The End Times are coming. Prepare.
She looked up with a frown. “Do we take this seriously?”
“Caroline—” Cuddy jabbed at the bridge of his glasses. “Three hundred and sixty-four people so far have reported to area hospitals. All of them marathoners. All of them vomiting. If this letter’s true, the count is going to rise.”
“But do we know it’s ricin?” Shephard threw himself into a chair. “What if this is just—”
“A hoax?” suggested the Post reporter. “A little bit of food poisoning washed down on a Sunday morning? What better way to spread panic?”
“On the eve of Sophie Payne’s funeral,” Caroline mused. “What are the symptoms, Cud?”
“Severe dehydration. Gastric sickness. That’s about all we’ve seen so far.”
“There is no clinical test for ricin poisoning,” Shephard reminded them tiredly. “You just have to wait it out. See how and when people die.”
“I know that.”
“But I don’t,” Price said unexpectedly. “Since I was good enough to call in the government and hand over the original of that letter, maybe the government could help me out?”
Caroline was studying the fax. “It’s not classified information. Ricin’s the chemical residue left over in castor bean mash, which is produced all over the Midwest for the castor oil we use in motors and industrial products. Ricin’s easy enough to make if you can get your hands on a gas chromatograph—which is available in any high school chemistry lab—and cheap as hell. Am I right, Tom, in thinking the Bureau’s been worried about something like this happening for years?”
“Damn straight,” he replied, “though we’ve been thinking in terms of aerosolized hits—a crop duster unleashed on a city, for instance. Most of our models are for airborne toxins. I doubt we counted on people lining up to drink them.”
Price drew out a notebook and pen. “What does ricin do in the human body?”
“It gets into your cells and prevents them from making the proteins they need,” Shephard said baldly. “Absent those proteins, cells die, and eventually so do you. If this letter’s accurate, and the ricin was dissolved in water, it’d cause internal bleeding throughout the digestive tract.”
“But that could be treated, right?” Price looked up from his notes.
“Treated,” Shephard agreed. “Rarely survived. Depends how much ricin each person got.”
“But the water must’ve tasted bad. Wouldn’t most people spit it out?”
“The mouth’s a sponge. The toxin’s absorbed by skin tissues. You can die just from getting the powder on your hands. In the best case, we’ll see bloody diarrhea and vomiting. If the victim lives at least five days, he or she will probably survive the attack.”
“—And in the worst case?”
“Liver, spleen, and kidney failure, followed by death. Within forty-eight hours.”
“Jesus,” Caroline muttered. “Fifteen thousand people run that race.”
The men around her were silent.
“So why have you come to me?” she demanded. “For names and phone numbers of 30 April here in the States? Cuddy just told you, Tom: We don’t have any. The CIA doesn’t operate on U.S. soil. That’s the Bureau’s jurisdiction.”
“And you quit the Agency this morning,” Shephard returned brutally. “I heard. Congratulations.”
“We want you to pack a bag.” Cuddy’s voice was, if possible, even more strained than at the beginning of his visit. “Dare Atwood has ordered federal protection for you, Carrie. If this letter’s true—if 30 April is operating in America—then you’re a target.”
“Death to the whore who betrayed the Leader,” Steve Price murmured. “That can only mean one person.”
“Bullshit.” Caroline handed the faxed sheets back to the Post reporter. “I’m not going into hiding because of some kook with a fax machine.”
“This time,” Shephard said as he rose from his chair, “you’ve got no choice.”
Chapter 5
SPRING VALLEY, 9:57 P.M.
George Enfield lifted the sleeping Mallory from his lap and placed her carefully in the arms of her young nanny. “Take her back to the waiting room, Marya,” he said. “I don’t want her here when Dana goes.”
The nanny nodded once but said nothing. Marya had witnessed more than a few untimely deaths in her native Estonia. She merely dropped a kiss on the slumbering child’s head and carried her around the screening curtain that divided Dana’s part of the emergency room. George’s eyes followed them a trifle absently; then his gaze strayed back to the motionless figure on the gurney. Dana had lost consciousness again. It was as though she’d clung to the world as long as Mallory did, wanting every last second she could have with her daughter.
Her face was gaunt, her eyes unmoving beneath the still lids; for an instant he was afraid that she’d left him already—that she’d chosen that moment of Mallory’s departure to skitter away herself, without the pain of good-bye. He sank down on his knees by the side of the bed and reached through the metal railing for her hand. The fingers were chilled and unresponsive. Something between a groan and a sob tore from his throat.
“What is it?” he’d demanded of the supervising physician as she wheeled his wife through the crowd of people in Sibley’s ER. “Her diabetes? Dehydration? What?”
“She ran the Marine Corps?” the doctor asked grimly. “We’re seeing a flood of people who did. Something was tainted. We don’t know what. Just hold on and we’ll try to stabilize her gastric system. I’m afraid I can’t give you a private room, Mr. Speaker—”
All around him, in pairs and groups and lonely solitude, were men and women of every age and ethnic background, doubled up in pain. George stopped counting at sixty-three. Had all these people run the marathon? He began to grasp the extent of the problem, began to be terribly afraid. The doctors would not—or could not—tell him what was wrong with his wife. He started calling every contact he could think of—people at the FDA, Dana’s personal physician, his Chief of Staff simply for comfort—at nine-thirty on a Sunday evening.
There was a brief moment when Dana gave him some hope, after the violence of the vomiting and the exhausting bouts of diarrhea—a period when the morphine had taken hold, and her tortured entrails were blessedly quiet. She’d stared at the ceiling, her fingers locked in his. “I want to talk to Steve,” she said.
“Steve Price?”
A nod. “I want to tell him. What I saw.”
The Enfields had known Steve Price for nearly ten years, since the journalist had traded the editorship of his family newspaper for an investigative reporter’s job at the Washington Post. But why Dana wanted to talk to Steve, of all people—rather than her best friend or her sister or even himself—baffled George.
“Please,” she said faintly. “Get him now.”
He called the cell phone number he found in his Palm Pilot and caught Price on the second ring.
“Shit,” the journalist muttered when George told him where he was. “I was afraid of this. I’ve called your house four times. You know it’s ricin?”
George hadn’t known. He told Price to get his ass to the hospital and hung up shouting for Dana’s doctor. Demanding an antidote—any kind of antidote—for a poison that’d never had one.
Price spared George the unwanted words of commiseration. He leaned over the gurney to kiss Dana’s cheek, oblivious to the odor of blood and vomit that rose from her failing body.
“Hell of a race, girl,” he said. “Unbelievable. You rock.”
She smiled crookedly at him and closed her eyes. “I want you to take down what I have to say. I want it to get to the right people.”
He pulled out a tape recorder. “Shoot.”
“I remember where things went wrong,” she said. “Mile twenty. Hains Point.”
George saw Price’s expression change, saw the brows draw down and the lines around the mouth harden. There was something about Hains Point—something Price al
ready knew. “You’re sure? What do you remember?”
“I was feeling like crap—I’d taken a shot in my thigh, but I was afraid I was going to faint. I asked the first Marine I saw for help.”
“And?”
“He wasn’t with the others at the aid station. He gave me water. It tasted weird—sort of muddy or metallic—but I figured that was just me. That my levels were out of whack. I drank it anyway.”
“All of it?”
“All of it.”
A faint sound, almost a whimper, from high in Price’s throat. George turned away from them. She asked for help and the bastard poisoned her.
“What did he look like, Dana?”
“Older,” she replied with effort. “Older than a Marine. In his thirties, maybe. White. Five foot ten. Bright blue eyes. Cammies. No music. A couple of water drums and a stack of bottles.”
She paused to draw breath. Price reached for her hand and squeezed it.
“I thanked him for the cup. . . . But I remember: He didn’t smile or wish me well. Which was odd. Everybody else did. I got my blood tested at the aid station, ate a banana and drank some juice, then ran the last few miles.”
She began to pant, and with the automatic surge that had become horribly routine, George reached for a basin. Price watched as Dana retched out her guts in her husband’s hands; she vomited mostly blood.
“I’m sorry, gentlemen,” said a nurse at the partition, “I’m going to have to ask you to step into the hall. Mrs. Enfield needs rest.”
“You’ll tell them, Steve?” Dana whispered.
He blew her a kiss. “Be strong. This is just another race, Dana girl. You’ll win it.”
But once beyond her range of hearing he asked George, “What’ve these doctors told you?”
“Squat, Steve. I don’t think they know what’s happening. I told them it could be ricin, and they asked me not to spread panic.”
“It’s ricin.” He handed George a sheet of paper. “Read that. I’ve already shown the original to the FBI. It was some kind of terrorist hit. Nobody knows how many . . .”
His voice trailed away, and he glanced over his shoulder toward Dana. “You should be with her, buddy.”
“Tell me what you know. I’d rather hear the truth.”
“She swallowed enough poison to kill her. If she can hold on a few more days . . . there’s a chance . . .”
“Days,” George burst out. “How can anybody take this for days? And with her condition—”
From the curtained gurney behind them came a strangled cry. Dana arched upward, convulsed with pain, her fingers scrabbling on air.
“Nurse!” George shouted. “Nurse!”
Chapter 6
ARLINGTON, 10:45 P.M.
Caroline threw on her jeans and buttoned a blouse around the bandages on her shoulder and spent ten minutes tossing clothes into the suitcase she’d only recently unpacked from Europe. Thinking: An American cell. What did we miss? How did we miss it? Jesus, this is our fault— She kept the television on in her bedroom, without sound, reading the marquee scroll that sped across the bottom of the screen. More than four hundred people had checked into area hospitals. They don’t even know. No one’s told them yet. That they haven’t a chance of surviving. The word ricin had not yet been mentioned in public.
Tom Shephard had left her unwillingly at the door.
“Cuddy has my cell,” he’d said, one hand reaching for her good arm. “Call once you’re out of here, understand? I want to know where you are.”
Caroline had stepped back from the raw emotion in his eyes, shoulder burning under her cotton blouse. She was not going to become Tom Shephard’s burden—another woman he had to save. She’d deceived him enough already. Tom had no idea her husband was alive.
“We’ll be fine,” she managed. “You’ve got enough on your plate tonight.”
He was due back at Bureau Headquarters, the J. Edgar Hoover Building at Ninth and G, where the director would be forced to notify the President and a press conference would have to be called. She didn’t envy Tom his decisions. Tell the world there’d been a ricin attack, and risk mass panic—even if the faxed letter was a hoax? Or be accused of cover-up and conspiracy once the first victim died?
It would be easier when someone died, in fact. They’d have an autopsy, then. They’d know.
Except that Caroline already knew. Thirty April’s letter had come like a valentine from the grave, a dirty assignation she’d been dying to keep. The total obliteration of the neo-Nazi group had seemed too easy, even while she watched it happen; she’d learned to expect the hydra effect. Despite the cloud of misery she’d struggled through the past six days, she knew now that she’d been waiting for these words, this knock on the door. The next round. When she could atone for all her sins.
“Did you pack your gun?” Shephard had asked.
“I’m Agency, not Bureau. We don’t carry guns.”
“Liar,” he retorted. “Call my hotel with your number. And get some sleep.”
She’d watched him drive off with Steve Price in the journalist’s car, aware that Shephard was somehow relieved to have a role—to have something to do besides watch a sports channel in his jockey shorts. Like her, Tom had only been waiting.
“I don’t want to sleep,” she told Cuddy now. “I don’t want to run or hide. I want to talk to the boy.”
He glanced at his watch. “Visiting hours at Bethesda Naval are long since over.”
“So what? Jozsef’s the best option we’ve got. You can flash your badge and mouth platitudes about national security. I’ll smile and look sympathetic.”
“Does this mean you’ve decided to stay?” Cuddy asked.
“I have no choice. I’m a target, remember?”
Jozsef Krucevic was the son of 30 April’s leader, Mlan Krucevic, a man Caroline had helped to destroy. The boy had flown back to Washington in Air Force Two with Sophie Payne’s body. For thirty-eight hours, dangerously ill, he’d hung on the fringe of the waking world. Two days ago, however, he’d sat up in bed for the first time and eaten green gelatin; Caroline had spent a few enjoyable hours with him, explaining the nature of American cartoons. Nobody had figured out where Jozsef was going to live, or with whom. It had seemed important to get through Payne’s funeral before disposing of her killer’s son.
Bethesda Naval was a surreal place, with its massive central tower in the Thirties Fascist style. A light at its apex distinguished the room from which James Forrestal, once a Secretary of Defense, had jumped to his death. Caroline found suicide a macabre sort of memorial for any building, particularly a hospital. She drove her Volkswagen while Cuddy called ahead to the night nurse on Jozsef’s pediatric intensive care ward and told the woman that the boy’s CIA handlers needed to speak with him immediately. The nurse had refused to give them access—she lacked the proper authority—at which point Cuddy called Dare Atwood at home in Georgetown and brought the DCI up to date. A personal escort—a military doctor, by the look of him—stood waiting for them at the front entrance.
“Are you getting marathon victims in your ER?” Cuddy asked as they strolled briskly in the direction of Acute Care Pediatric.
“Seventy-four Marines, at last count,” the doctor said starkly.
Jozsef seemed both older and younger than his age, with his dead-white cheeks and large, hollow black eyes. Like a child out of Dickens, Caroline thought. Too knowing, consumptive, and doomed. His frail fingers plucked at the starched hospital sheet. The legs beneath were as thin and straight as two metal poles. Jozsef. She had carried him on her back straight out of hell.
“Hey, kiddo. You still up?”
“They had to give me my shot,” he answered irritably. “They were able to replicate Father’s medicine—did they tell you? He thought it was an impossible code to break. He was wrong.”
“About a lot of things,” Caroline said gruffly, and reached to tousle Jozsef’s hair. He’d been deliberately infected by his own father with a gen
etically engineered strain of anthrax. “You don’t look too bad. Seen any SpongeBob lately?”
He lifted one shoulder in a petulant sort of shrug, his eyes sliding toward Cuddy. He’d met Cuddy only once, and seemed to feel awkward around him. As though Cuddy were watching and judging him. As Cuddy certainly was.
“I’ve been reading. This.” He gestured toward the book; a paperback of The Golden Compass Caroline had given him a few days before. “I cannot decide what is real and what is false in all the words. My English is good—but my brain . . .”
“. . . is better. You’ll get there—stick with it. Look, we’re sorry to bother you so late, Jozsef, but we need to ask you some questions.”
The huge dark eyes came up to her own. “You always do. That’s why you saved my life, is it not? So I could tell you everything I know?”
She shook her head. “You saved mine, I think. Or we saved each other. That’s what good people do.”
“I am not a good person. I am a killer’s son.” His gaze dropped to his thin fingers again, restlessly kneading the blanket. Caroline glanced at Cuddy, who’d remained standing in the doorway, one shoulder propped against the jamb as though it were his office. His face was expressionless; he had not yet decided what he thought of the boy—what was real and what was false, amid all Jozsef’s words.
Caroline drew an uncomfortable vinyl-backed chair closer to the bed. “I was hoping you could tell me how long ago your father decided on Sophie Payne. Why he chose the vice president to kidnap, I mean. Did he dislike her personally? Did he know she was coming to Berlin?”
Jozsef shrugged again. He was pissed about something beyond this unexpected visit. Bored in a hospital that was no better than a prison? Worried about what might happen next?
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