“That’s Sarah, isn’t it?” Wade asked.
He nodded. There was nothing he could say and nothing more he wanted to.
“They’re going to take me upstairs. You stay here with her,” Wade said.
He remained with her for two days, covered in the pale blue scrubs with mask and gloves the nurses provided. The sterile barrier between them was the price he paid for her presence. He held her hand while she slept.
When she woke, she asked him to check on Kerim, her new husband. He fared much worse, but he couldn’t tell her the truth. From an infirmary room doorway he watched Kerim vomit blood into a bedpan. She wanted to see her new husband.
“I’m sorry,” he told her.
Twice he left to eat. On the second night, he stood on deck alone under a night sky without stars breathing the humid sea air. She wasn’t getting better, and he didn’t want to see the awful end. He’d forgotten everything else around him—the disorder of the ship and his duty to his work. His mind occupied only the nightmarish stupor of stink and misery as nineteen people wasted into putrefied wretches around him. He willed himself to return to it for another hour with her.
At the end of the two days, when she too had vomited blood, he watched her slowly slip away into delirium and pain. He told her he was sorry again. She couldn’t hear him, let alone know the totality of why he said it. And then she was gone.
Chapter 24: Bad Habits
McLean, Virginia
7:55 p.m., Tuesday, July 10
Paul trudged to the seventh floor and entered Director Drummond’s office. The wood paneling seemed darker in the evening, more aged and more severe. It was a trick of age and absence. The room was the same. Paul had aged since his previous visit. He met with Drummond alone, and the room’s emptiness seemed to close in on the two of them standing there without their peers.
“Paul, thanks for meeting me so late. Take a seat.”
Drummond sat on the front of his desk with a leather-bound folder tucked under his arm. “I’ve read the latest. We have a few loose ends, and that doesn’t give me much confidence to ease the President’s mind.”
Paul walked the length of the conference table and sat at the end near Drummond’s desk.
“The Navy team recovered twelve of the vials,” he said. “Two of them had been emptied, apparently in the kitchens by the two brothers Pierce eliminated. They used them on trays of fruit. Just poured it over the top. Apparently if you cook this stuff or do much of anything to it, the virus isn’t effective.”
He let out a little cough, and his voice rasped with phlegm. He’d taken to sleeping on the couch, when he slept at all. In the evenings, his old bad habits caught up with him.
“And the second outbreak in Tunisia is contained?”
“So far. No new cases reported after the numbers we received yesterday. Fifty-three dead and six survivors.”
“Could have been a damn sight worse. But let’s assume that’s just one more vial. So, you’re telling me none of our people know where the rest are?”
“Yes, sir, that’s what I’m saying.”
“You don’t need to sir me, Paul. I think we’re well past the bullshit now.”
“I’d say we’re very much in the thick of the bullshit at this point.”
Drummond chuckled, and his posture eased. He stood and took the chair at the end of the table next to him. Paul sat at his right hand, the very chair Harley Gilchrist had occupied every time he’d visited the room. The realization unsettled something in his head. He’d lost so much, and he spent the last ten days trying to piece together the damage Harley had wrought. Paul cleared his throat again and swallowed.
“Pierce indicated there were eighteen vials. There could be as many as five more out there,” he said.
“And how does he know there aren’t twice that or more still out there?”
“That’s the intel he received from Khorasani. The Romanians have taken over the facility in Brașov. Scorpio won’t be producing more of the stuff any time soon.”
Drummond went quiet. He folded his hands and stared at the empty table space.
“This thing really snuck up on all of us. You suffered the worst of it, and I’m sorry for that. But Harley left all of us in a hell of a tough spot. You know, I have no illusions about my liability here. If the virus hits stateside, my tenure will end faster than a shit storm tornado. After what’s happened, I’d say I’m a notch closer to the exit, wouldn’t you?”
“Those politics are above my pay grade.”
“Don’t kid yourself. My predecessor lasted nearly ten years. If I make it to a fourth year, I’ll consider that a good run. I’d like to say I left the place better than I found it. Right now, I can’t. How the hell did it go this far? You’re a smart guy. How in the holy hell they did this to us?”
Paul had asked himself the same question every day since he found the photo of Harley and his protégés. It was a ghost’s enigma that would haunt him every time he considered it. With Janey gone, he would never stop asking himself why it had all happened and what more he could have done.
“I know this much. Harley wasn’t some revolutionary,” Paul said. A true believer, maybe, but he didn’t share politics with this damn Scorpio Compact. Maybe he did it for the money. But I think it was something more for him. Maybe he did it for power. For the freedom to operate and do what we can’t do and run his own kind of agency. That’s the only sense I can make of it.”
Drummond frowned with his chin pushed up as though he’d eaten something spoiled.
“Maybe he was right,” Drummond said.
Paul glared at him. It was a callous thing to say, but Drummond continued unfazed by his expression.
“Right about the freedom to operate I mean. This Korkolis character ran circles around us. He used our own limitations against us. You know that better than anyone. We’re facing a new kind of asymmetry here. And the hell of it is, he’s still out there. I think a little latitude is in order here.”
“We have a good idea how to track him down. Once Pierce gets back on his feet, he’ll be more than eager to target him.”
“Do you really think Pierce is the right officer for this? After all that’s happened?”
“No,” Paul said. “I think he’s the right officer because of all that’s happened.”
“Don’t make that the wrong decision for the both of you. I don’t want to know where the target is or what the target’s going to do next. I want to know when he’s no longer a target, and you’ve moved on to the next one. And the next one after that. Understood?”
Paul nodded. He had no confusion about Drummond’s intentions, though he hated the political undercurrents. Despite Drummond’s insistence that things had changed, the consequences hadn’t. He and Pierce would be hung out to dry with any misstep. But that was the genius of Drummond’s directive. He wouldn’t decline. Neither would Pierce. And Drummond knew it.
“I understand you perfectly. Sir.”
He left the seventh floor but reconsidered a visit to the operations center. Pierce slept in quarantine somewhere on the Black Sea where it was close to four in the morning. They could both use the rest.
He descended the stairway, and his voice echoed as he spoke aloud to himself. “No rest for the wicked.”
He drove home as the summer sun set late, and for the first time since Janey left him he passed by the site of the crash. He slowed to see the concrete slab, but it bore no mark of the collision that he could see. It was as though she never existed and had never been there to leave a mark. He had to face the reality of a world that moved on while he could not forget.
He entered the house’s unwelcoming silence. He opened the first-floor windows to hear the rustle of leaves in the cooling night. He fixed himself a turkey sandwich and devoured it while standing at the sink. The crumbs fell down into the drain, and he washed the bits away still craving something more. He went to the garage to find an old pack of Marlboro Lights he’d hidden away fro
m Janey in a locked drawer of his tool bench. They had dried out through heat and cold and humidity after two years since he last snuck a smoke. He walked back and forth in the unmowed grass of his back yard, pulling on the old cigarette that burned fast and bitter in his mouth. He watched the smoke drift up into the maple leaves and stared at his empty bedroom window above.
Chapter 25: No Reservations
Ayia Napa, Cyprus
7:10 p.m., Friday, October 19
Ethan killed the engine and let the small fishing boat slide to a stop a hundred yards from Nissi Beach. A flock of blue umbrellas and empty lounge chairs on the shore caught the last beam of sunlight, and behind those the hotel gleamed white. Tourists trotted inside to change into their evening wear for a night of drinking and dancing. He heard the early revelers at the hotel bar. The music and their laughter carried over the water where he and Wade had other evening plans.
Here the sea calmed, and the tiny islet to the west sheltered the shallow waters from the wind. Wade chose the spot four weeks ago, and each week they had launched a different rental around the eastern horn of Cyprus to anchor at the lively resort. Each week, they saw fewer tourists as the temperatures cooled. Each week they fished for their target but caught nothing.
Wade sat behind him in the rear facing chair. He wore a bucket hat and tank top, every part the tourist fisherman. A pair of great deep-sea rods angled up like antennae at the aft, but Wade ignored them. He kept still in the seat and focused on the hotel that rose up ten stories at the water’s edge.
“This is good. Right here. I can handle this,” Wade said.
Ethan dropped anchor into the shallow sands below, and the boat glided almost imperceptibly until the prow faced the resort like a compass arrow. He played his part. He wore a linen shirt, and his skin had tanned under the Cyprus sun.
“You think he’s here?” Wade asked.
“Kay says he is. I don’t see the car, but the agent in place confirmed him at the dock in Larnaca.”
“Then he’s here.”
They waited out the hour, adrift on the rising tide that flooded the white beach sands. The western glow waned and gave way to a starry night sky. He and Wade had waited too long for those stars to align, and he wondered if Wade now had any doubts. If so, he said nothing as he rolled out a towel to lie between the boat’s forward cushioned seats.
For himself, Ethan held no reservations. He had lost any doubts before Paul Corso called him months ago. In the tiny crew’s cabin aboard the Aria where he waited out those sorrowful days in quarantine, he had spent hours remembering every misstep he had taken and every weakness they had used against him. Against all of them. Paul’s call was permission to act. It wasn’t revenge. It wasn’t even justice for Sarah or for anyone else. He saw it in a way that Kamran Khorasani would understand. This was strictly remedy, like the painful pinprick of inoculation.
Through binoculars, he scanned the beach side for workers in white shorts who scurried around a row of wooden boxes sprouting wires along a concrete dock. As he watched them, he heard Wade open the latches of a long case and load rounds into the rifle with a quiet clack as the bolt slid into position.
“Time to call,” he told Wade.
Wade leaned into the forward cushions and propped the rifle’s bipod upon the boat’s prow. The sizable scope atop the rifle swallowed up light, and Wade settled into it, breathing slower as he waited.
Ethan reached into his pocket and emptied a cracked cell phone from a plastic baggie. He’d kept Andrei’s phone for the occasion, though Kay already confirmed the number he dialed had remained active. He recognized the sonorous voice that answered and pictured the white hair and beard of Hector Korkolis.
“I was wondering when I would hear from you, Mr. Pierce. I’m even a little disappointed it’s taken you this long. So many things could have happened since our last encounter.”
“I hear you’re losing more and more friends these days,” he said.
“Then we have that in common. Although you do go about it in a much more severe fashion. Tell me, how is your estranged wife? Did she receive my gift? It’s so difficult to return.”
Before he could answer a string of little meteors shot up from the ground and burst over the water in a brilliant shower of purple and pink sparks. The popping sound travelled through his phone at a delay to Hector’s penthouse. More fireworks followed from the dock side.
He waited for a sign from Wade before he replied. Another volley exploded overhead, and Wade gave him the slightest nod.
“Just think of me as a loyal dog who learned a new trick,” he said.
Wade’s rifle fired under the crackle of the fireworks overhead. The shot rang loud in Ethan’s ears, but at the beach the tourists cheered along with a wedding party at the display overhead and the crackling pops and reports of the show.
Wade cycled the bolt without lifting his head and waited. Ethan crouched awaiting a second shot. None came.
Wade exhaled. “Target down.”
His friend returned to his chair and pulled his hat down low over his eyes. Together they watched the firework display of brilliant orange and fiery reds. The electric blues and whites lit up the dark water like a mirror made of darkness and light. Ethan closed his eyes and felt the thunderous bursts from above like an invisible weight he would carry with him from then on. He thought of Sarah. He saw in his mind her beautiful face and her sickly one, overlaid like a trick of the light that never settled. He knew he’d carry that forever as well.
When the skies darkened again, he pulled the anchor out of the sand, hauling it up hand over hand. He started the engine and steered the boat past the islet out into the deeper water where they sped along the coast into the trackless night.
Acknowledgement
No one writes a book alone. I owe much to my wife, Canada Snyder, who read along as I wrote and cheered me past doubts. Thanks to my kids, Kate and Riggen, who wondered where Dad was many nights.
My hat’s off to the Gateway Group: Tracey Kelley, Nate Granzow, Chad Cox, and Thad Smull. This book wouldn’t exist without them and their writing tips and encouragement. Thanks also to the Des Moines Writers Workshop group. Big thanks to Erin Johnston, Amy Lillard, and Julie Stone for their advice, support, and laughter.
Special thanks to Gayle Lynds, whose professional guidance made this book better. And special thanks to Vincent Racaniello, whose expertise in virology and willingness to share his thoughts made my unusual ideas more plausible.
Finally, teachers never get the true credit they deserve. What I know and what I write comes from so many teachers. Thanks to: Pat Fife, Bruce Hukee, Barb Lang, Linda Unser, Thisbe Nissen, Richard Thomas, Steven Wright, and most of all to Brooks Landon and Carla Lawson.
The Hidden Vector: A Spy Thriller Page 30