Resistant

by Michael Palmer

  “How about you ask for a check and we go outside?”

  Clearly the man intended to keep his responses cryptic. While Vaill seemed ready to pounce, McCall stayed relaxed.

  “I’d do what he asks,” McCall suggested.

  Lou studied both men. He wasn’t a big TV guy, but he’d watched enough dramas with Emily to know the good cop–bad cop routine when he saw it—even when the players were as good at it as these two.

  “No harm in taking a walk,” Lou said with a shrug.

  He signaled for a check and to speed matters up, reluctantly eschewed a credit card for most of the cash in his wallet. He headed for the door with McCall and Vaill behind him like highway tailgaters. The agents waited until they were outside to put on dark sunglasses. Lou took a moment to appraise them, and was unable to keep his mouth in check.

  “Now you guys look like real FBI agents,” he said, gesturing at their blue suits and shades.

  There was no response. Bad sign.

  “So, where are we walking to?” he asked, still more curious than frightened.

  “We parked just down the road,” McCall said, nodding.

  “You didn’t use customer parking?”

  Lou wondered if they had steered clear of the lot to avoid any kind of public scene with him in case he went ballistic. He glanced at his watch. Any chance to make a meeting had just about passed.

  “We needed the exercise,” Vaill said.

  The three started in the direction McCall had indicated. The sidewalk was wide enough for Lou to be kept sandwiched between the men. His apprehension was beginning to mushroom. Even though he had no intention of running from two almost-certainly armed FBI agents, they apparently were taking no chances.

  “So what’s this about?” Lou asked again, this time with a mix of anxiety and impatience.

  Although he could not see their eyes behind their shades, he got the impression neither of them could care less if he were upset.

  “It’s about you making inquiries into a very dangerous germ,” Vaill said finally, his gaze straight ahead.

  Lou stopped walking.

  “How’d you know about that?” he asked.

  “We’re with FBI,” McCall said, presenting Lou a mocking grin. “It’s our job to know these things.”

  A brief stare-down ensued and Lou realized he was more at ease moving than he was standing still. He started to walk and again the agents kept pace.

  “Is it a crime to ask about a bacteria?” Lou questioned, ticking through the people to whom he had even mentioned the Doomsday Germ—check-in calls to Puchalsky, hospital chief Win Carter, and surgeon Leonard Standish, as well as some nurses in the iso unit, and two people he knew in ID at Eisenhower Memorial. Then, of course, there were Samuel Scupman and Vicki Banks. “It’s savaging my friend’s leg. If it can’t be stopped they’re going to have to amputate. And his doctors will keep amputating parts of his body until the infection is either contained or my friend is dead. So that’s why I was asking around.”

  “I’m sorry about your friend,” McCall offered in a sincere tone. Lou was not surprised he’d be the one to show some sympathy. For whatever reason, Vaill kept up his menacing act, as if Lou somehow repulsed him. He felt judged guilty of some crime without even knowing the charges. Again he sensed there was something off with Vaill, as if one wrong word or a misinterpreted hand gesture would be enough to set him off. Lou reminded himself to remain calm and proceed with extreme caution. Until he knew their agenda, these agents were not to be trusted.

  “So, Dr. Welcome, how is it you’ve come to know so much about this germ?” Vaill asked.

  “I got a briefing from Cap’s doctor,” Lou said. “Ivan Puchalsky. He’s the head of infectious disease at Arbor General.”

  “We know Puchalsky,” Vaill said. “We spoke to him already.”

  “So then you know. Why are you asking me?”

  McCall took out a small notebook and referenced it as they walked. “What about this thing called a … a bacteriophage?” he asked. “You ever talk to anybody about that?”

  Lou felt his face get hot. He eliminated Puchalsky, Carter, and the nurses from his list.

  “Who contacted you? Was it Sam Scupman?”

  “Never mind that,” Vaill said. “My partner asked you a question. You ever talk to anybody about a bacteriophage?”

  Lou nodded. “I did, yes,” he said. “I brought it up a few days ago as a potential idea for a treatment to Dr. Sam Scupman of the CDC’s Antibiotic Resistance Unit.” Both McCall and Vaill nodded as if they knew that tidbit already. “So is that why you’re here? Is it a crime to try and save your friend’s life these days? Don’t you guys have better things to do, like fight terrorism or something?”

  Vaill gripped Lou’s arm tight. “I think we know best where and how to spend our time.”

  Lou wanted to break his arm. Instead he just pulled away.

  “Sorry about that,” Vaill said in a tone that was not even a little apologetic.

  “What’s this about, guys?” Lou asked.

  McCall stopped in front of a silver Chevy Impala parked on the side of the road.

  “How’d you come up with the bacteriophage theory?”

  Lou’s pulse quickened. He knew he had to tread carefully. One wrong slip risked exposing Humphrey. It would mean the end of the lab and quite possibly Cap’s life. Somehow without Lou realizing, Vaill and McCall positioned themselves so that his back was up against the car. They both kept their eyes locked on him.

  “I’m a doctor,” Lou said. “I simply suggested a potential medical treatment for my friend’s condition.”

  Vaill said nothing. He seemed to be giving Lou a chance to change his answer.

  “Yeah,” Vaill said. “Well, I don’t think you want to go down that road.”

  “What are you talking about?” Lou snapped.

  “I’m talking about what we know,” Vaill said. “I’m talking about information we have that you don’t that says you couldn’t have possibly come up with that approach on your own, unless you’re a trained microbiologist. Are you a trained microbiologist, Dr. Welcome?”

  “Before you answer him,” McCall said, “we already know your résumé.”

  “We also know you just got fired from the Physician Wellness Program in D.C.,” Vaill added. “You worked for Walter Filstrup.”

  No reference to any notes. Vaill knew this from memory.

  “Why are you guys checking up on me like this?”

  The agent ignored the question. “And we know about your problems with drugs and alcohol,” he went on. “So we know a lot about you. But funny thing, nothing we’ve learned suggests that you’re a trained microbiologist. So what do you say, doc? How’d you come up with this theory of yours?”

  They could goad him all they liked, but Lou was not going to give up Humphrey’s name.

  “Agent Vaill, Agent McCall, if you guys know so much about me, you must also know I’m a really smart guy.”

  McCall lowered his shades so they rested on his nostrils. “If you’re really that smart, you’ll tell us the truth. Where’d you get your information?”

  “I did research.”

  “With what source?” Vaill asked.

  “The Internet, at the hospital library, my friends at Eisenhower Memorial. I can be quite resourceful when I’m motivated.”

  Lou regretted the words the moment they tumbled out. He had smart-assed himself into a corner with claims he couldn’t prove. Vaill jumped on the opportunity.

  “So there are people at the hospital library who will corroborate your story?” he asked. “You have to know we can search your computer and see records of what you were looking at. In fact, I wouldn’t be the least surprised if we did that anyway.”

  Lou did not answer, which in FBI parlance was probably tantamount to an admission of guilt.

  “I’m going to ask you one more time,” Vaill said. “Where did you get your information about the bacteriophage?”
>
  “I told you. What more do you want me to say?”

  Vaill grabbed Lou’s shoulders, flipped him around, and jerked his arms up behind his back.

  “Hey!” Lou shouted. “What in the hell are you doing? You can’t do this. I have rights!”

  He felt the pinch of handcuffs being snapped into place.

  “Dr. Welcome,” Vaill said, “you’re under arrest.”

  “What’s the charge?”

  Lou’s demand came out rife with indignation but his voice was also more than a little shaky. The cuffs were incredibly uncomfortable, and in moments his arms began to throb. He tried to reposition his wrists, but the slightest movement caused the manacles to tighten even more.

  “I have rights!” he protested. “I want to speak to a lawyer. I’m not telling you anything more until I do. You can’t just take me in like this. Jerks! I haven’t committed any crime.”

  Vaill turned Lou around to face him. His smile was scornful and smug, as if this was the best part of his job.

  McCall opened the Impala’s rear door, and with some difficulty, the two men stuffed Lou into the backseat.

  “When it comes to terrorism,” Vaill said, “the law has a lot of latitude regarding who we take into custody and how we do it. And as for rights, thanks to your unwillingness to cooperate, and Miranda’s public safety exception, I’m sorry to inform you that you don’t have any at all.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Social/Political philosopher Lancaster Hill’s growing popularity should be a source of concern to us all.

  —DAVID CARP, New York Times Op-Ed, MAY 8, 1940

  The elevator ride to the bottom of the granite shaft took Kazimi no more than thirty seconds. The platform shuddered and shimmied. Machinery, corroded from the salt air and water, groaned. With each passing foot, the sound of waves grew louder. Faint natural light filtered up through the elevator’s grated platform, and the complex smells of the ocean grew more pronounced. The eerie descent ended with the locking of gears and a jolting stop.

  Kazimi peered upward. He saw the lights embedded in the walls and nothing more. There was no trace of the stairway on which he had entered the shaft. Still, he had to hurry. It was only a matter of time before Bacon’s thugs came looking for him. Kazimi exited the platform and followed a wooden walkway out an opening carved through the cliff face. Twenty feet down the narrow dock he entered the boathouse. There he paused, savoring the wind on his face, and breathing in the heavy salt air.

  Freedom!

  A few feet more and the dock widened to form the floor of a storage area—marine supplies, engine parts, oil and gas cans, life jackets, ropes, bumpers. Not unexpectedly, the construction was first-rate—hardwood walls, beamed ceiling, four good-sized windows. The dock continued as two extensions, one along each wall. At the center of the construction, bobbing on its moorings like a glistening mahogany torpedo, was the boat.

  It was a stunning inboard—a Chris Craft, long and sleek, with fold-away seats that increased its transport area.

  Please, let there be a key. Please …

  The boat looked as if it were ready to speed off just by willing it so, but that simply wasn’t going to happen. Nothing in the ignition.

  Please …

  Kazimi hurried back to the shelves, and quickly scanned them and the walls for any kind of a key hook or holder.

  Nothing.

  He returned to the cockpit, pausing to listen for any sounds from back beyond the storage area. Then he loosened the dashboard cover and searched for a way to cross wire the ignition. The computer that controlled the speedboat’s functions looked as complicated as the ones he worked with in the lab.

  Rarely an impatient or easily frustrated man, Kazimi cursed his situation and his limitations. There was a single paddle on the floor. Untying the boat and trying to row it out to sea was a possibility. But the afternoon was giving way to dusk, and the gray, choppy, uninviting ocean was frigid. To make matters worse, the brisk wind was onshore. In all likelihood, if he could even get the heavy inboard boat past its boathouse, it would end up wrecked at the base of the mammoth cliff.

  His odds of making it away from Red Cliff, he decided, were considerably better on land. He scrambled off the magnificent craft, carefully stepped around the edge of the boathouse, and jumped to the rocky shoreline. To his left, the cliff face rose almost straight up, like a massive arcade climbing wall. Between its base and the lapping waves were five feet of sand, pebbles, and stones.

  The wind and salt air stung Kazimi’s lips as he made his way along the treacherous shoreline, slipping on seaweed-covered rocks. When he fell, he pushed himself up and plunged ahead. When he got hurt, he ignored it. His plan was simply to keep going. Sooner or later he would have to come to a trail that would cut up away from the water. For a few moments he considered trying to scale the cliff wall itself, but for years his exercise had consisted solely of half-hour walks around the streets of D.C. once or twice a day. A climb like this one, challenging for an expert, just wasn’t going to happen.

  One foot … the other. Again … Again.

  The going was painfully slow, and now he had another concern—another enemy. The width of his treacherous and narrow escape trail was shrinking. The tide was coming in. He estimated he had traveled maybe two hundred yards, perhaps a little more. The trail was now half the width it had been when he started. To his left, the cliff was just as sheer. The wind was noticeably picking up, and the thin outfit he had worn to the lab was not fending off the chill. With every step, the taste of his newfound freedom was becoming more bitter.

  It was at that moment, with the late-afternoon shadows moving across the water, that Kazimi thought he saw movement on the rocks well ahead. He tensed, uncertain if the vision was a seabird, a person, or his imagination. If it was one of Bacon’s massive bodyguards, there was nothing he could do except try to escape the way he had come—this time sloshing through deepening water all the way.

  A few more tentative steps, and he could make out a figure, standing on top of a large boulder. The figure, really a silhouette in the deepening shadows, was waving to him with both hands. Thankfully, it became quickly apparent that the man—for it almost certainly was a man—was tall and lean, not at all like either Drake or Costello.

  Slipping on rocks and wading in the cold seawater, Kazimi waved back and quickened his pace. Allah had heard his prayers and answered them. Whoever this man was, he would know of a passageway along the rocks that could bring him to the top of the cliff. The Janus strain was going to be the next great plague unless Kazimi could warn the government to abandon all pretense of secrecy and to put as concerted an effort into stopping Janus as it had the AIDS virus. Hopefully, there was still time to stop it from happening.

  “Hello!” Kazimi cried out. “I need help! Help me, please!”

  His words were swallowed by the wind and the building sea.

  Racing ahead, he stumbled, lost his footing, and fell heavily onto a wet, barnacle-covered rock, slicing his palms and knees like a nest of razors. He cried out at the pain, but it was of no matter. Whatever the price of escape, he would pay it. In seconds he was up and shambling ahead as best he could, peering through the gloom at his savior, mussel shells crunching beneath his feet. The man ahead remained motionless except for his arms, which continued to wave rhythmically back and forth.

  As the distance between Kazimi and the man narrowed, he slowed his pace. The fellow’s features were coming into focus. There was something familiar about him—something about his narrow face and corn-colored hair.

  Burke!

  It was far too late for Kazimi to turn and run now. The killer, dressed in a navy blue sweatsuit with white stripes running down the sleeves, casually slid a pistol from a shoulder holster, and trained the weapon on him.

  “From this distance I can shoot you in plenty of places that would be terribly painful, but won’t keep you from working,” he called out.

  Kazimi kept his distance, so Bu
rke, wearing high-cuts, jumped nimbly from his boulder and closed the gap between them until just a few feet remained.

  “Did you really think we’d just let you walk away?” he asked.

  “How long have you been watching me?”

  “The whole time,” Burke said. Kazimi could hear the breezy pride in his voice and it disgusted him. “We had cameras on you, but Bacon wanted to see if you’d figure it out. Maybe he was starting to think you weren’t as smart as you were advertised to be. You passed that test. Now you get to pass another one. If you don’t follow me back to Red Cliff, the tide is going to come in, and soon you’ll be swimming in sixty-degree ocean water.”

  “Then it would be Allah’s wish,” Kazimi said.

  Burke dismissed that notion with a wave of his pistol.

  “No, it would be your wish—your death wish. But my wish, no, make that my orders, are to bring you back to your lab. You’ve got work to do.”

  “I will do no such thing. I’m finished.”

  Burke did not look surprised. “Bacon told me you’d say something like that.” From a pocket in his sweatpants, he retrieved a cell phone and held it up for Kazimi to see.

  “I’ve got a number here on speed dial,” he said. “It will call an associate of ours in California. He’s been stalking a former graduate assistant of yours, Dr. Amy Gaspar. Do you remember Amy? She’s a pretty girl with brown hair and a really sweet smile.”

  “Please,” Kazimi said, holding up his hands, imploring Burke to be merciful. “There is no need to hurt her.”

  “One call,” Burke said, shaking the phone, “and it’s bye-bye, Amy. Nothing as quick as a bullet, though. We decided on hanging.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I told you. I want you to go back to Red Cliff and stop trying to escape. We have no patience for this nonsense.”