Hot Intent (Hqn)

by Dees, Cindy

  “It’s Katie,” she said low. “We just got in a batch of patients. Alex thinks they’ve been exposed to some sort of chemical agent.”

  Abruptly André sounded entirely alert. “Like a chemical weapon?”

  “Yes.”

  A short pause and then, “Tell him to get me proof. At all costs, get me proof. As soon as you’ve got it, execute the exit protocol and get that proof back here. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “At all costs. You hear?”

  “Got it.”

  She thought he might be suggesting something sinister along the lines of theft, murder and mayhem if it became necessary. But she didn’t speak spy double-talk nearly as well as Alex.

  “Katie!” Sylvia called.

  “Gotta go,” she murmured into the phone.

  “Keep in touch—” She cut off her boss and stuffed the phone back in Alex’s pack.

  Several patients went into various stages of collapse over the next few hours, keeping her, Alex and Sylvia hopping. A man in his sixties died, and an elderly woman followed him soon after. It was, in a word, awful.

  Sylvia was beside herself that whatever the patients had might be contagious and was agonizing over whether or not to shut down her little clinic and deny the locals any more care.

  Finally, as the sun rose, Alex told the nurse, “Keep your clinic open for now. Katie and I will go investigate this illness further.”

  He sent the overwrought woman to bed for a few hours of badly needed sleep while he went looking for the man who’d driven the farm truck into the village last night. The guy was sleeping off a hangover a few huts down and roused slowly.

  Alex had Katie fetch coffee from the communal eaterie the locals had set up to pool their food resources. He poured a few cups of the strong, hot brew down the man and then informed him he was taking them to the source of the sick patients. Now.

  An exhausted Sylvia was roused from her nap and Alex shouldered their backpack of equipment.

  The hungover driver climbed back in his truck silently. Alex slid over to the middle of the cab and Katie mashed up next to the door. The vehicle bumped out of town on the ruined road and Katie groaned under her breath. Banging around in this truck was better than walking but not by much.

  The driver was taciturn. He was probably nursing a monster headache, which had to suck for him on these awful roads. Alex was equally grim, and that worried her. He was a brilliant man and a highly qualified physician. She seriously doubted his suspicions were wrong about what had sickened those poor people.

  Lord, the implications of it, though. If chemical weapons were stored right in America’s backyard, Uncle Sam was going to go crazy. Memory of studying the Cuban Missile Crisis in history class came to mind. Were the Russians involved this time, too?

  Where else would tiny Cuba acquire the technology to make such weapons? Could the Cubans have developed the skill independently? She supposed it was possible. But why would they try, knowing how their neighbor to the north would react if such a thing were discovered? No, she was more inclined to suspect the Russians were behind this.

  Given the furious set of Alex’s jaw, he must surmise the same thing.

  The trip was not long in distance, but it took a couple of hours to navigate the terrible roads. Twice, all three of them had to pile out of the truck and drag aside debris that had fallen or blown into the road overnight.

  They crested a rise and she was surprised to glimpse the Caribbean Sea glistening like a jewel in the distance. Between them and it lay what looked like a destroyed coconut palm grove. Rows of the giant trees lay uprooted or snapped off at the base of the trunks. She hated to think about how wind could wreak such havoc. If the strong, flexible palms could not withstand it, how could anything else?

  The truck turned onto a sandy path and drove to the edge of a small settlement that was still flooded. A few people waded wearily through knee-deep water. “Here we are,” the man announced.

  “Water-borne illness?” Katie murmured.

  Alex frowned. “Most of those are caused by microbes or parasites in the water. Symptoms are typically intestinal in presentation.”

  “Botulism?” she suggested. “It’s often fatal.”

  Alex shook his head. “We’d be seeing high fevers. Delirium. Those patients back at the village showed neither. They were in agony but lucid. Respiratory distress. Pinpointed pupils. Runny noses. Hemorrhaging. That’s not a bug in the water or food poisoning.”

  He turned to the man and asked in Spanish, “Are there any more people alive in the area who are affected?”

  The man nodded grimly and led them toward a cluster of makeshift tents at the far end of the tiny village. Except when they got to the crude shelters, flies swarmed everywhere outside. Inside, a dozen bodies lay in neat rows on the dirt, bloated. Stinking. Dead.

  Katie staggered back, retching.

  Alex pulled a surgical mask out of his pack, donned it and muttered, “Stay out here, Katie.”

  Oh, God. Not a problem. She turned toward the man who’d crossed the street to sit down on an overturned metal barrel. He pulled out a cigar, lit it and sat there staring blankly into space and smoking. She walked over to him. The cloud of smoke seemed to drive off the flies, and the smell of the tobacco was better than the alternative.

  “Did you lose anyone in there?” she asked quietly.

  He shrugged. “Wife. My brother.”

  “Did they die in the storm or of the sickness?”

  Another shrug. She couldn’t blame the guy for shutting down like this. How did one face the staggering loss of family, home and livelihood all at once? “Where are you staying now?”

  “My truck.”

  Wow. “Food? Where are you getting that? And fresh water?”

  “Around.”

  “Is the government passing out supplies anywhere?”

  “Baracoa, maybe. I heard some boats came in.”

  Sharply aware of the CIA missions—both of them—hanging over her head, she asked, “Is there a port or dock anywhere around here where supply boats can tie up?”

  “Yeah, sure. At the Zacara plant. But none have come yet.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Factory. They make cleaning supplies. Furniture polish. Window cleaner. That sort of stuff.”

  “Where is this place?”

  “Couple klicks up the road.” He pointed with his cigar to the north.

  “Do people from this village work there?”

  He nodded and took another long pull on his cigar. She coughed a little at the blue cloud of smoke he blew out.

  Alex stepped out into the street and ripped off his surgical mask, breathing deeply of the fresh air. He looked shaken as he strode over to them. He asked the driver, “Did you know these people?”

  A grunt around the end of the cigar.

  “Can you tell me who they were or where they lived?” Alex tried.

  “Yeah, sure.” He rattled off a half dozen family names followed by, “They lived on the plantations north of town.”

  “Up by the Zacara plant?” she asked quickly.

  The man glanced at her. “Yeah.”

  “What kind of farms were they?” Alex asked.

  “Co-ops. Pigs. Chickens. Food crops—beans, plantains, vegetables.”

  She looked over at Alex, who was frowning. She murmured in English, which the driver didn’t seem to understand a word of, “This Zacara facility is some sort of chemical factory. Makes cleaning supplies. Could the hurricane have breached storage containers of something dreadfully poisonous?”

  “It’s worth a look,” Alex replied dubiously.

  The driver had wandered away from them and into the ruined hull of a modest house. They heard some crashing as the fellow rooted around inside. He emerged onto the stoop and took a long slug out of a liquor bottle.

  Alex cursed under his breath. “So much for having him drive.”

  Katie groaned. “We’re walking agai
n, aren’t we?”

  “Yup.”

  They headed out on foot, which probably wasn’t that much slower than driving along the trashed road. Katie commented, “That guy said there haven’t been any supply trucks through here yet. You’d think the government would send someone out this way in the next day or two to check on the locals. Maybe deliver some bottled water.”

  “You’d think.”

  “He also said there’s a dock up by the Zacara factory. I thought maybe we could find someone who works the docks and chat him up. See if any ships are coming in at weird hours and on-or off-loading anything.”

  Alex nodded. “We’ll have to take it slow, though. We can’t afford to make anyone suspicious.”

  “See anything interesting in those bodies back there?”

  “More evidence of some kind of chemical poisoning.”

  “What does it mean?” she asked in dismay.

  He shook his head. “I don’t even want to think about the political implications if it turns out to be a weaponized chemical.”

  “Could this Zacara factory have been storing some cleaning chemical that makes a horrible, evil gas when it’s released? Or maybe two chemicals that aren’t supposed to mix but did during the storm?”

  “The operative words being during the storm. With two-hundred-mile-per-hour winds blowing, any deadly chemicals that were released would be swept away so fast they’d have little or no time to affect anyone in the area. If they were released in a high enough concentration to actually hurt people, we’d see a wide scatter pattern of deaths, not this tight little cluster in this one village.”

  “What the hell is going on, Alex?”

  “That’s what we’re going to find out, hopefully. I’m praying the storm caused a slow leak and that a cloud of something innocent, but poisonous, built up near the factory.”

  They trudged onward in silence.

  She spotted them first. Dead, bloated lumps in a pasture littered with tree branches. “Oh, my God, Alex. Cows.”

  He glanced where she pointed and swore. If there had been a fence containing the beasts at some point, it was long gone. Alex swerved into the pasture to examine the creatures. Katie had no desire to get up close and personal with any dead animals and stayed out on the road.

  Alex was back quickly. “Same pathology at a glance as the people,” he announced.

  Katie shuddered. They walked a little farther and spotted a child walking alone toward them.

  At first, she hardly believed her eyes. And then her maternal instincts kicked in and she rushed forward to kneel before the boy. He was maybe ten years old and said his name was Oscar. He had cuts and abrasions and seemed mildly in shock.

  Alex joined them, but stood back, detached and merely watched as she gave the boy a bottle of water and a couple of protein bars, which Oscar wolfed down.

  “Aren’t you going to at least check him over for injuries?” she finally demanded.

  Alex frowned, but stepped forward to ask the boy a few terse questions in Spanish, check his eyes, and look into his mouth. While Alex impersonally ran his hands over the boy’s limbs in search of small cuts or abrasions, the boy described his home being destroyed in the hurricane. He’d apparently been swept inland on the storm surge and was only now trying to find his way back to his family’s farm, which was somewhere nearby.

  Her heart ached for what the boy was likely to find waiting for him, but Alex didn’t seem the slightest bit moved. Sometimes she really hated his detachment. Even if it was good in both of his lines of work, she couldn’t stand how completely he refused to express emotions of any kind. A little simple, human kindness wouldn’t kill him, would it?

  Instead, Alex had a quick conversation with the child, looked at the map and checked the GPS. “I place the boy’s family near where we’re headed,” he announced. “He can come with us.”

  And if Oscar’s home had been in the opposite direction? Would Alex have abandoned the child and let him proceed to the ruins of his family’s home alone? To discover he’d lost everything and everyone he loved by himself?

  Katie took Oscar’s hand and held it tightly as they continued their hike. She feared for what they would find when they reached this boy’s house.

  An iron gate came into view, and Oscar ran to it eagerly. But only a bare concrete slab remained beyond where the child’s home had stood. He burst into tears and Katie’s heart broke for him. She sat down in the middle of the road and pulled the boy into her lap to hold and console while she cried with him.

  *

  ALEX STEPPED AWAY from Katie and the child. He felt bad for the kid, but as quickly as sympathy reared its ugly head, he slammed the useless emotion shut in a drawer in his mind.

  Oscar’s life had just been irrevocably shattered. And the sooner the boy came to terms with that, the sooner he could pick himself up and go on. Alex knew that from personal experience. He’d been only a few years older than the kid when his own world imploded. Katie coddling him wasn’t going to do him a bit of good. As much as it sucked, Oscar was going to have to grow up fast.

  While Katie calmed the boy, he mentally reviewed his college chemistry for chemicals and combinations of chemicals that could be lethal. He desperately hoped Katie was right and the cleaning supplies factory was the source of the deaths in the area. But his gut told him he wasn’t looking at something that simple.

  Eventually, Katie extracted information from the boy that Oscar’s grandmother lived in Baracoa. He wasn’t surprised when Katie offered to take Oscar to the city to find her, but he really didn’t have time to play fairy godfather to some kid right now. They had a crisis on their hands, and they needed to get to the bottom of it as soon as possible.

  Before he could voice his objection to a Baracoa road trip, however, the boy ran toward some sort of shed behind where the house had stood and Katie followed the child. The structure looked largely intact.

  Alex started when his cell phone vibrated in his pocket and pulled it out cautiously. He swore and answered in Russian, keeping his voice low. “What do you want, Peter? I’m a little busy at the moment.”

  “Have you found anything?” his father asked without preamble.

  “Like what?” he responded cautiously.

  “You tell me.”

  “What do you think I’m going to find out here?”

  “Dead people,” Peter answered promptly.

  “Good guess.”

  A pause drew out between them. Alex finally murmured, “You’re draining my battery. I’m going to hang up now—”

  “Wait,” Peter said sharply.

  “What?”

  “Have you found any...unusual deaths?”

  Alex’s skin crawled. Literally. It felt like a million tiny insects were clawing across his flesh. “Why do you ask?” he asked sharply.

  “If you should happen to run across anything...out of the ordinary...it would behoove all of us if you...removed...any evidence of such a thing. It would be a tragedy if something...contagious...were to be loosed upon unsuspecting people.”

  Just which unsuspecting people was Peter talking about? Was he threatening Americans with a chemical attack if the presence of such chemicals were revealed here? Or was he merely talking about the Cuban government silencing the locals by whatever means necessary? Not that a localized massacre was that great an alternative, either.

  “You’re going to have to speak plainly to me, Peter. You already seem to know what I’ve seen out here.”

  “I need you to bury the evidence. All of it. Do you have any idea the international crisis that would ensue if word of what was there got out?”

  “Is there more of it still in the area?” Alex demanded.

  “I don’t know. If you could find out and let me know, I’d be eternally grateful. You’re a doctor, son. Think about the lives you will save if you do this thing for me.”

  “And if I fail?” he asked carefully.

  “You must not fail, my son. The collateral
damage in your life would be...unthinkable.”

  Alex stared at nothing as shock reverberated through his entire being. They would kill Katie and Dawn. If he didn’t betray the United States and commit treason by burying evidence of chemical weapons in Cuba, the only people in the world he loved would die.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  KATIE WAS PERPLEXED over why Alex had abruptly broken off their investigation of the Zacara factory to take Oscar to Baracoa. She didn’t for a minute think he’d agreed to the trip for altruistic reasons. He’d gotten a stubborn look on his face when she first promised the boy she’d take him to his grandmother. Then, that call had come in, and Alex had abruptly changed his tune.

  The shed had yielded a waterlogged moped, but Alex and the boy worked some sort of magic on it and had gotten it running again. Alex had taken apart a wheelbarrow and rigged a makeshift hitch to turn it into a towable wagon.

  She and Alex rode the moped while Oscar sat in the wagon behind it. The trip to Baracoa was slow going. They were fewer than thirty miles up the coast from the city, but it took them most of the afternoon to get there.

  Baracoa had fared slightly better than the villages up the coast. A number of cinder-block and concrete buildings had more or less withstood the battering of Giselle. And it had public services like police, a fire department and a hospital. It appeared that much of the populace had been recruited to clear debris and shovel mud. The highest two-thirds of the city was more or less dug out from the storm and passable, while the coastal margins of the town were still under water.

  A soldier with an AK-47 slung across his back waved them to a halt as they reached the edge of the town. Katie more or less hid behind Oscar while Alex explained in fluent Spanish that they were bringing the boy to his grandmother. On cue, Oscar burst into tears. Her limited Spanish led her to believe the child was telling the soldier a fractured account of his home being washed away and his family lost.

  Once Alex assured the soldier that he and Katie would be leaving Baracoa as soon as they found the boy’s grandmother, the soldier let them pass.

  The irony was not lost on her that Alex was doing to Oscar exactly what his father had done to him—using a child as a cover for espionage. For surely, this trip to Baracoa was about their mission in some way.