by Harper Allen
“Dr. Halid’s going to give you an injection that’ll turn you into a modern-day Typhoid Mary,” he said carelessly. “Then we’re going to let you walk out of here…and by the time you make it to a hospital you’ll have spread the rogue virus we developed from M & G’s stock to half the population of Denver.”
He shook his head, the amusement plainly visible now. “Not that getting to a hospital’s going to save you or any of your victims. There isn’t an antidote yet. It’s going to take the Disease Control authorities weeks to come up with one, and the virus kills within hours.”
A modern-day Typhoid Mary. The terror that sluiced through her at DeMarco’s words was as cold and as vile as the runoff from a sewer. She would be the carrier, Marilyn thought in numb horror. She was to be the instrument of death for hundreds, maybe thousands of people. Long after she was dead, the name Langworthy would be remembered with revulsion and dread.
That had been Helio’s plan all along, of course, she told herself dazedly. As trivial as the outcome of any election seemed beside the loss of so many innocent lives, that was what this was about—making sure Josh’s bid for senator had no chance of succeeding, and that DeMarco’s man Houghton was reelected. Everything else was peripheral as far as Helio was concerned.
Sky’s abduction had been as she’d suspected, a smoke screen to divert Colorado Confidential’s resources. Even DeMarco’s desire to revenge himself on Con by killing her could have been more easily accomplished—it nearly had been, Marilyn acknowledged, with the sabotaging of the elevator in her building. Injecting her with the virus was obviously a last-minute and sadistic refinement of the original plan.
He might have chosen a homeless man, a child snatched from a playground, one of his own thugs. But when she’d unexpectedly contacted him on Tony’s cell phone yesterday and then confided in a police captain who worked for him, she’d both set the trap and walked into it willingly.
She closed her eyes. Immediately she saw the man she loved, the man she would die loving, green eyes alight with wicked humor, dark hair falling across his forehead, those skilled gambler’s hands moving over her body, bringing her to an ecstasy she’d never known was possible…
DeMarco had made one miscalculation, Marilyn thought dully, opening her eyes and staring at the well-dressed and well-groomed man with the soulless and reptilian gaze. It was the miscalculation that would eventually bring about his own death. Con’s grief would consume him, yes. Helio was right about that. There would be nothing left of the man who’d been willing to turn away from the hatred he had for an enemy and choose instead to make a life with the woman he loved with all his heart. That man would be destroyed by her death and the loss of his unborn child.
But in his place would be the man she’d caught glimpses of once or twice—the man who’d stood over the body of a dead friend and sworn terrible vengeance, the man who was willing to gamble away his soul for the chance to bring down a killer.
Helio DeMarco would look into the eyes of that man one day. They would be the last sight his own eyes would behold before his life was extinguished. And the thought gave her no comfort at all.
A subdued knock sounded at the door. It opened, and the thin man called Simons entered, a smaller man with thinning dark hair right behind him, his manner more than nervous. He had to be the doctor, Marilyn thought fearfully. How could anyone who’d ever taken the Hippocratic oath be a willing party to an atrocity like the one Helio was planning?
“It was like you thought, boss.” Simons looked disgusted. “I found him wandering around in the lobby, drawing the attention of every hotel security guard in the area.”
“Please, Mr. DeMarco—I did not mean—” Clutching a leather satchel in front of him with both hands, the small man swallowed. “I did not mean to bring attention on myself. I could not remember the name you told me to ask for. I am a professional man, not a gangst—”
Again he floundered to a frightened stop. DeMarco turned away. “Maybe once you were a doctor, doctor. But with the experiments you performed in those camps your country’s leader set up before the U.N. was called in, you’re going to find it hard to get a licence to practice here without my help.”
Sick comprehension flooded through Marilyn. She should have realized, she thought hopelessly. A man like Helio DeMarco would know where to find the kind of doctor who would have no qualms about infecting a pregnant woman, and through her, a whole city. Halid was a war criminal, as much a monster as the mobster himself.
“Of course, Mr. DeMarco. I meant no offence by my remark.” Halid set his satchel on a nearby table. “This is the woman you want me to inject with—”
“With the virus, yes.” DeMarco’s tone was short. “And here’s the virus itself. Be careful with that, doctor,” he added swiftly as Halid took the small glass vial from him. “If it breaks open we’re all going to be walking around spreading death and destruction, not just Ms. Langworthy here.”
“Death and—”
“This is what he was like in the lobby, boss,” Simons interjected, his glance at DeMarco sharp. “How hard can it be to stick a freakin’ needle into a vein? Junkies do it all the time. Why don’t you let me take care of the doctor here, and then I’ll inject the woman myself?”
“No, no!” Already Halid was unlatching his bag. “I will do it, no problem, Mr. DeMarco. The language is sometimes still confusing for me, that is all, and when the guards were watching me I was very nervous. When I am nervous I—”
“When you’re nervous you talk too much,” DeMarco said flatly. “And having someone around who talks too much is dangerous in my line of work. If you don’t want me to go along with Simon’s suggestion, Doctor, you’ll shut up right now. Get that syringe ready, and like I said, be careful.”
He exchanged a glance with the thin man. “Stay here and make sure this goes off without any more screwups from our nervous friend. The virus takes a few seconds to reach the respiratory tract, so as long as you leave as soon as Halid completes his injection you don’t run any risk of being infected by her yourself. I’ll get the car from the parking garage and be waiting for you out front of the hotel. I don’t like needles.”
“He’s going to hunt you down. And then he’s going to kill you.”
She hadn’t bothered to speak before because there’d been no reason to speak, Marilyn thought. Nothing she could say would save her and her baby. Nothing she could say would prevent Helio’s insanely evil plan from being implemented through her. So she hadn’t pleaded and she hadn’t begged…but she didn’t want him to walk out of here believing he’d won.
“Burke?” DeMarco had his hand on the door. “I don’t think so. This is going to finish him off. Maybe you don’t know your man as well as you think you do.”
“I know him like I know myself,” Marilyn replied. “And that’s how I can be so sure he’s never going to rest until he kills you.” She met his coldly unconcerned gaze. “Because if it was me who survived and Con who was dead by your hand, DeMarco, I’d do the same thing.”
He blinked. Then he frowned, switching his attention to the thin man. “If you’re not standing by the curb when I drive up I’m not waiting around,” he said curtly. “Get this over with fast.”
Marilyn closed her eyes. She could hear Halid and Simons exchanging terse remarks, and then the sharp smell of disinfectant bit at her nostrils. She didn’t waste her time wondering at the irony of Halid using an alcohol swab on skin he intended to inject with poison.
Truth. Beauty. Love… She wasn’t even sure if she’d said the words out loud, but they rang like silver chimes in her heart. “I had them all,” she breathed softly to herself. “I fell in love with a gambler. We made a baby together. Together we won it all.”
She felt a suddenly cool patch on the inside of her elbow, and knew Halid had just swabbed the injection site.
I love you, Con. And I love the baby we created. I wish you could have shown us both your beloved Big Easy…
The n
eedle slid in. Her eyes flew reflexively open. She saw Halid depress the syringe’s plunger, saw the colorless contents rush past the markings on its barrel, saw Simons bring the silencer-fitted gun in his hand up—
“Federal Marshall! Put down your weapons, we’re coming in!”
At the shouted command—Con’s shouted command, Marilyn realized, her wild joy turning immediately to fear—everything happened at once. Simons swung his gun from the still-unsuspecting Halid’s head toward the door crashing back on its hinges. Marilyn heard her own voice screaming out a warning to Con and those with him, but even as her terrified words left her lips she saw Con fire at Simons. The force of the bullet slammed the thin man off his feet, his own shot going wild, and before his body had completed its arcing fall to the floor Con was racing toward Halid, his face an unrecognizable mask of fury.
The doctor’s hands went instantly up in a gesture of surrender. The half-full syringe dropped and shattered at Con’s feet.
“Oh, no!” Anguish shafted through her. “Con—get away! Everybody get away! Evacuate the hotel, shut down the venting system. For God’s sake, Con—that’s the virus. Helio’s plan was for me to be the carrier!”
The roomful of people froze, all except for Con.
“We’re getting you to a hospital, cher’.”
From somewhere he’d produced a jackknife and was already carefully slitting the duct tape that bound her ankles together. He cut through the tape strapping her left arm to the chair and moved to her right arm, where the puncture mark still showed red. Con looked into her face, his features taut with unbearable strain and his green eyes sheened with pain.
“I won’t let this happen to you, heart,” he rasped desperately. “If I have to carry you there in my arms and stand over the goddamn doctors with a gun, I swear I’m not going to let you die. I can’t lose you, cher’.”
“Please, Con—get away from me.” Marilyn felt her own eyes fill. She went on in a broken whisper. “You don’t understand. There isn’t an antidote. I’m already dead. But maybe if I’m quarantined here other lives might not be—”
“Excuse me.” Halid let his hands drop. They shot back into the air as a slim woman with cropped dark hair stepped forward and leveled her gun at him.
“Con, if what Marilyn’s saying is true, then she’s right. We might still avert the outbreak by—”
“It was water.” Halid stated. “Distilled water. Mr. Cheesman tells me to come here with my medical supplies and frighten this lady by giving her a needle. That is bad, yes. I know I have broken a law. But there is no harm done to her, so maybe I can go now, no problem?”
“Water?” Con’s face darkened. He bent swiftly and picked up the barrel of the smashed syringe. “If it’s water, then you won’t mind tasting it,” he said hoarsely. “Go on, you bastard—there’s enough left in there to prove whether you’re lying or not.”
Halid shrugged. He tipped back his head and stuck out his tongue, upending the broken cylinder above it. A few drops of clear liquid fell into his mouth.
“Con, we can’t take any chances.” The brunette’s tone was brittle. “Who knows, this man might like the idea of dying as a martyr as long as he takes as many innocent citizens with him as he can, or maybe DeMarco told him this stuff was harmless just to get his cooperation. Until we get it tested we have to assume it’s the virus—”
“Simons was about to kill Halid just as you arrived,” Marilyn interrupted. A tiny flame of hope flickered somewhere deep within her. “If he’d succeeded, Halid wouldn’t have had the chance to tell us anything and we’d all still believe I was injected with the virus. So DeMarco wanted me—wanted the authorities—to assume exactly that.”
“But what would be the point?” The brunette’s brows drew together. “We’d find out sooner or later you weren’t a carrier, and then—”
“And then it would be too late,” Con said flatly. “Because while we were evacuating this area of the city and getting Marilyn into a biohazard quarantine, we wouldn’t be trying to find out where DeMarco’s really planning to disseminate the virus. Who’s Cheesman?”
“DeMarco,” Marilyn answered absently, her mind still racing. “It’s the name he’s registered under at the front desk. Con, I think Halid’s telling the truth, but Colleen—” the brunette had to be Colleen Wellesley, she thought, “—Colleen’s right. Everyone in this room has to be quarantined, just in case. The search can still go on for—”
She stopped. Her eyes met Con’s uncomprehending ones.
“What is it, cher’?” His hands grasped hers. “What’s the matter?”
“That’s it.” Her voice was unsteady, Marilyn noted dispassionately. “That’s how he’s planning to do it. I was just a smoke screen, the same way we always thought Sky’s kidnapping was. It’s the mainstay of Denver’s water supply, Con—the last stand before Denver’s drinking water reaches the city’s treatment plants.”
“Dear God.” Colleen’s face was ashen. “I think she’s got it, Burke. It has to be where DeMarco’s planning to release the virus.”
He was from New Orleans, Marilyn thought shakily. Of course he didn’t know what they were talking about.
“The Cheesman Reservoir on the South Platte River, Con,” she said urgently. “It’s about an hour southwest of the city. If Colorado Confidential moves fast, they can still prevent DeMarco’s thugs from carrying out his plan.”
“If I’m under arrest, Burke, I want an attorney.”
Even before she saw Con stiffen, Marilyn realized who the harsh tones belonged to. Her startled gaze went past the knot of Confidential agents to the open doorway where a handcuffed man with cold, dead eyes was standing between Lexy Kanin and an agent she didn’t recognize.
“We stopped him as he was leaving the parking garage, C.W.,” Lexy said, addressing her remark to Colleen. “He gave us a phony name, but I recognized him from the photos you distributed. Say hello to Mr. Helio DeMarco.”
Chapter Sixteen
“How does it feel, being the sister of the governor?”
Marilyn, Con’s arm around her, looked swiftly over her shoulder as Colleen Wellesley came up behind them. She managed a smile at the brunette.
“It hasn’t been twenty-four hours yet. I’m not sure it’s really sunk in, even though Josh won by such an overwhelming majority.” Her smile dimmed. “When Con and I phoned to congratulate him last night, Celia and Father invited us to Thanksgiving dinner today with the rest of the family. We would have loved to have gone, but it doesn’t look as though we’re going to make it.”
She turned her eyes once more to the silent tableau being enacted behind the tempered-glass window in front of them, and as if by unspoken agreement Colleen did the same. Con, Marilyn realized as his arm tightened around her, hadn’t taken his gaze from the scene in the first place.
The Royal Flush looked like a ranch. It was a ranch, as Con had told her when they’d arrived here two nights ago after Helio’s capture and the last-minute thwarting of his plans to release a killer virus into the Cheesman Reservoir. An ex-employee of Denver’s water board had been caught just moments before he’d been able to carry out his assigned task of cracking open the vial he’d received from a man who fit the description of the late Simons and dumping its contents into the city’s water reserves.
Buried in the back pages of yesterday’s Denver Post, Marilyn recalled, had been three news stories, seemingly unrelated. One had concerned the apprehension in a downtown hotel of a Dr. Halid, who had been charged with practicing medicine without a license and entering the country illegally. Hotel security were praised for alerting the authorities when they’d arrived to the suspicious actions of Halid, and providing them with the number of the room he was in.
The second story was briefer, reporting only that a certain Captain Breen of the local police had died of a gunshot wound apparently suffered when his weapon had accidentally discharged while he was cleaning it.
The third snippet of news Con had d
rawn her attention to had been the sketchiest of all—a vague line or two about a disgruntled water board ex-employee being arrested on suspicion of attempting to destroy property near the Cheesman Reservoir. None of the three stories had appeared on the television newscasts later, mainly because the election and Josh Langworthy’s thrilling landslide victory over former governor Todd Houghton had taken precedence over everything else.
Maybe one day the public could be informed of the disaster that had been so narrowly averted, Colleen had gently warned Marilyn upon her arrival at the ranch two nights ago. But Colorado Confidential’s effectiveness depended upon it remaining a shadowy, behind-the-scenes force for justice.
Which was why its headquarters was disguised behind the facade of a real working ranch, Marilyn thought now, feeling the tension in Con’s arm around her. Even the Royal Flush’s basement had appeared to be a perfectly ordinary storage area until Colleen had pressed some hidden release on a dusty wine rack, revealing an entrance to a spacious and well-lit meeting room. Even more clandestine was the entry from the meeting room through what seemed to be a broom closet to the surveillance room they were presently in.
This was the nerve center of the whole operation, Colleen had informed her. All ranch access points were visible on the bank of videos that took up one wall, as was the Denver office of ICU. The computer system rivaled those of the federal authorities—and necessarily so, Marilyn had gleaned from the ex-cop’s veiled references, since it could link to federal and state files.
But the video and computer systems, as state-of-the-art as they were, weren’t what was holding the attention of the scattering of grim-faced agents, including Con and Colleen, at this moment—in fact, at almost any given moment during the past two days, Marilyn thought worriedly. Colorado Confidential’s agents were watching through a room-length, one-way glass window as Helio DeMarco skillfully volleyed his latest interviewer’s questions.
