Hard Road

by J. B. Turner

  A woman boater rushed across the deck. “What’s wrong with her?” she asked again.

  “You got a car?” he asked.

  “Sure. What’s wrong with her?”

  “We need to get her to the hospital. Right fucking now.”

  The woman ushered Reznick to her car, which was parked close by as some alarmed tourists gasped as he barged past them on the gangway. Reznick opened the back door and laid his daughter on her side in the back seat. He climbed in beside her, holding her tight. “Let’s move it!” he said.

  The woman started up the engine. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Just get her to the hospital. She’s quite sick.”

  The journey took five long minutes. Reznick held his daughter’s hand as he barked at the woman to floor the gas pedal. A short while later the car screeched to a halt outside the Lower Keys Medical Center.

  Reznick pulled his daughter out of the back seat and carried her into the main waiting area as if she was a sleeping child. “Drug overdose,” he shouted. “I need help!”

  He didn’t see anyone.

  “Emergency!”

  A doctor and two nurses ran forward and placed her on a gurney, before rushing her towards the trauma room.

  “What sort of drugs has she taken?” the doctor demanded to know Reznick ran alongside the gurney.

  Reznick told them about the heroin she was given and the doses of Naloxone he had tried.

  “How long has she been like that?” the doctor snapped.

  “I don’t know. A day. A couple of days. Maybe less. I gave her a couple of shots of Naloxone about half an hour ago.”

  “What the hell are you doing with Naloxone?”

  “I’m her father. I found her. I tried to bring her round. Can you save her?”

  “Did you give her the heroin?”

  “Are you fucking serious? I just want you to save my daughter.”

  “We’ll take it from here,” he said, turning away.

  A nurse ushered him towards a waiting area as Lauren was wheeled through some double doors and into the trauma room. He felt helpless as he slumped down in a seat, head in his hands.

  Then he closed his eyes and began to pray.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Just before 10pm in the FBI’s office in North Miami Beach, assistant director Martha Meyerstein was observing from behind a one-way mirror as Dr Frank Luntz ate hot chicken soup and cheese sandwiches in a windowless interview room. He sat hunched at a table and had a noticeable shake. But he seemed in overall good physical health despite his ordeal with Reznick.

  She had trusted Reznick down in Key West and her instincts had paid off. The powers that be within the FBI would say it was wrong to aid Reznick. She knew it was against all the rules and laws she had learned. Her father always stressed the importance of ethics, the sanctity of the law and of doing things the right way. He might have forged a reputation as a pit bull in court, but he was also a stickler for protocol.

  The more she thought of it the more she realised she had crossed the line and had not acted as an Assistant Director of the FBI should. She had crossed over into muddied waters. Suddenly there was no right and wrong and there was no law. And a growing sense that she would live to regret her deal with Reznick.

  She stared through the one-way mirror at Luntz. The team of doctors who had only finished examining him ten minutes earlier said he showed signs of trauma and anxiety, which wasn’t surprising in the circumstances. They cautioned against pressurizing Luntz to speak. But that wasn’t an option as there as too much at stake.

  She needed to find out exactly what had happened and what he knew about Caan, before Luntz was handed over to Dr Adam Horowitz and his team of scientists, for a full debrief.

  Meyerstein felt another yawn coming on and covered her mouth. What she wouldn’t give for a good night’s sleep. Even a bad night’s sleep would be something.

  She picked up the file on Luntz and opened it up. A recent photo his wife had taken before Luntz was kidnapped showed the scientist carefree, playing football with his children in a park.

  She couldn’t remember the last time she had spent quality time with her own children. She’d only managed a five-minute phone conversation with them before they caught the bus to school earlier that day. When she phoned to let them know she’d be away for at least a couple more days, her mother, who had moved down from Chicago on a semi-permanent basis since her split three months earlier, sounded stressed and Meyerstein felt guilty that she couldn’t say for sure when she’d be back home. She didn’t want to entrust a nanny to look after her kids, and she didn’t know any of the mothers at her children’s school well enough to impose. But she knew she couldn’t rely on her mother forever.

  The more she thought of how little she saw her kids and how little time she spent in the home, the more she realised they were becoming a distant second to her job. That wasn’t right. No matter how important her job, her children should come first. They needed their mother. She missed bathing them in the evenings. She missed talking about the Chicago Bears, and how when she was a kid, she was dragged down to Soldier Field in all weathers with the rest of her family to watch granddad’s beloved team. She missed her dad a lot. She sometimes wished she could phone him to talk things over about how she was feeling. He instinctively knew, perhaps that came with experience, of what to do. How far to push things. He always knew there was not just the law, but a moral code to adhere to. Lying and cheating, to him, was a sign of weakness. But she knew that even if she did speak to him, being all touchy feely and opening up wasn’t his strong suit. She also missed the school plays, the soccer mom routines which most of her kids’ classmates’ mothers were immersed in. Perhaps most of all she missed the cuddles and kisses and sitting snuggled up on the sofa at night with them, watching a cartoon before their bath. She missed the intimacy.

  She shut her eyes for a moment and imagined her son Jacob’s gentle little hand tying knots in her hair. She loved that feeling. And the warmth of Cindy when she climbed into her bed during the night and cuddled into her.

  Suddenly, the door behind her swung open and Ray Stamper marched in with two Styrofoam cups of strong, black coffee, snapping her out of her reverie. He looked dog-tired, top button undone. Too little sleep and too much caffeine, the same as her. He handed her a cup and she took a large gulp.

  “Darn, that’s hot!” she said. A jolt of caffeine hit her system.

  “Just got some news from Kate down at the bio-lab.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Four guys from the Pentagon have just turned up. They say Kate has not received, and I quote, ‘proper security clearance’, to be shown details of the work Luntz was involved in.”

  “You kidding me?”

  “Nope.”

  Meyerstein shook her head. It sounded to her like a Special Access Program. It was the name given to ultra secretive work or operations known only to a select few in the Pentagon. She knew that to get such a program off the ground, it had to be cleared at the highest level of government. “Anything else?”

  “We’ve been talking to the staff. They said Luntz and Caan were working together on a secret project, and had been for years. And we found out something.”

  “What?”

  “Three vials have gone missing from the lab’s freezers, which were discovered during a recent inventory.”

  “Unaccounted for?”

  “Yup.”

  “So, what did the three vials contain?”

  “That’s the thing. No one knows a goddamn thing.”

  Meyerstein ran her hand through her hair. “This just got a helluva lot more interesting. OK. I want Kate and her team and the WMD people to let me know the moment they find out anything else. And let’s keep digging some more. We’re making progress. Good work.”

  “So what do you propose to do with Luntz?”

  “We need to get a handle on exactly what Luntz knows. We need to find out how this all came about. And with
that information, we can track down Scott Caan.”

  “What about the Pentagon?”

  Meyerstein gave a wry smile and sipped her coffee. “What about them?”

  “You going to find out what they’re trying to keep secret?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  Stamper gave a pained expression. “You’re on thin ice making that call, Martha. The shrinks are saying to take it easy with him. Might be worth holding off.”

  Meyerstein felt herself grinding her teeth. This was something she found herself doing more often. “We need answers.” She stared through the glass as Luntz wiped some crumbs from his face with a napkin. “We need something. Anything, from this guy.”

  “Shouldn’t we just sit tight? Wouldn’t that be the smart move at this stage?”

  She took a final sip of coffee before throwing the cup in a wastepaper bin. “Maybe it would. But I think we need to get in there and find out the truth, whether it pisses off the Pentagon or not.” Her cell phone rang and she blew out her cheeks.

  “Martha, it’s O’Donoghue. You and I need to talk. Right now.”

  She rolled her eyes at Stamper. “Good evening, sir. I’m just about to interview Frank Luntz.”

  Stamper nodded in recognition of who was on the line and left the room.

  O’Donoghue sighed. “I want to talk about Reznick.”

  “What about him?”

  “I’m hearing that you cut a deal with him. Is that true?”

  Meyerstein closed her eyes for a moment, wondering how he had got to hear. “I got our scientist. I want to find out more about Scott Caan. Did you get the message that three vials are missing?”

  “Yes, I just got that from Stamper’s team. But answer me this. Did you cut a deal, Martha? Because that would not be good. We have ways of doings things.”

  “Sir, I respect what you’re saying. Can we iron out any problems when I get back to Washington?”

  “Martha, we cannot have people like Reznick out there, killing and destroying whatever gets in his way. And another thing. I’m not going to let this lie. There will be consequences. Do you know that Claude Merceron was a Haitian diplomat?”

  “Yes, I did.” She explained how Merceron had links to Norton & Weiss, believed to be a CIA front.

  “Martha, we can’t go beyond the law to carry out our functions.”

  Meyerstein sighed. “We recovered the scientist. But yes, I admit, we got our hands dirty. That didn’t sit well with me.”

  “Martha, with immediate effect, I want you back in Washington.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve just been off the phone to the Pentagon, and they’re saying they want their people who have special clearance to speak direct to Luntz. This is a classified project. Special Access Program, apparently. They’re flying into Miami first thing in the morning.”

  “Sir, this is not a good time. I am about to interview Frank Luntz.”

  “Are you disobeying an order, Martha?”

  “Yes, sir, I most certainly am. Do what you have to do. But I’ve got a job to do here.”

  Meyerstein ended the call. Her heart was racing. She was facing an internal investigation into her conduct, that was for sure. She knew that and would have to deal with it. But to compound matters, he was telling her that the Pentagon was to take over.

  What a mess.

  She stared through the glass at Luntz for a few moments. “Son-of-a-bitch.”

  Stamper came back in the room. “What was O’Donoghue wanting?”

  “Someone on our team told him about the deal with Reznick.”

  “What?”

  Meyerstein nodded.

  “You want me to find out who it was?”

  Meyerstein shook her head. “I’ll deal with it when I get back to Washington. We have more pressing matters.”

  Stamper stared through the glass. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this whole thing. A really bad feeling.”

  Meyerstein sighed. “Yeah, tell me about it.”

  A few moments later, Meyerstein entered the interview room and smiled.

  “Assistant Director, Agent Martha Meyerstein,” she said. She pulled up a chair and sat down opposite Luntz, her back to the one-way mirror. The smell of soup still in the air. Luntz managed to force a smile.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  Luntz shrugged. “I’ve felt better.”

  “Tired?”

  “You could say that, yeah.”

  “Look, I’m not going to take much of your time. I think you’ll be looking forward to a warm bath, a long sleep and some time with your family, right?” She didn’t mention that a full debrief would take place in the next couple of hours with the WMD team, before he had had any chance to sleep.

  “I want to help the FBI any way I can.”

  “And we appreciate that, Dr Luntz, really we do.”

  “Please, call me Frank.”

  Meyerstein nodded as she noticed a slight tremor in both his hands. “OK, Frank, so you’re quite happy for me to ask you some questions at this juncture?”

  “Certainly. I want to help in any way.”

  Meyerstein leaned back in her seat and smiled. “Whenever you like.”

  Over the next hour, Luntz recalled in minute detail and chronological order, what happened to him. His memory was precise. He remembered the moment he left his home in Frederick with the FBI agent who was assigned to look after him until he was woken at gunpoint. All the details tallied perfectly with their timeline. Meyerstein knew he could provide the breakthrough they so desperately needed.

  She knew that it was important not to convey tension or pressure. She needed to be authoritative, calm and reassuring. Like a trusted, reliable friend.

  “That’s great, Frank, you’ve got a better memory than me,” she joked.

  Luntz smiled as he picked at the cuticles of his bitten fingernails.

  “Now, Frank,” Meyerstein said. She shifted in her seat concentrating on making her voice softer and more empathetic. “Let’s think back to why you wanted to see us in the first place. About your concerns on biosafety at your lab. Tell me about your work first of all. The FBI scientists, specialists in this area, will want to speak to you later. But for now, just fill me in so I’m up to speed.”

  Luntz shook his head. “I’m real sorry, but that’s classified.”

  She could see how he was going to play it. “What’s classified?”

  “The work we were doing at the lab.”

  Meyerstein leaned forward in her seat, a matter of inches from Luntz, and sensed his vulnerability. “Now listen to me and listen good. We’re talking a possible imminent threat to national security, if you hadn’t realised that already. And I’m not going to have you hiding behind security clearance, or some other bullshit. Do you want me to spell it out to you?”

  There was fear in Luntz’s eyes.

  “Your colleague, the esteemed Lt Col Scott Caan, has gone missing. And I’m hearing three vials were taken from the lab you were responsible for. Do you know what that means?”

  Luntz said nothing, looking at the floor.

  “Maybe I’m not making myself clear. That means you will be facing a near certain criminal investigation into the lax security systems you had at your lab. You have put the security of the United States at grave risk. Do you understand me?”

  Luntz bowed his head and nodded quickly.

  “So, I’m going to ask you again, what the hell are we dealing with?”

  Luntz stayed quiet.

  “It’s your choice. You either tell me everything, or, you’re gonna face a long, long time in jail.” Meyerstein leaned back in her seat knowing she was playing a high-risk strategy. “Your choice. What’s it gonna be?”

  Luntz went quiet for nearly a minute, occasionally biting his lower lip. Eventually he took a deep breath and spoke, voice as quiet as a mouse. “I hear what you’re saying. It’s just that the project is very, very secretive.”

  Meyerstei
n smiled. “I’m very discreet. Whenever you’re ready.”

  A long silence opened up before he spoke in a hushed whisper. “My colleague, Scott Caan, and I have been working for years trying to learn as much as possible about the origins of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. It killed at least twenty million people worldwide. I was part of the laboratory team, led by Dr Jeffrey Taubenberg, who resurrected the killer flu.”

  Meyerstein nodded, not wanting to hurry him unduly. She fixed her gaze on him for a few moments. “I remember reading about that. Can you describe the broad-brush process to me, just so I’ve got a better idea what we’re talking about?”

  “We used a highly complex computer program which perfectly matched the Ribonucleic acid, also known as RNA – which is one of three major macromolecules that are essential for all life – and DNA structures. In effect, the complete genome of the 1918 influenza virus was known. But my work – along with Scott Caan – was in the pursuit of anti-viral drugs and vaccines as well as developing a new hybrid strain of 1918 Spanish flu.”

  The word hybrid seemed to stick in her head. “You were developing a new hybrid strain?” she repeated.

  “This is allowed under the Biological Weapons Convention which was signed in 1972. Article 1 allows exceptions for medical and defensive purposes in small quantities.”

  Meyerstein nodded as the full magnitude of what she was dealing with hit home. It didn’t make any sense. How could it be justified to try and recreate such a dangerous eradicated strain that could wreak unforeseen havoc if released, either deliberately or accidentally? But she knew that wasn’t her concern. “Was this hybrid strain as deadly as the original 1918 Spanish Flu?”

  “Four-fold. It was given the highest security classification. The Pentagon was funding the whole thing. We all had to have a higher security clearance to protect the program’s highly sensitive information.”

  Meyerstein nodded. She knew a security clearance application would have had to be submitted to the Department of Defense for review and consideration. But she felt a growing mix of anger and disbelief that a killer virus was now out of the laboratory setting. “I see. Please, go on.”