by Nick Thacker
“I’m okay. It’s the virus, but it seems to have slowed down for the moment. I’m with Ben…” she wasn’t sure how to explain Malcolm’s presence, so she moved on. “Listen, Randy, I — I don’t know for sure, but I think Livingston might be involved in all of this somehow.”
No response.
“I know you’re already under fire for this, but I really need eyes on him. And keep sending me anything you find on Diana Torres and what she was working on.”
“Yeah, I got it.”
“I owe you one.”
“You owe me a lot of ones.”
She hung up.
Chapter Thirty-Six
David Livingston flicked off the 75-inch curved television in his living room. Brand new and still priced like the novelty it was, the Samsung was his pride and joy, at least for this month.
He had satellite and cable television, Netflix, and an action movie collection of over one thousand titles, and he still couldn’t find something to watch. He tossed the remote control to the other side of the couch. Unsure of how to satiate his desire for entertainment, Livingston sat in silence for a minute.
Juliette’s involved in this, he thought. He knew it. It was stronger than the standard pang of paranoia that constantly plagued him about each of his employees; this was real. He had proof.
Stephens believed him. Both men had been at the hospital, planning to interrogate her after she’d failed to turn over the information she’d acquired during her “stint” in the field. And after Livingston had discovered that Randall Brown, his own IT technician, had helped Julie, it was enough for Livingston to convict her.
He didn’t know exactly how, or why, but he knew Juliette Richardson was involved in this mess. He’d spent enough time in government to know that careers were made or broken by the men who went the extra mile to prevent mutiny within their ranks.
And his career would be made. He just needed a little more proof, and a motive wouldn’t hurt, either. He had ordered Randall Brown to record and send over to him any conversations Julie had with him, but he’d also placed a few IT bugs of his own on Brown’s network. Any calls the IT tech made or received would be immediately recorded and emailed to Livingston.
It was these types of plays that Livingston knew would eventually get him noticed in Washington. He wasn’t naive enough to think that those in power got there by cashing in on their good deeds.
He rose from the couch, pacing once before moving toward the office. The foyer of his house was immaculate, smaller than he would have liked, but impressive nonetheless. He paid a few hundred dollars a month to a maid service to keep the place clean enough to meet his standards, and another couple hundred on the side to the maid herself for “on the side”-type activities. It had taken a few months to find a woman agreeable to his terms, but as he’d discovered in his own career, a bit of cash went a long way. The companionship did little to satiate his loneliness, but it helped make his large house feel lived in a little.
He entered the great office at the front of his house, admiring his decorating job. A huge bust of an elk or moose — he wasn’t sure which, and he hadn’t shot it anyway — smiled down at him from the far wall, hanging directly above a large fireplace with an ancient-looking mantle. He’d placed a few picture frames, the stock photos still inside, on the mantle and around the room on floating shelves.
But his prize possession, the pièce de résistance, was the huge Scottish coat of arms hanging above his desk. The placard was enormous, stretching almost four feet across and six feet tall. It was red, yellow, and green, and didn’t match anything else in his house. But it was him. His history, his name, his origins.
It represented him, and all that he stood for, and he stood a moment in front of it, admiring the wooden shield.
He walked behind his desk, grabbing the decanter of whiskey and pouring himself a glass. He stood face-to-face with the coat of arms for another moment, enjoying the warm liquid. Finally he turned to sit down.
And saw a man standing in the center of the room, staring at him. Recognition washed quickly over Livingston, but he was angered that the man had caught him by surprise.
“Oh — my God,” Livingston said, nearly dropping his glass of liquor. “You scared the shit out of me. What are you doing here?”
He made a mental note to call his security company to set up perimeter alarms. The HD motion cameras were enough to turn over footage to the police after a break-in, but they obviously weren’t meant as an early-warning system. He grunted and sipped on his whiskey.
The man continued staring.
“Well, what do you need? You seemed to enjoy sneaking up on me. What is it?”
The man finally looked Livingston up and down and shook his head. Livingston sat down behind the desk, acting preoccupied with a stack of papers. As he picked up the stack and began to rummage through them, he heard a clunk on the desk.
At the edge of the desk, Livingston saw a small, compact 9mm pistol. His visitor had placed the gun there, and now stepped back from the desk to the middle of the room once again.
Livingston felt his blood run cold. His nostrils flared, and anger flashed through his body. Still, he was calm. He took another sip of whiskey, this time deeper, letting the heat sting the back of his throat.
“Trying to intimidate me?” he asked.
“Is it working?”
Livingston snorted through a mouthful of liquor. He swallowed and blew out a breath of alcohol-laced air.
“This is a waste of time,” Livingston said. “I don’t know anything, or anyone.”
“I didn’t say you did,” the man replied immediately.
“You want answers, talk to Julie, or that thug she’s running around with.”
“I don’t need to.”
Livingston’s anger grew. “What the hell are you here for, then?”
The man blinked.
Livingston looked down at the pistol, then up at the man, catching his eye. He looked to the large bust of the moose-elk, across the mantel at the pictures of someone else’s family, and then back down at the gun again. He picked it up slowly, delicately.
He’d actually never held a gun before.
It was heavier than he’d imagined, surprising for its compact size. He examined it. The barrel, trigger, and hammer — is that what the back thing is called?
He felt its weight beneath his fingers. The man didn’t say a word as Livingston pressed the safety release back and forth, locking and unlocking the gun’s firing pin.
Livingston wasn’t going to let himself be intimidated. He wouldn’t be humiliated, especially not in his own home. He felt his lip turn upward into a slight sneer. This asshole.
He stood up, gaining confidence. “Get out.” The words were cold.
The man didn’t move.
“Get out,” he said again. He lifted the gun quickly and pointed it at the man’s chest. “Don’t make me repeat it.”
Still, the man didn’t speak. His expression was stoic, but Livingston could see a glint of something — amusement? — in the man’s eyes.
He felt his right arm shaking, and he tried to force it to stop. He aimed the gun and closed his eyes just as he pulled the trigger.
He heard a tiny click.
That wasn’t right.
He tried again.
Click.
Shit.
He looked down at the gun, as if silently arguing with the metal contraption, but nothing happened. When he looked up, the man standing in front of him was shaking his head.
“You’re too predictable, Livingston. Always have been. All of you.”
Livingston frowned, but the man was already moving. He closed the distance between them in less than a second, and Livingston saw him pull his arm back.
He smashed his fist into Livingston’s face. Livingston felt his hands open, dropping the empty gun and the glass of whiskey. They both tumbled and fell to the top of the desk. The glass shattered, whiskey and shards of crysta
l exploding around him. He was immediately in a daze, his mouth opening and closing as his brain tried to offer some sort of help.
The man, however, didn’t stop to wait for Livingston to recover. He grabbed a wad of Livingston’s thick, dyed hair and pulled up on it. He met Livingston’s eyes for a brief moment, then slammed Livingston’s head down on the top of the desk. Hard.
Livingston’s face and ears exploded in pain, only to be followed by a much more penetrating ringing pain that lanced through the inside of his mind. He felt as if his entire head had been lit on fire from the inside out.
He flailed his arms wildly, but the man was still in control. Once again, he brought Livingston’s head up, held tightly by the tufts of hair, then smashed it back down on the desk.
Livingston groaned, and his body went slack. His eyes were blurry, but he was still conscious. He felt a trickle of drool escape the corner of his mouth, but he made no motion to wipe it away.
He collapsed downward, his rear end somehow finding the chair as his torso and upper body sprawled forward onto the desk. He lay still, wondering why he hadn’t already blacked out.
“You’ve been a cancer to this organization for years, Livingston,” the man said. Livingston heard a scrape and felt the desk vibrate slightly. He turned his face to the side, trying to will his eyes to focus.
The man had picked up the gun and was now reaching into his jacket pocket. He withdrew something — something small, shiny.
It was a bullet.
Livingston was unable to panic, or perform any other voluntary function, but alarm sirens erupted in his brain. Or was it still the pain? He was unsure — everything was blurred together, one giant smear of pain and confusion.
“You’re predictable, useless, and spineless. I can’t think of a greater waste of air than the breath you breathe.”
Livingston was surprised to discover he was still capable of feeling anger. He relished the anger, though he was unable to act on it. He grunted again.
The man loaded the bullet into the chamber of the gun, and Livingston heard a succession of clicks.
“This has been a long time coming, Livingston. Sorry it had to be this way, but like I said — you’re predictable.”
Livingston didn’t hear the explosion of the bullet as it raced out of the barrel and found its target.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Julie was adamant. “Go! Stop being ridiculous — I’ll be fine!”
Ben shook his head, planning to stage a resistance. Malcolm grabbed his arm and pulled him out of the hotel room. “It’s fine, Ben. We’ll only be gone for a few minutes.”
She had insisted that the two men head to the nearest supermarket to get some supplies and pick up food for the three of them. Takeout Chinese had been her request. After a few minutes of arguing back and forth, Julie had prevailed, and the two men left for the F450 parked outside.
Julie shut the door to the hotel room and opened her laptop. She initiated a few searches, first inside the SecuNet database and the rest of the private CDC intranet, then through Google. She tried numerous combinations. Livingston CDC, David Livingston, David Livingston CDC, and more, but each result was merely a bare-bones biographical entry that was obviously written by Livingston himself.
David Foster Livingston is a successful leader and proven manager in many corporate settings. He is currently head of the Biological Threat Research division of the Centers for Disease Control. A growing list of Livingston’s accomplishments include successfully restructuring the BTR division for efficiency and efficacy, increasing employee retention, and streamlining data systems for cost effectiveness at BetaMark, Inc., where he was previously employed. He has one daughter and resides in Minnesota.
Julie saw the same paragraph pasted onto every page that referenced Livingston. Each of the surrounding articles only mentioned the man, too. A project he co-sponsored, a few articles written by a team Livingston had served on, and a few shots of the man on a company softball team years ago. Livingston was certainly paranoid, as the verbatim biography on each site suggested that he’d been successful in forcing each of the article’s writers to update his information with the same paragraph.
She shook her head and reached for her phone.
“Hey Randy, it’s me again. Anything yet?”
“Julie, it’s been ten minutes. Are you serious?”
“Sorry, I know. I’m getting a little antsy, though.”
“I get it. We all are. Don’t worry about it. Why did you call?”
“I’m trying to find something on Livingston — just in case.”
“Don’t bother,” Randy said. “I already tried. It’s pointless. The man’s either got the PR team of a celebrity or he’s the most paranoid person I’ve ever met.”
Julie laughed as she read the first line of the Livingston biography. “David Foster Livingston is a successful leader and proven…”
“…Manager in many corporate settings,” Randy finished. “Ugh. You’ve got to be kidding me. What a joke.”
“Okay, well, thanks for trying. Let me know if you come up with anything else.”
“Will do — take care.”
“Hey, one more thing,” Julie said into the phone.
“What’s that?”
Julie paused. “Uh, don’t worry about it, actually. Let me see if I can dig something up first.”
She hung up the phone and woke up her computer’s screen. She started a new search, and began browsing through the results.
Finally, one result jumped out at her.
Teenaged Hero Rescues Father and Brother was the headline.
She clicked the listing and waited for the slow hotel WIFI connection to load the advertisement-riddled page. It was a newspaper article that had been scanned and transcribed for the news site’s archives, dated thirteen years ago.
“…The Bennett men were camping in a southern region of Glacier National Park when the youngest Bennett, nine-year-old Zachary, wandered to a clearing where he accidentally stumbled between a mother grizzly bear and her cub…”
“Johnson Bennett ran to his son’s aid, but the mother grizzly struck Johnson, knocking the man unconscious…”
“…Shooting the larger bear first with two rounds from the father’s rifle, and scaring away the cub. Harvey pursued the smaller animal and eventually shot it, bringing it down with one round…”
Julie covered her mouth as she read the account.
“…Zachary and Johnson Bennett were rushed to St. Andrews Memorial Hospital, where they were both treated for severe trauma, and the elder Bennett for a concussion. Zachary Bennett is expected to make a full recovery. Johnson Bennett is currently comatose in a stable condition, however, doctors are unsure of the possibility of recovery…”
The door to the hotel room opened, and Julie quickly slammed the laptop shut.
“Julie!”
It was Ben.
Startled, Julie nearly tripped over the chair as she stood and turned toward the door. Malcolm Fischer entered the room just behind Ben, breathing heavily.
“Julie, I got an email from Randy. Just now.”
Julie looked at him. “Randall Brown? My IT guy?”
“Yeah, he wanted to send it over directly, since he thought there might be an issue with your emails or something. But you should have gotten it too.”
She started to check her email, but stopped herself. “Okay, well what did he say?”
“It was a forward of my mother’s email draft. She must have tried to send it, but it never went out.”
Julie’s eyes widened.
“It has information in it, Julie, about the virus. The night… the night she died, she must have been writing it. It’s got everything she was working on, and everything she and her assistant discovered.”
“Go on.”
“For one, it’s not a virus.”
She turned her head slightly, her eyes narrowing.
Malcolm continued the explanation for Ben. “Ben’
s mother’s research seems to prove that the virus is actually a mutated bacteria —”
“No, that’s not possible. The contagious spread, the outbreak pattern, the —”
“It’s a mutated bacterial infection inside of a virus.”
Julie’s head snapped up. “Come again?”
“That’s right, Julie,” Malcolm explained. “While I still believe the virus is made up of some synthetic alteration of the powder substance my students and I found in Canada, Dr. Torres is postulating that the reason this strain has been so difficult to model is due to its uncharacteristic qualities. Map it as a virion, and it fails many of the chemical application tests. Map it as a bacteria, and it doesn’t appear to be living — immediately disqualifying it from the ranks of bacteriophages.”
“Okay,” Julie said. “So she was able to determine that we’re dealing with a highly infectious viral-bacterial disease. I’ll admit that’s unbelievably fascinating, but did she find a cure?”
Malcolm and Ben shared a knowing glance.
“No,” Ben said.
“But she found that the infection would naturally die out, after running its course. It reaches a certain point, she said, and just vanishes. But not until after it kills its host.”
“We’re not dead yet,” Julie said. “And you’re not dead, either, Dr. Fischer.”
Malcolm stepped forward and nodded. “Julie,” he said, his voice calm and steady, “We need to get to a research lab. If there’s any way you can find out exactly why none of us in this room are dead, you must.”
She started pacing. “Okay, right. Yes, you’re right. Let’s, uh, let’s go back to —”
“Julie, we’re not going back to the CDC. Livingston and Stephens might be there, and besides, we can’t forget about the bomb back at the park.”
“But can’t you call someone there? Someone who might —”
“Julie.” Ben’s voice was firm, but he looked her right in the eyes until she understood. “There’s no one else.”