The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich

by Lars Emmerich

  But watching Sarah come within hours of a grisly, horrible death, and then watching her amazing and miraculous recovery, had helped Evelyn shed all of the bullshit from her mind and heart. Every day was a miracle. Every smile was a gift. Every breath was a bonus. This was the way she would approach every moment for the rest of her life.

  She knew that Sarah grasped the same truth, in the deep, wordless wisdom that children acquainted with tragedy and hardship often have. Evelyn could tell that Sarah had a keen awareness of how serious everything had become. Her body was on the mend, but it had still been ravaged. She had lost a leg. She had lost nearly a quarter of her remaining body weight, and she was weak, hungry, and sleepy much of the time.

  But she was alive, and both Evelyn and Sarah knew what that meant. They shared a tacit agreement to never again let anything cloud their vision of their lives. Every moment was simply too precious, too fleeting.

  Evelyn’s phone buzzed. She recognized the number. It was the number attached to the man who had changed everything for them, at great personal risk. Jim Firth had flown from Paris with an illegal miracle drug. Evelyn had gratefully jumped at the chance to help her Sarah. She wasn’t blind to the risks, but any odds were better than the certainty of Sarah’s horrific death. The deadly endotoxins lining the outer membranes of that satanic bug inside her little body would have granted no quarter, and Sarah’s life expectancy had been down to hours, maybe even less.

  “How is she?” Firth asked.

  “She’s wonderful and amazing,” Evelyn said, awe and gratitude in her voice. “Thank you so, so much, Dr. Firth. I just can’t…” Tears overtook her, and she couldn’t finish the thought.

  “Please,” Firth said. “You’d have done the same thing if roles were reversed. I’m just thankful and relieved that she’s doing so well.”

  “Thank you just the same,” Evelyn said. “It was a huge risk that you took, and Sarah and I will never forget it, ever.”

  Firth didn’t quite know what to say. His motives weren’t quite as philanthropic as his performance with Evelyn had led her to believe, but that wasn’t to say that he wasn’t deeply moved and joyful that what had been a very lucrative job for him had also saved a little girl’s life. Those kinds of things didn’t happen very often in his line of work.

  “Listen, Ms. Paulson,” he said, seriousness in his voice. “I want you to watch her very closely over the next couple of days. If she were going to have a negative reaction to the drug, the odds are that we would already be seeing symptoms, but there is an outside chance that she might experience delayed-onset side effects. If her fever returns, or if she experiences shortness of breath or dizziness while lying down, I want you to call me right away. Okay?”

  Evelyn agreed. Of course she would call.

  “And the staff at NIH will probably run some additional tests on Sarah’s blood. There may be some remnants of the drug that might catch their eye. I hope you won’t mind playing dumb, as I’m still in quite a bit of legal jeopardy.”

  “Of course,” Evelyn said. “Anything at all, just tell me.”

  “And the last thing is,” Firth went on, “that there’s a small chance that the infection might return. Sarah doesn’t need any more doses of the medication as long as she continues to recover her health and vitality, but if she takes a turn for the worse again, I want you to call me right away. We’ll have more on the way from Paris in a heartbeat.”

  Evelyn assured Firth that he would be her first call if anything went awry, and she thanked him profusely. “You’ve given us our life back, Dr. Firth. I wish there was some way I could thank you.”

  “You don’t need to thank me,” he said, and Evelyn could hear the smile in his voice. “Trust me, her recovery is thanks enough.”

  “You can’t just give me your address, you know, for a thank-you card or something?”

  Firth laughed. “I really wish I could. But you know how it is. This is one of those cases where doing the right thing was not the same as doing the legal thing. So we have to lay low for a while, at least until there’s time to get through all the red tape.”

  Evelyn understood. “Promise you’ll call me when that happens,” she said. “Maybe then we can thank you properly.”

  “I’d like that,” Firth said. “But for now, I have to catch a plane. You’ll call me right away if anything changes with Sarah?”

  Evelyn promised. She thought she might also call him just to talk to him, and to let Sarah thank him personally. When the time was right.

  She heard a knock on the door. Dr. Fred Farnsworth entered. He wanted to talk to Evelyn about some strange blood test results. Nothing to be alarmed about, as the bacteria count was down to almost negligible numbers, he said, and Sarah appeared to be in the middle of what can only be considered a miraculous recovery, but there was just something that he needed to ask about.

  Evelyn knew what was coming, and she was prepared for it. When they had finished talking, she wasn’t sure that Farnsworth had completely bought her story, but she knew that she had delivered a convincing performance just the same.

  40

  Gunther Fleischer was being chased by a man with a meat cleaver in one hand and a cell phone in another. Fleischer ran faster, winding his way through endless miles of corridors in a dark hallway lined on either side with locked doors. In the distance, heads peeked out of opened doorways at the commotion advancing down the hallway, and Fleischer shouted out to them for help. If they would just let him in, let him dive through and then shut the door in his wake, instead of slamming them as he approached, he might escape the maniacal apparition at his heels, the tall ghost of a man with a blank face, shouting names at him, the names of the ones who screamed or begged or pleaded with him to think of their families, their wives, their children. But the doors slammed as he approached them, the faces ducking out of the way in fright, leaving Fleischer to face his fate at the hands of the man with otherworldly strength and speed, the meat cleaver swinging ever closer to Fleischer’s flesh, that goddamned cell phone clanging incessantly in his ear.

  And then he was awake, sweating, breathing hard, hands balled into fists, a weight crushing down on his chest. He forced himself to breathe deeply. This was the price he paid for the life he chose. The nightmares.

  But the ringing cell phone wasn’t a construct of his dreams. It was a physical object on his dresser. He had evidently woven it into his nightmare. It stopped ringing, and then it beeped, signaling that someone had left a voice message.

  Fleischer listened. “Call me,” was all Jefferson Ames said. Fleischer caught his breath for a minute, allowed his mind to settle down in the comfort of a reality that did not contain a cleaver-and-cell-phone-wielding wraith, and hit the call button.

  “Are you sitting down?” Ames asked.

  “It’s three in the morning,” Fleischer said.

  “Right. Sorry. But I thought you’d want to know right away.”

  “I do. What have you found?”

  Ames’ voice lowered in pitch and intensity, giving him a more conspiratorial affectation than his normal affectation, which was also best described as conspiratorial, at least as far as Fleischer saw. “Your man does not exist.”

  Fleischer shook his head. “I don’t understand. You couldn’t find him?”

  “No,” Ames said. “The record doesn’t exist.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “It’s clear that this guy’s identity used to be in the system, which you’d expect because he’s obviously a real person and he stood in front of an ATM camera or went through an airport security line or he had a Facebook account, or maybe all of the above. But it’s been deleted. He’s not in there now.”

  Fleischer had trouble comprehending the implications. “I’m sorry, I must be a little bit groggy yet. What does this mean?”

  “Dude,” Ames said, a bit of an edge in his voice, “I’m saying that the people who own this database don’t want your man to be found.”

&n
bsp; “You delete people from the database?” Fleischer asked.

  “All the time. Witness protection, battered spouses, narcs, clandestine services guys, you name it.”

  Fleischer got a sinking feeling in his gut. “There’s no chance this is a mistake? That the computer misidentified the photo? I can send a different picture if you need me to.”

  “No, no. It’s not that the algorithm didn’t recognize your guy. It’s that it did recognize him, and it ain’t sayin’ anything about who or where he is.”

  Fleischer was silent a moment. “That is a very interesting development.” He mulled a minute longer, then asked, “Do you know of any way around this?”

  “Of course. That happens all the time, too. But it happens via official channels, and it’s approved a few levels above my head. We obviously don’t have that option in our… circumstances.”

  Fleischer understood. Ames was selling his access secretly and illegally, for reasons that Fleischer didn’t entirely understand. Money, maybe, but Fleischer was certain that the consequences if Ames were to be caught would quickly outweigh the paltry sums he was collecting. Ames was earning a tidy bit of spending cash, Fleischer was sure, but the money certainly wasn’t enough to fully account for the risks that the American was taking.

  “If I may ask,” Ames said, “and I won’t mind if you don’t want to tell me anything, but where did you get the picture of this guy?”

  “Cologne,” Fleischer said. He hesitated a beat, but then decided that if he was in for a penny, he may as well be in for a pound. “At a crime scene.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I thought,” Ames said. “My money’s on a clandestine services guy. They have a way of showing up at those kinds of parties.”

  “CIA?”

  “I’d start there, if I were you,” Ames said. “But it could be someone from Homeland or the Defense Intelligence Agency or one of the fifty contracting companies the government hires to do its dirty work. Not to tell you your business, but that’s what I’d be thinking if I were in your shoes.”

  Fleischer thanked his old friend and signed off. He had a lot to think about. Most of all, he had to decide if the amount of money that Kohlhaas was paying him could possibly justify tangling with the US government. He might need to renegotiate the terms of his deal.

  He might also need to get a lot smarter about how he investigated. Police states were remarkably good at counterintelligence, and America was no exception. He had heard rumors of capabilities that alerted the US security apparatus when people typed certain search terms into their internet browsers, or spoke certain words during telephone conversations. Fleischer had no desire to be rolled up as a result of a careless phone call or overeager internet research session.

  He ambled to the sparse kitchen and put on a pot of coffee. He had a lot of work to do, and there was no time like the present.

  41

  Four hundred and ninety kilometers west and south of his friend’s butcher shop, Viktor Kohlhaas lay awake, staring at the ceiling in the guest room of his Paris flat, his eyes tracing the ornate ceiling work that was barely visible in the dim predawn light. He’d slept well for five or six hours, but awakened with fear in his chest and a cry on his lips.

  His demons howled less about what he had done, and more about what he had set in motion. He recalled the events that had solidified the Iraqi’s role in what he came to refer to, in his mind if not anywhere else, as Synergique’s master strategy.

  The Iraqi had plenty of experience, which was why he came so highly recommended to Kohlhaas, and ultimately why Kohlhaas had paid him the otherworldly sum it took to incite the ancient and soulless Arab to action.

  The bioweapons expert’s acumen wasn’t limited to technical aspects, it turned out, and Kohlhaas had found himself engaged in a very serious conversation regarding the strategy of the whole thing. “As you know,” the Iraqi had said, “I have seen many of these kinds of things, perhaps more than anyone alive at the moment, and I wonder how much thought you’ve given to your target.”

  Kohlhaas hadn’t given the targets much thought at all. People were people. Sick and dying people would demand medication, which Synergique would provide, and for which Synergique would be paid exorbitant sums. What else was there to think about?

  “These operations are most effective when the victims have an emotional resonance to them,” the bioterrorist had told him.

  Kohlhaas hadn’t followed right away, but the Iraqi had clarified. “Not all victims are created equal. Some inspire sympathy, empathy, outrage, and, ultimately, the kind of action you desire. Others, well, they’re just a statistic.”

  Kohlhaas had understood the logic, but not the point of the discussion the Iraqi was trying to have with him.

  “Children,” the Iraqi said, slightly exasperated. “People move mountains to protect the children.”

  He couldn’t believe he was going to go through with it, but there was no denying the truth of it. Sick secretaries wouldn’t give anybody pause, or sick lawyers, or sick Wall Street people, or even sick housewives. There would be news stories, and they would play up the emotional angle for viewership ratings, but it was anybody’s guess whether that would be enough, really enough, to put demand for the drug over the top, to spike prices and volume up to where Synergique needed them to be.

  But sick children were another matter entirely. Sick children would certainly do for Synergique what Kohlhaas needed to be done.

  And so he had reluctantly agreed on the delivery parameters, at great cost to what remained of his conscience, justifying to himself the egregious pain and suffering he would inflict on them, even if only momentarily, by the hackneyed Greater Good argument. But it rang hollow, even to him, and at the end of the day, he was going to put at risk hundreds of schoolchildren to satisfy his own greed, his own lust for power, riches, and adulation.

  It was this knowledge that kept him awake on this particular night, along with all of the obvious things that could go horribly wrong. What if the biostatic drug therapy LeBeque had devised couldn’t be delivered in time? How many kids would die? Would the infection rate outpace the cure rate? Could he produce enough doses of the drug quickly enough to keep from igniting a worldwide conflagration? Those were very real risks, ones that he had taken great pains to mitigate. But in an infinite and random universe, one in which simple life forms such as bacteria had found their way around deadly impediments for billions of years, nothing was guaranteed.

  And Mathias. The images flashed involuntarily in front of his mind’s eye for yet another time, threatening to shatter what remained of his emotional constitution, threatening to leave him wholly unraveled.

  Those images also reminded him how vulnerable he was. He had received another hang-up call from the same New York telephone number. It had to be that prick from Prizer Pharmaceutical. He knew it in his bones.

  Even while weakness and worry battered him from within, he resolved to show no weakness to friend or enemy. His team needed him to be stronger than ever as their plans neared completion. And he vowed that he would shove it up Prizer’s ass, and every other giant, bloated, worthless pill pusher in the industry, or he would die trying.

  He was approaching the point where he didn’t care which outcome eventually came to pass. He longed for it to be over, to be resolved one way or another, to release this infinite suspense that had wound his life to an intolerable tension over the past year.

  It was the weakness of fatigue, Kohlhaas knew. He rose, dressed, made an espresso, and let the caffeine restore a portion of his courage.

  He turned on his phone as he sipped his coffee in the predawn gloom. It timed in, and then beeped with an urgent message from Gunther Fleischer. “Call me immediately,” it said.

  Kohlhaas sighed. Midnight messages rarely heralded good news.

  42

  “Congratulations,” Quinn said, “on another brilliantly planned and executed operation.”

  A beat went by while Quinn’s sarcasm
sunk in. “You let him escape,” was his boss’ eventual reply.

  “Yes,” Quinn said, his voice dripping. “It was my lack of skill and experience that caused me not to find the guy. The absence of a name, address, or photo should not have been a problem for a seasoned pro such as myself.”

  “You had a location.” The protest was delivered in the familiar nasal tones that Quinn had grown to hate over the years. Their relationship had started out with contempt, and so familiarity had nowhere to take it but headlong into hatred.

  Quinn snorted. “A hotel lobby? That’s not a location. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.”

  “It’s all we had.”

  “Obviously. What I recommend you do now is send a field forensics team to snag some prints from the computer the geeks say he was using. Otherwise, I think you’re pretty dead in the water on this guy.”

  Quinn’s employer mulled this over. “Hard to do that without drawing attention.”

  Quinn chuckled. “Please. Child’s play. But it’s your op, mastermind, and your call. You keep trying to do this in public places and you’re making this guy look like superman.”

  “Maybe he is superman.”

  “Because he killed an agent? I’d say you just sent the wrong guy,” Quinn said.

  “I deeply value your opinion.”

  Quinn smiled at the sardonic tone in his employer’s voice. “I’m going to take a vacation now,” Quinn said.

  “The hell you are. You still owe me a stiff.”

  “And you still owe me a way to find this asshole. Until you get your act together, I’m unavailable.”

  “Wrong. You’re going to park your ass in front of that hotel and stay ready. He’ll make a mistake, and you’ll get to him.”

  Quinn laughed. “Sorry, big guy. Stakeouts aren’t my department. I graduated from that bullshit years ago. Call me when you get your head out of your ass.” He hung up, satisfied.