Chimera

by Sonny Whitelaw

  She bit her lip, trying to hold back the unfamiliar sensation of tears. It wasn't McCabe who'd publicly humiliated her. She'd done it all by herself.

  "C'mon Jordan, don't beat yourself up over it," said Chuck Long. "We're all entitled to lose the plot once in a while."

  "But not in a hot zone," she replied. "Never, ever in a hot zone."

  The vehicles turned onto the road leading to the hospital compound, and stopped at the barricade. At the sound of angry crowds Jordan looked up. Soldiers climbed out of the trucks and began shouting. In the predawn light she could see that people were trying to get out of as well as into the hospital grounds.

  She was about to jump down from the truck when someone fired a short burst from an automatic weapon. Then everyone was screaming and running. Some fled back into the hospital while others disappeared into nearby buildings.

  With reflexes honed in Iraq, Jordan dived onto the floor of the truck, Chuck landing heavily on top of her. Seconds later, she found herself at the bottom of a pile of very heavy HAZMAT suited bodies. Much to her annoyance, she heard Broadwater's commanding voice, calmly taking control of the situation and settling everyone down. The trucks started moving again and continued into the hospital. By the time Jordan climbed out, almost everyone was already inside. No one bothered to check if she was all right.

  No one being McCabe.

  It wasn't as if she'd expected him to come rushing over, but they had always been aware of each other; a glance of mutual reassurance was all it took. Shots had been fired. McCabe should have been watching her back. She should have been watching his-just like she was watching it right now. He was standing at the entrance to the hospital with his back to her, talking to Nate, Susan Broadwater, Chuck Long, and Glenn Morris, the hospital director. Dismayed by his indifference, she joined them.

  "The problem," declared a visibly shaken Morris, "is that the patients who don't have this chimera are scared shitless and they want out. You can't blame them. They can see what's going on. Almost half- half ," he said, pressing his point with a wave of his hand, "of the nursing staff are sick with this thing. And people are dying by the fistful!"

  "How many new patients came in during the night?" Nate asked.

  "There's a curfew until 6:00 am, that's why so many people were waiting outside when you arrived."

  Susan groaned. "And now they've scattered, taking the infected with them."

  "Worse," said McCabe, looking over their shoulders. "A pack of journalists have just arrived."

  "Oh, well, that's great." Susan glared at Morris. "I warned you what would happen once they got wind of this."

  Morris' eyes narrowed behind his mask. "Get a grip, Colonel. You think you can go running around Nadi in these getups," he said, tugging at his own bright orange HAZMAT suit, "and burn down houses without broadcasting yourself to the world?"

  "Right about now," McCabe muttered to Broadwater. "I wouldn't mind one of Saddam's Special Republican Guard units to come rolling in across the lawn."

  Jordan caught Chuck Long's grim smile. Suddenly, she felt like an outsider. Just a few months ago, McCabe would have said that to her, not Broadwater. Angry with herself for succumbing to such a stupid, childish emotion as jealousy, she pushed past them and into the hospital. She was a doctor; at least in there she might be able to do some good.

  -Chapter 45-

  Fiji, September 03, 2001

  For ten days, Jordan played her role thoroughly and methodically, working with the team to isolate the spread of the chimera, moving from village to village, inspecting, then burning the homes of people who had become infected, and listening with a sympathetic ear to those who'd lost loved ones, possessions, and their livelihood.

  Her upbringing in Vanuatu had inured her to the rudimentary dwellings that many called home. Dirt floors and snuffling pigs, mangy dogs and wary chickens, it was as familiar to her as it was to Nate Sturgess. For the others on the team, those who had been in Iraq, Africa and South America, it was a variation on a common theme, a bizarre juxtaposition of poverty and dignity. Jordan explained kindly but firmly in terms that the villagers understood, that this was a disease they could not treat with traditional medicines, a sickness that passed from the dead to the living. For the sake of their children and mothers, brothers and uncles, the dead had to remain within the barbed-wire confines of the hospital that had become a charnel house, and their possessions had to be burned.

  It had not been pretty, but it had been effective. The number of dead reached almost a hundred before the incidence of new cases began to taper off.

  When Jordan returned to the hotel late on the evening of September second, it was with the knowledge that the last new case was forty-four hours old. The outbreak was officially over. Six patients remained but they would be dead before morning. No one doubted the chimera might have hidden again in some dark corner of a hut or a pile of unwashed bedding, but they had capped the demon. This time.

  Ignoring hotel regulations about nighttime swimming, Jordan plunged into the cool waters of the pool. It was the first time in weeks she'd been able to swim, and she stretched out arm over arm, lap after lap, hoping the rhythmic motion would bring some order to her chaotic emotions.

  On the flight to Fiji, Nate's accusation that she was jealous had rankled. She and McCabe had become a mutually exclusive world of two, equally invested in the same burning need to find and bring down those who had butchered their loved ones and torn their lives apart-until she'd told him about Douglas' secret files. Then he'd begun withholding things. Nothing unusual in that, McCabe was notoriously stingy with information, but not with her, not with the trust that they'd developed during the last years. Not until Susan Broadwater had reappeared.

  Jordan swam faster, trying to get warm, but the memory of Nate's words chilled her. McCabe and Susan had a 'history'.

  How many nights in how many godforsaken grubby hotels had McCabe come banging on her door, or walked in without knocking to wake her from a deep sleep, and insist on talking through some idea through? How many times had they shared a hotel room, camel-skinned tent, or pickup truck and not once, ever, had he made the slightest romantic overture? McCabe had no interest in her as a woman. He seemed to have little or no interest in any woman-or man. He was interested in only one thing.

  Tired of obsessing, she reached the end of the pool and stood in the chest deep water.

  "Hey."

  Jerking her head back, she squinted in the moonlight, and demanded, "Who's there?"

  "Nate."

  "Oh." The pang of disappointment was heavy. She climbed from the pool and accepted his offering of a towel. Despite the limited light, she noticed the spiral burn in his forearm and suddenly, the years of pain and horror snapped into sharp focus. "Nate." She tried to meet his eyes in the darkness. "I am so sorry for what I said to you. I've been a bitch on wheels since we got here."

  "I thought maybe it was just exceptionally pronounced PMS," he quipped.

  She bit her lip. "I never once asked how you were holding up."

  "Believe it or not," he replied. "I've seen worse in the years since. Not as deadly, of course, but we've proved the chimera is containable. What near destroyed me on Mathew was the sense that it was unstoppable, the sheer terror that it could have spread off-island. And of course, that damned volcano doing a Dante's Inferno. How you're holding up is more to the point, isn't it?"

  The night air was cold and she began to shiver. "You want to come back to my room for a drink?"

  "Finally!" he cried in exaggerated relief. "You're propositioning me!"

  "I don't proposition married men." She chuckled, and, wrapping the towel around her waist, headed for her room.

  With an exaggerated sigh, Nate followed.

  "I think-no, I know I've lost my sense of perspective," Jordan said sometime later.

  They were sitting in cane chairs on the hotel room balcony, looking across the beach. The silhouettes of coconut trees framing the moonlit waters of
the South Pacific failed to entrance her; the scene was too familiar.

  "Why did you really resign, Jordan?"

  "The FBI is not the same outfit that I began working for ten years ago, Nate. And I'm not the same person."

  "Nothing to do with Josh, then."

  Was she jealous of Susan? Perhaps, but not romantically. "McCabe has always treated me as a professional. Sure, we became close, as friends and comrades in a very dangerous world, but we've been working together for a very long time."

  Years ago, she might have said that she and McCabe had been working on something that would finally be over in a few weeks, but even that much could alert the Consortium. She could not trust Nate, not entirely. And now, not even McCabe could be trusted. Was she paranoid, or was he sleeping with the enemy? That she could not discern the truth told her that resigning had really been for the best. "I'm not an FBI agent, Nate. Never will be. And when it comes right down to it, as odd as this may sound, I'm not part of that world. Australian forensics has come a long way since 1990; I did some checking after Gran's funeral. With my background I can more or less write my own ticket." She looked up and, meeting his eyes, smiled. "I've decided to come home. For good this time."

  "Your grandmother's place?"

  "Doug left me enough money so I can buy my brother's half." And half of Canberra, for that matter. "Brian and I are sharing the cost of restoring it, then we're putting it up for auction. Tomorrow morning-" she glanced at her watch. " This morning, I'm going to call my solicitor and authorize him to purchase it. That way, Brian gets a fair market price for his half. I've got to return to the States to lease out my apartment in DC." And wait alone, looking on as those who destroyed my life are finally vanquished.

  She fingered the locket on the chain around her neck; inside was a photo of Douglas and Jamie and a snippet of Jamie's hair from when he'd been born. Beside the locket was Doug's wedding ring. She absently rolled it through her fingers. After discovering his secret files, she'd wanted to pull off the ring and toss it away. But McCabe had said Doug wasn't part of the Consortium. He'd been contracted by them to carry what appeared to be a highly classified, US government sanctioned job. Then Doug had tried to assist the FBI in its investigations.

  Somewhere along the line of hotel rooms was McCabe, probably with Susan. His relationship with Susan Broadwater notwithstanding, he was right to dismantle their dependency on one another. After a six-year detour they could finally move on with her lives. She smiled at Nate. "Funny, now that I've made the decision, it feels liberating."

  -Chapter 46-

  New York September 11, 2001

  McCabe felt the sponginess of damp grass beneath his feet, the endless cadence of each step as his feet softly pounded the ground.

  Pound, pound, feel the blood pump, hear your heart beat . He couldn't afford to run himself into exhaustion today. In a few hours, a lifetime of secrets would be exposed. Even if the Consortium were alerted now, right this minute, the Attorney General had enough evidence to arrest every one of them.

  Exposing them, the depth of their decades' long malfeasance would shake up the administration, indeed, much of the world. Some of them would declare diplomatic immunity, many would make bail within hours, but it would be too late to destroy documents and computer files, especially those kept at the Pentagon. Not all of the Consortium members had been as pathologically meticulous as Williams in covering their tracks. The years he and Spinner had spent searching were proof of that. You should never have let me live, Rob. You should have known I'd hunt them down.

  It would be a beautiful day. The sky was free of clouds, the summer foliage in the park was green, and birds chattered in the morning. The skies over Iraq had been blue and cloud free, too, and parts of the landscape, green and inviting. Spinner had said the Iraqi skies reminded her of the skies over the Australian desert.

  He thought back to the first time he'd seen her. High-heeled shoes capped by a bald head and a scowl. Their partnership, a bureaucratic marriage born from mutual needs and forged by circumstance, was finally over. Her quest to find and to bring to justice those who had stood by while the Federal Murrah Building was bombed, was down to its last hours. Today she would have closure. He smiled and shook the sweat from his brow; he only wished his journey could end so well. The pact he'd made with himself was almost over. The old nightmare, the old demons were waiting in the wings. He had no intention of letting them have him.

  Pound, pound, feel the blood pump . So much blood had been spilled by so many people to protect the Consortium's secrets. He wondered how many men he and Spinner had killed, how many running gun battles they had survived. How many times their hotel rooms had been tossed or blown up. How many hours had they spent in planes, trucks, and hotel rooms in pursuit of an endless, international sleight of hand? Brant and Susan had been right. The only way to protect Spinner from the inevitable fallout had been to distance himself from her. Perhaps he was also protecting himself, divorcing himself from his dependency on her, making his decision to do what he had to do less difficult. Unlike him, she was a normal human being, entitled to a normal life. No question that she deserved that.

  His cell phone rang. "McCabe," he answered, slightly breathless.

  "It's done," declared Assistant Director Peter Brant.

  Pound, pound . "All of them?"

  "Three hundred and thirty eight and a thousand and seventy two."

  McCabe broke the connection. Three hundred and thirty-eight arrest and more than a thousand search warrants had been issued across five countries. Most of the arrests were middlemen, but in a few hours the main cast, some of the country's most powerful individuals, would be meeting to discuss their next move in a thirty-year old conspiracy.

  When George W Bush had declared that a high casualty terrorist attack on US soil was a 'fantasy', McCabe had actually found himself sympathizing with his father. What would it take to make the world wake up? Iraq was a hobbled player in a huge, international game where alignments shifted like quicksand. If the demonstration on Mathew Island and the subsequent, secondary infection in Fiji had no impact on current thinking, what would it take? A demonstration on US soil? The Consortium would not get a chance to try.

  Leaving the park, he hit the streets. The hotel was six blocks south. New York wasn't his favourite place, but like any city, early mornings housed a fascinating sub-culture; pigeons and delivery vans, cabs and street vendors, the smell of exhaust fumes and coffee, bagels and, well, New York. He turned and ran along Broadway, already crowded with pedestrians and yellow cabs in a pre-rush hour that never quite seemed to end.

  He reached the hotel, glanced up at the tenth floor and wondered if she was awake. Every day, every night in Fiji he had wanted to go to her. Not as a lover-never that-but he had come to trust her like no other, and he knew the pain that she carried behind her carefully maintained barricades. Her suspicion of Nate Sturgess was clear evidence of that. She was confused and angry. And hurt. Don't forget hurt .

  The first time she'd killed someone had been to protect him. Death she could handle in a pinch, but to take a life had torn her apart. He'd held her that night, while she'd shivered in shock. But she had not cried. The only time he'd ever seen her cry was when she'd learned the truth about her husband. Bitter tears that had soaked his tracksuit. He'd carried her to her bed and held her in his arms, slept with her. But not as a lover. Never, ever as a lover, always as a friend, a companion in a strangely twisted journey through life. Now that, too, was gone.

  Back in his hotel room, McCabe showered and changed. Then he checked the time. Eight thirty. Just an hour, Spinner, and it's all over. Your journey will be complete, your truths understood, the answers you needed, given. It brings you no joy, I know, but it brings closure. Take it, Spinner, take it, go home and get on with your life. And Spinner? Don't look back, for I will not be here. He left his room, went up to hers, and knocked once.

  She opened the door. The confusion in her eyes tore at him. He
fought back the overwhelming urge to tell her the truth, and that he wanted, needed for her to stay with him. Without her he had no excuse to go on.

  But he would not risk her life, not anymore. His phone buzzed. "McCabe."

  "Showtime," said Brant.

  "Everyone?" His unspoken question: was Susan Broadwater amongst them?

  "Yeah. The last ones are in the elevators now."

  Brant hung up. It was the signal for McCabe to leave and join the surveillance vehicle. There he would listen to the Consortium's discussion, hear Susan's words of betrayal. Then the tactical teams would move in.

  Turning her back on him, Jordan walked into the hotel room. The open door was tacit permission for him to follow. "When are you leaving?" she said.

  "Now."

  "One last ditch, McCabe?"

  A dozen times in a dozen countries he'd left her in pursuit of some tenuous lead or another. Because it had not been her job to risk her life. Because she wasn't an agent but a civilian scientist. Yet she'd seen more action that some trained soldiers, been shot at more times than he could count. Killed more often than was good for anyone. "You can see everything from here, Spinner." He walked over to the window. The view from this angle was perfect. She would see every one of them-including Susan Broadwater-marched into black cars with tinted windows, and then driven away. "McVeigh's dead, and these are the last of them," he added unnecessarily.

  "It's been a strange six years, Special Agent McCabe," she said softly.