by Bradley West
Sal walked over and tried to hug her, but she squirmed out of it.
“How’s your mother?” he asked.
“She’s at home with an ICU nurse. She should recover if she doesn’t suffer complications, but she should be in the hospital for another week while they run neurological tests. It’s not safe and I insisted they bring her home. I’m sure that doesn’t meet—”
“Barb, it sounds like you did everything right. I’m sorry I couldn’t be there.” Sal’s voice had a catch to it, but inside he didn’t know what he felt besides relief that Pat would survive.
“Sal did all he could to get back,” Jaime said. “We all did. It was a long night and one of Travis’ men was killed trying to rescue Steph and Tyson. Travis and another man were wounded. When you’re done, can we go home together? We have to figure out where they took Tyson and Stephanie.”
“Not in my car! He didn’t care about Mom, and he doesn’t care about me!”
“I’ll stay here with Travis,” Sal said. “Jaime, take the ransom money and pay Paulson for the forty-two-footer. Buy another provision truck and fill it with food. Once we free Stephanie and Tyson, we have to be ready to leave on short notice.”
Once that vital pint of blood had flowed from Barb into Travis, Hip Hop disconnected them. Ryder’s pale cheeks had regained some color.
“Your body will replace the red blood cells within four to five weeks, and you can donate again in six weeks,” the former Navy medic said to Barb. “Drink plenty of fluids.”
Barb nodded in dull acknowledgment and shuffled out of the animal OR. She was bone-tired, and wanted a glass of wine and her mother. As she walked through reception, she saw a face that frightened her. “That’s him! That’s the man who hit Mom!” Jaime didn’t react other than to pull her closer.
Melvin had been in the bathroom when Barb walked in. Now he sat in the waiting room with his right arm and shoulder heavily wrapped, complemented by a bandage on his left calf. He averted his eyes in shame.
“He works with us now,” Jaime said. “He may know where they took Stephanie and Tyson.”
Barb began to weep. As they left, Jaime looked over his shoulder at Sal, who stared at the floor, lost in misery.
“I’m sorry I fucked up your life, man,” Melvin said to Sal. “I don’t know what I have to do to make it better.”
Sal looked at him. “Why did you strike my wife with a gun, for God’s sake?”
“Muller woulda shot her if I didn’t. She was running after your daughter. She fell and hit her head hard on the driveway. I’ve been prayin’ for her.”
Sal could tell that it was important to Melvin that he believed him. Strangely, he did. In the chaos of the last several hours, Melvin could have taken the suitcase and fled, yet he’d stayed. “What do you want?” one crestfallen man asked the other.
“I want to make it right, at least the best I can. I promise you, I looked after that baby like he was my own. Changed and fed him at least five times a day. I stopped them from taking his blood to make the cure too. Told ’em that they should trade him for his mother, who could donate blood without dyin’ on account of being so small. It was Muller’s idea to take the money and grab her.”
“It was the obvious move. I shouldn’t have left the house unprotected.” Sal was lost in his private hell: Tyson and Steph captives, Pat and Greg hurt, Barb estranged and his allies killed or wounded. If he didn’t pull his act together, cruel people would continue to torment his loved ones. In an imperfect world, this abject man who’d struck down his wife might be someone he could trust.
Sal’s brain cleared and he walked over to reception for a pen and paper. He turned back to Melvin and pulled up a chair. “Tell me everything your gang did from the time you kidnapped Tyson until you dropped Steph at the warehouse last night. Don’t leave anything out.”
An hour later, Ryder was awake, Sal had four pages of notes and a few ideas, and a solo Jaime had rolled up in his F150. Hip Hop wasn’t happy about moving Travis, but he was less pleased with the prospect of the Texan recuperating in the back of his employer’s clinic. The three of them lay the wounded SEAL on towels spread on the pickup’s bloody backseat. Brandon loaded them up with various painkillers and antibiotics, and Sal pressed two thousand dollars into his reluctant hands. Sal drove the Ram seated alongside new comrade Melvin. Jaime covered their six and stayed close to make it more difficult for law enforcement to read the stolen plates. It was just after two o’clock and they were counting on busy roads.
* * * * *
This time the security guards knew where to find Carla. None too gently, one of them prodded her awake. “Dr. Holland wants you in her office.”
Carla had been far away in dreamland. She was skiing with Travis somewhere, maybe Tahoe, maybe northern BC. She looked at her watch with blurred eyes: 1:43, just about time to wake up anyway. “What does she want?”
“It doesn’t matter. Move it.”
Carla was tired of being bullied and by the time she reached Holland’s corner office she had a head of steam. Enough was enough. The guards left the two women alone and closed the door. Carla ignored the gesture to sit down.
“Two of your team just turned up at the infirmary and claimed Covid symptoms,” Holland said. “They don’t have fevers and when the test swabs come back, they’ll be negative, but these people refuse to suit up. You need to get them in line, or else—”
“Or else what? You’ll make us work impossible hours on a cure for a virus that will kill us if we make one mistake? What’s worse than that, Harriet?”
“Or you may not leave here for a very long time.”
Carla realized that her team would suffer the repercussions of her escape. She had to get everyone out, and Travis’ plan didn’t scale. “I can speak with my team, but you have to stop the mushroom treatment. I handed over the formula and assembled a simple batch facility. We’ll soon know whether—”
“The dishes with the medium-to-high concentrations of 896MX have already killed one hundred percent of the Covid-19 and -20 samples,” Holland interrupted.
“Already? It’s been only, what, six hours?”
“Strong stuff. I’ve notified General Overmeyer and he’s delighted. We will replicate your work at two other BSL-4 labs to confirm.”
“That’s great news. So why do you need my team? Let us go home to eat and sleep properly before we return.”
“It’s not so simple. Charles has a high regard for your abilities, too high in my estimation, but that’s because I observe your mistakes every day while he serves a continent away. In the past week, three Covid-20 survivors have come to our attention and we brought them here. Overmeyer wants your team to analyze their platelets, plasma and antibodies to see if a second treatment, a convalescent plasma or similar, can be derived. Our leaders in Washington are most keen to double-track possible cures. The advantage of an antibodies-based approach is that it shouldn’t require sophisticated equipment or biohazard research laboratories to produce. All we would need is centrifuges, perhaps separation membranes, and survivors to supply the blood. Overmeyer thinks you’re the right person to document the equipment and processes so that they can be replicated across the country. This approach could plug the short-term gap while Big Pharma produces the ingredients and remdesivir we’ll use to produce hundreds of millions of 896MX doses.”
“I want to be clear about what you’re saying. You want my team to design and flow-chart a simple method that uses the blood of survivors and extracts antibody-rich plasma to treat people at sites nationwide?”
Holland nodded and waved her hand.
“If we assume that the average plasma-based dose is ten milliliters, and the average survivor donates five hundred mills of plasma, that’s a fifty-to-one ratio. With the Covid-20 survival rate of thirty percent, donors won’t be a problem. The only constraint will be on the lab equipment available to separate the antibody-enriched plasma.”
“That’s where you’re dead wrong,
” Holland said. “We’ve only found three recovered patients in Northern California. The thirty percent survival rate was a preliminary estimate. Quite a few of those seemingly recovered patients relapsed and died of massive organ failure within days. Many of the others who recovered had the far milder Covid-19, not Covid-20 as we originally thought given the Oakland location.”
“So, what’s the actual recovery rate?”
“We don’t know for certain, but our current estimate is one percent.”
“The math doesn’t work on two counts. First, any pathogen that kills ninety-nine percent of its hosts will burn out fast. Either Covid-20 will mutate to something less lethal, or it will disappear after the first wave kills nearly everyone in the country. Second, we’ll need at least a three or four percent survival rate to have enough donor plasma antibodies to inoculate everyone. We’ll need the slack to allow for ineligible donors and geographical skews.”
“No one in D.C. wants to gamble on surviving a Covid-20 tsunami without a vaccination. As to your second point, the numbers work fine if you base your calculations on five liters per donor.”
Carla’s eyes widened. “Five liters? That’s the entire blood supply of a one hundred and twenty–pound woman. A man might have six. You’ll kill them if you take more than a liter at a time.”
“It’s a pandemic and that justifies extreme measures. I hope that we’ll find more recovered patients in the days to come. The initial survivors had to be sacrificed, regrettably.”
“What? You killed the three survivors for their blood? That’s murder.”
“It’s what President Crandall ordered.”
Carla’s resolved redoubled that everyone on the team must escape this insane place. But how? “Well, if the president ordered it, we have no choice but to comply with her wish. But we don’t have the centrifuges and plasma separation membranes on hand to process fifteen or more liters of blood.”
“Make a list of what you need,” Holland said. “I’ll have it brought in.”
“What we need depends on what can be obtained. I suggest we take it in two phases. I’ll start by using the fastest, highest-capacity equipment available until we nail the process down. Then we simplify the equipment requirements to maximize production based on what’s affordable and available. The centrifuges we pick will have a cascade effect on the downstream lab equipment we deploy. Maybe we should select Thermo Fischer or maybe Drucker Dash . . . it’s impossible to determine over the internet.”
Holland was confused. “What do you propose?”
“Bettadapur’s Scientific Supply in Burlingame is where the biotech companies in the Valley source high-end equipment. Send my team over to inspect their physical inventory. We’ll need to confirm that each piece functions properly: It’s no good to collect boxes and later discover a key component doesn’t work. Francisco, Nedd and I can sort and test the equipment. We’ll also need two lab techs to manage the on-site decontamination.”
“Decontamination? What for?”
“We can’t ship dozens of cartons back to the lab because we don’t know how or whether they’ve been recently handled. We’ll unpack and wipe down every item, then seal them into sterile bins and transport all of it to Livermore. Once they’re here, have a second deco team give them another once over.”
“How soon can your team be ready?”
“In under an hour. How soon can we send someone over to Bettadapur’s?”
“I’ll take care of that. Meet me with your team in Dr. Pond’s office in forty-five minutes. Pack what you require discreetly and tell no one of this mission. I need to jump on a call with General Overmeyer. Shut the door on your way out.”
* * * * *
Smiley Shuckies grimaced despite the five grand in his pocket, Muller’s advance. He’d signed on for security work, not to push a mop over a bloodstained cafeteria floor. Why hadn’t Muller wrapped the old man in plastic sheets? The poor bastard had bled out in a huge puddle before Scarface dragged his fat ass to the freezer and left a smeared trail that Helen Keller could have followed. The blood had dried, and even Clorox and warm water couldn’t dissolve it despite his vigorous efforts with the mop. He knew where this was headed: a hands-and-knees job with a scrub brush. Back to his earlier question, Muller didn’t do it the right way the first time because he lacked the right experience. Muller had done a couple of secret squirrel tours in raghead countries and he thought this made him a criminal mastermind. Wrong. Muller could fire fancy black rifles and call in drone strikes, but as for running the day-to-day affairs of an organized crime outfit, he was an amateur.
Where the fuck was Horne? Right, Muller had told him to wire up the exits. Fair enough: Bomber had a flair for explosives. Frankly, detonators and det cords scared the piss out of Shuckies. And he was unsettled by that wiry woman and the undersized baby at her boob. She had the thousand-yard-stare he’d seen in Mogadishu refugee camps back in 1993, and he knew how that fatalistic passivity could transform into homicidal frenzy at the flick of a switch . . . the death of a child, say, or a UN peacekeeper wanting to fuck her teenage daughter in return for a gallon of water. Stephanie bore watching, which is why Muller had put her in here with him: He had had the best situational awareness of anyone in 3rd Ranger Battalion. In the years since Black Hawk Down, he hadn’t lost his edge either, despite retiring in 2010 when he’d put in his twenty. This was thirsty work. He put the mop down to look for a beer.
Burns was on a sofa in the blacked-out teachers’ lounge, blinds taped to the walls to prevent any leakage. The only light emanated from the screens of laptops with Windows 10 downloaded onto newly initialized hard drives. He didn’t want to use the biker laptop in case it had a location tracker that tipped off the authorities—or even worse, its rightful owners. That sat switched off, now and always. The door opened and he heard Katerina’s enticing voice.
“Come here. I want to suck you off on top of a teacher’s desk, but only if you promise to write a glowing letter of recommendation to six colleges.”
“Sounds like a lot of work just for a blowjob,” Muller said.
“You’ll be lucky if you can walk after I’m through with you.”
Burns decided to lie low and enjoy the audio, but he felt that Katerina’s tastes in penises revealed poor life choices.
* * * * *
As a teenager, Carla had realized that she was hot when she discovered that boys would do anything she asked—or even without her asking. She was plotting how to use this to her advantage as she sat behind the driver Ron and another guard in the van conveying her team to Burlingame. She hadn’t had a chance to tell her people anything since they hadn’t been given any privacy. Her top priority was to speak with Travis, but Holland had confiscated their phones.
Ron was about her age with a fuzzy brown Jewfro. The other lab security officer was in his fifties with a paunch and gray flecks in cropped dark hair. John had a touch of Asian or maybe Native American in his droopy eyes, wore black horn-rimmed glasses and stole looks at Carla as Ron drove. She knew that John would be her ticket to a phone; she just had to work out the details.
* * * * *
Back at Crown Road, Barb had closeted herself in Pat’s bedroom. Sal, Melvin and Jaime helped a drowsy Travis onto the sofa bed in the TV room. Huppert’s corpsman job spec in the Sandbox was to stabilize the wounded until they could be medevacked, and by that metric, his work had been a success: Huppert had closed Ryder’s forehead flap with coarse stitches; removed protruding chain links from his left upper arm, confirmed no bone damage and sutured it shut; and maybe/maybe-not cleaned up the abdominal wound. The chain section he’d plucked out had been small and had missed the bowel, and hopefully any significant organs or nerves. Hip Hop had sewn up all the tears he could see without magnification, but they’d need X-Rays to be certain.
As for the prognosis, the only certainties were that Ryder required enough broad-spectrum antibiotics to keep a factory farm animal on its feet, followed by two weeks of bed
rest. The patient listened to this with glazed eyes and went back to sleep under the influence of a massive dose of ketamine.
Melvin volunteered to take the first shift by the bedside, and Sal set him up with a TV. Buzzed on his own dose of painkillers, the former paratrooper was fighting off a yawn before Sal had even left the room.
Jaime and Sal covered the Ram 2500 with a tarp, but not before Sal retrieved the two plastic trash bags. The overhead sun reflecting off the truck bed had heated up the metal and the assorted horrors of what had used to be Maung were beginning to smell. Sal sat the bags on the back patio and made a mental note to dispose of them before the opossums dined on the dead hero. He threw together a platter of sandwiches out of stale bread and whatever fillings he could find. Jaime wolfed down his pepperoni and mayo sandwich, but that may not have been an indicator of quality. Sal poked his head into Steph’s old bedroom and found Barb and his son-in-law asleep. He left them food and iced tea and exited quietly. He poked his head into his bedroom to check on Pat and was summarily waved off by an imposing geriatric nurse wearing a face shield over a mask and sporting elbow-length latex gloves.
Quarantine or not, Jaime had a long to-do list and a suitcase full of cash. He dismissed Sal’s suggestion that he grab a few hours’ sleep and instead borrowed a power bank to recharge his dying phone. With luck, he’d accomplish in the next few hours what Sal had planned for months.
As Jaime drove off, the weight of the world crushed Sal. He’d never been as depressed in his life. His goal was to sleep until 5:30 and relieve Melvin, but he wasn’t certain he’d ever rest again. Sal didn’t even have the energy to check his email as he watched the battery creep back to over ten percent as his phone recharged. There was no one he needed to hear from . . . except Wells Fargo, where he was due to collect two million sometime tomorrow. Screw it. He shut down his phone and lay on the sofa to clear his head. Then he sat upright and focused: By next week that cash might not be worth anything more than a Zimbabwe hundred-billion-dollar banknote, so he’d better start spending it now.
