” she began.
Someone grabbed her forcefully from behind, pulling her by the hair with one hand and closing the other around her throat.
“I’ve got her!�
�� Matthew Shorter said, but now he was using his French accent again. “Mr. Bauer thought she’d try to make a run for the boat and sent me here to wait. Go get him. Quickly!”
“But—” Vito said, confused.
“Go get him!” Laurent said, yanking hard on Cassandra’s hair. “I’m sure he’ll want to do this one himself. If I don’t do her first. Go!”
The first mate ran to find Bauer.
“Sorry about the hair,” Shorter said, releasing Cassandra. “I had to make it look real. You okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said, following him down the stairs.
She raced down the staircase to the boat platform. Next to the Zodiac, a pair of Jet Skis hung from davits. Shorter told her to move to the bow, then loaded a pair of red five-gallon gas tanks into the Zodiac behind her. He untied the inflatable from the docking cleat and pushed off.
He let the Zodiac drift free and then started the sixty-horse outboard motor. He revved the throttle and sped away from the ship, glancing over his shoulder as he tried to put as much distance as possible between them and the ship before the propane ignited. “Minorca might be closer, but Sardinia will be easier to find,” he shouted above the engine noise. “Just stay low and try—”
Suddenly, a surprised expression came over his face as he sat up straight, then fell to one side and out of the boat. In an instant he was gone, but Cass realized he’d been shot only when the next bullet ricocheted off the motor and pierced one of the flotation compartments on the port side of the Zodiac, deflating it with a hiss. She looked up and saw Bauer, his face contorted in fury, shooting at her from the fantail with Vito next to him. She lunged and reached for the throttle, turning the motor as far as it would go as a second shot missed. The third shot deflated another flotation chamber at the bow; the rubberized fabric flapped as the air escaped. The Zodiac began to take on water, riding forward but slower now, half submerged and foundering.
As she reached for a life preserver, she turned to see Bauer taking aim again. She was well within range of the rifle. There was nothing she could do but wave. He lowered the gun and waved good-bye. Then he took aim once more.
