Search & Destroy (Outbreak Task Force)

by Julie Rowe

  “As long as they don’t put you in danger, yes.”

  She raised one eyebrow.

  He shrugged. “You wanted complete honesty, right?”

  He wanted her to know he wasn’t going to back down.

  Her lips pinched together. “All right. Fine. Come with me. I guess it’s a good thing you haven’t had time to unpack.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Maybe he sounded too smug, but whatever the reason, she lasered a frown at him. “Stop that and get your things together.”

  Within five minutes, they were both ready to leave. Henry met them in the hallway, took the keys from her with a short nod, gave Dozer a don’t fuck this up look, and went back to his own apartment.

  Dozer had a lot of respect for Henry, a veteran Special Forces soldier who’d lost a leg in Afghanistan. The prosthetics he used didn’t slow him down a bit, and he’d gone back to school and gotten his master’s degree in microbiology after his injury. Funny thing was, most people saw the metal leg and discounted him as a threat.

  Big mistake.

  A man’s brain was always his best weapon, and Henry was well armed.

  “How are we getting to CDC headquarters?” Dozer asked Carmen.

  “Gunner is giving us a ride and a place to sleep.”

  “Oh?”

  “He and Joy have a couple of cots in their office.”

  Their office wasn’t all that large. “Can we move the cots into your office?”

  “They’re company property, so yes.” She came to a stop about ten feet from the front door to the apartment building.

  She hadn’t looked straight at him since she’d gotten that phone call.

  “Carmen?”

  She glanced at his collarbone rather than his eyes. “Hmm?”

  “My face is up here.”

  She jerked her gaze up to meet his. “What?”

  “We didn’t do anything wrong.”

  She flinched and looked away. “It wasn’t right, either. You’re hurt, and…intercourse isn’t the easiest activity to engage in for someone with your specific list of injuries.”

  He leaned down to whisper, “You did all the work.”

  She looked away, her whole body stiff. “I was foolish.”

  Despite the fact she was standing next to him, barely a few inches between them, she was doing her best to distance herself from him. Unacceptable.

  “You’re allowed to need someone, to have a physical connection to another human being,” he told her, his voice low and quiet. “When was the last time you allowed someone to hold you?”

  She didn’t answer, at least not verbally. Her nervous body shifts told him everything he needed to know.

  “That long, huh?”

  She swallowed hard, then stepped away. “Gunner is waiting.”

  She walked like it hurt, like he’d beaten the crap out of her. That didn’t make sense. He wanted to protect and pleasure her. All the fucking time, if she’d let him. Damn it, they’d talked already. Why was she still acting like he’d harmed her?

  Dozer followed her out to Gunner’s Jeep, which was already revving, then slid into the backseat with his bag and hers.

  “How are your injuries?” he asked the other man.

  “I’m in better shape than you are.”

  “Yup,” Dozer said with a long-suffering sigh. “It sucks to be popular.”

  Gunner grunted out a laugh, then asked Carmen a question about the suspected measles outbreak.

  Dozer listened to the two of them talk, filing away the information in case he needed to understand why they were doing what they were doing. Unfortunately, the news didn’t sound good. If the disease did turn out to be measles, Carmen wanted all the health-care workers to wear full hazmat suits, along with using their own air supply.

  An expensive, time-consuming, panic-inducing option. One that meant a mistake might very well be punishable by death. Most people looked at someone wearing scrubs and a surgical mask and deemed it careful, professional attire. Those same people would see a hazmat suit and look for the source of the humanity-killing plague so they could nuke the shit out of it.

  They pulled up to the security hut, and the guard took a good look at all three of them, checked their IDs, then waved them through after consulting his computer.

  He approved.

  Taking Dozer’s duffel without a word or even a glance to see if it was okay, Gunner went inside with them. Dozer didn’t bitch. Gunner was a pain in the ass sometimes, but he had a good head on his shoulders, and he didn’t put up with any bullshit. Including Dozer’s.

  Gunner turned to examine him. “You feeling okay?”

  “Tired. Sore.” Dozer considered it some more. “Irritated. Impatient. Angry.”

  As he spoke, Gunner’s eyebrows crept a little farther up on his forehead. He blinked and turned to Carmen. “Sounds about right.”

  “Thank you for your exacting diagnosis,” she said in a dry tone.

  Dozer chuckled. Yup. The man didn’t deal with any bullshit at all.

  Gunner led the way to the office he shared with his partner, nurse Joy Ashiro. Partner in all senses of the word, if he believed the gossip. The doctor had moved into Joy’s apartment and showed no sign of leaving.

  It wasn’t a big office, but there was room for both desks, a couple of shelving units, a printer/fax machine, and two cots pushed up against the right-hand wall. They were made with military precision. Looked like military linens, too.

  “I’d like to suggest,” Gunner said carefully, “sleeping here rather than in your office, at least some of the time.”

  “Why?” Carmen asked. “It would be more convenient to work and sleep in the same space.”

  Dozer was about to explain why that was a bad idea, but Gunner jumped in before he could say anything.

  He held up one finger. “You’ll get less sleep because it will be too easy for anyone to find you.” He held up a second finger. “Someone has the two of you on a kill list, so the last place you should consistently be is where everyone expects to find you.”

  “We’re inside the CDC headquarters—”

  Dozer interrupted her. “Where security is good, but not airtight. Plus, there’s an information leak coming out of here. Someone found out which hospital you’d been hiding me at and when your flight was coming in. Those two fake agents are still in the wind. We’re not entirely safe.”

  The blood drained out of her face. “Then we make it airtight.”

  Dozer put his hand on her shoulder and smiled. “If we do that, we show our hand. We have to find out if someone is deliberately betraying us, or if someone is being used as an information mine, or if it’s something else. You focus on your job. I’ll focus on our safety and finding out how information is getting out of this building.”

  Her eyes searched him for what, he wasn’t quite sure, but after a moment she relaxed and nodded. “Okay. You’re the security expert.”

  She’d said that to him once before in Afghanistan—the night they’d survived an IED attack and had to hide from a whole lot of people who wanted to make sure they were dead.

  The night he’d made love to a woman who should have had men lined up begging to treat her like the queen she was. Then, she’d been the one to run.

  He saw that on her face now. The memories of them together in the dirt and the dark, whispering promises of pleasure to each other as he showed her how fucking good it could be.

  “I will take care of you,” he promised her now, as he’d promised her then. “I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

  She sucked in a shaky breath, stared at him like he was a ghost she could barely perceive, then drew herself up and nodded. “Thank you.”

  “Do you want to knight him, too?” Gunner asked with a snort. “Unfortunately, I don’t have a sword handy.”

  “No,” Carmen said, a smile flirting with the corners of her mouth. “Thank you for offering, though.”

  “I didn’t offer. I was commentin
g on the overly serious tone of your conversation.” He looked at each of them. “What’s wrong with you two?”

  “I already answered that question,” Dozer replied promptly.

  “My answer is the same as his,” Carmen said, that smile still hanging around her eyes. “I will be very unhappy if it turns out someone inside the CDC is providing information to anyone they shouldn’t.”

  “I’ll come to your office with you and do a security review of it and the route to and from this office,” Dozer said. “It shouldn’t take long, and I won’t be in your way.”

  “Excellent.” She smiled.

  Carmen’s office was on the same floor, but several doors down at the end of the hallway from Gunner and Joy’s. Between them were six other offices and a set of washrooms.

  The prerequisite security cameras were placed along the hallway and outside her office, but there were none inside. The building was designed to keep an intruder or member of the public out of areas where sensitive or confidential information might be easily accessed, but once inside those areas…security was far less constricting.

  Washrooms were a security risk—no one looked at a stranger funny in a washroom. He was going to have to keep an eye on them.

  In no time she was at work, wrangling phone calls, emails, and lab results.

  “Do you have a panic button?” he asked her in between phone calls.

  A frown crowded her eyes. “Not a one press type of thing. I have to make a call to the security desk. Should I have one?”

  “I’d like you to have one you carry with you.”

  “John,” she said, her frown smoothing out in favor of downturned lips. “If the situation demands pressing a panic button, it’s probably already too late to stop whatever is about to happen.”

  Any reply he had wouldn’t help matters, because he wanted to give her a good shake.

  To a bodyguard, knowing where the body you’re guarding is isn’t a small piece of information. He’d download a couple of apps and show her how to use them as a virtual panic button.

  Meanwhile, he sent out a few requests for information on the FAFO and any news on the search for the men who attacked him in the hospital. Next, he sent his boss a report, explaining why he was sitting in Carmen’s office and not squirreled away in a faceless hotel like he’d been ordered to do. When he finished that, he realized it was six o’clock in the morning and more staff would be arriving in an hour or so.

  Carmen was on the phone when someone knocked on the door.

  Dozer waved at Carmen to stay seated at her desk and got up to answer it himself. This early, he had a good idea who it was. “What’s the password?” he asked through the closed door.

  “Morning, backhoe,” a gravel-filtered voice said. “Open the damned door.”

  DS.

  “Dozer,” he said, opening the door to the older man. “It’s a pretty simple name.”

  DS came inside with a grin that should have made Dozer feel nervous but did the opposite. He’d worry when DS didn’t act like he was still an active-duty drill sergeant.

  “Whatever you say, dump truck.”

  It took a lot of focus not to laugh. The old bastard was good at destroying the illusions of grandeur anyone in his vicinity might have.

  “Shit hitting the fan?” DS asked, his volume significantly lower. “What does our fearless leader need?”

  “A couple of clones?” Dozer shrugged. “Mostly, she’s waiting for her teams to get to the two hospitals who sent out the calls for help. They landed at the airport about twenty minutes ago.”

  “You here to watch or are you working?” DS asked.

  “Officially, I’m not here at all, so neither. Unofficially, she’s not going anywhere without me.”

  “Ah,” DS said with a sneaky grin. “It’s a love story.” He nudged Dozer’s shoulder with his own. “Does she know you’re pining after her?”

  Chapter Nine

  6:05 a.m.

  Carmen ended her phone call just in time to hear Dozer say to DS, “If you start singing that K-I-S-S-I-N-G song, I will punch you in the mouth.”

  DS’s smile got larger. “I’ll have you know I have a lovely singing voice.”

  “DS, stop flirting with my bodyguard,” she said before she could stop herself. “Our people are on the ground in Orlando, and the number of sick is higher than initially reported. At both hospitals. Prep another dozen frontline staff to head down to Orlando. I want them ready to go on the next available flight.”

  He was standing almost at attention, all casualness gone from him. “Full gear?”

  “Yes. And, if the numbers of infected and sick continue to rise, we’re going to need the on-site temporary shelters and a command and communication center ready to roll.”

  “I’ll put them on standby.” He marched out of her office.

  She and Dozer stared at each other for a moment.

  “It must be bad,” he said quietly.

  “The vast majority of cases have been in children and younger teens. We’re seeing high fevers and seizures. No adult victims, so far.”

  “I don’t know if that’s good or bad,” he said, looking a little pale.

  “Nothing about this is good.”

  “I didn’t mean—” he said quickly, his voice apologetic.

  “I’m angry, but not at you. The staff at Kissimmee Public had seen cases a full twenty-four hours before Orlando General’s first case came in. If they’d reported the possibility of measles sooner, we would have gotten there a whole day earlier.”

  “Hindsight is easy,” he said. “No one can afford to waste money on an outbreak that isn’t confirmed.”

  Her phone rang—one of the doctors on the four-by-four team, Dr. Sean Stevenson—and she turned away to take it. Dozer continued to watch her, a frown on his face making him look pensive. And pale. And tired. He needed more rest and recovery time.

  She should have made him stay at the apartment. No one but people she could trust knew he’d been there.

  DS came back in with another man, whose voice was loud enough to prevent her from hearing the person on the phone. She waved at them to lower the volume.

  Dozer gestured at the other two men to leave, almost pushing them out of her office.

  “Can you repeat that, please?” she said to Dr. Stevenson.

  “…rash isn’t typical. We’re seeing it on the body’s hot zones, inside the hairline, neck, armpits, groin, tops of the feet and the back of hands. Fevers are running between a hundred and five and a hundred and seven. If it’s measles, these people have been contagious for at least four days, maybe longer. The ten showing symptoms all spent time at the theme parks, so the number of possible people exposed could be in the hundreds. Or thousands.”

  “Aside from the atypical rash, anything else telling you this isn’t measles?”

  “I wish I could say there was. Samples are on their way to the lab.”

  “Even if I push the testing as hard as I can, it’s going to be two to three days before we get a confirmation and a specific genotyping.”

  “The high fever is what concerns me the most,” Dr. Stevenson said. “We’re trying to control it, but it means worse outcomes for every patient who becomes sick.”

  He meant brain damage, seizures, blindness, circulatory shutdown to extremities that could lead to limb amputation and even death. But, given the amount of background noise coming through the call, he was in a public place and didn’t want to chance anyone overhearing specifics.

  “I’m sending more people, along with temporary housing and a command center.”

  A beep from her phone told her another call was trying to come through—the doctor she’d sent to Orlando General Hospital. “I have to go. Dr. Shaw is calling in.”

  She switched calls. The woman gave her much the same type of report as Dr. Stevenson did. Carmen told her the same things she’d told Stevenson and hung up.

  Raised voices in the hallway intruded.

  A
fter a rapid hard knock, her door popped open. A man strode through, almost at a run, and didn’t stop until he was leaning over her desk, his face flushed and pulled into a severe frown.

  “I want an explanation.” His voice was threatening. “For why I was treated like some…some…uneducated neophyte. Fired without cause?” He pointed a finger at her. “It’s unfair and unprofessional.”

  “Dr. Halverson,” Carmen said in an even tone. “I don’t know any of the details of why you were…let go.” She continued before he could jump in again: “I’ve been out of state trying to talk sense into politicians who wouldn’t know an outbreak from a coffee break, and now I’m dealing with an emerging outbreak in Florida. I suggest you speak with the CDC director.”

  He leaned farther over the desk. “I know you had something to do with it.”

  “No.” It was hard to maintain a calm demeanor in the face of righteous anger. She was telling the truth—she hadn’t been involved in the decision to let him go. “I wasn’t consulted before you were terminated, nor have I been informed of the reasons since returning.”

  “Sir,” John said, approaching from where he’d been seated in the corner of her office. “Dr. Rodrigues has had no time to catch up on any internal email or notices beyond those regarding the outbreaks she’s currently managing.” He managed to look chagrined and sympathetic. “Those of us who do all the fieldwork are often left in the dark.”

  Halverson sneered. “Don’t try to create a false sense of camaraderie with me. You’re not even a CDC employee, just another gun-toting government flunky.” He turned back to Carmen. “I won’t stand by while my reputation is torn apart by lies and accusations made by fools and idiots.”

  Movement behind Halverson turned into two uniformed security guards, who paused to take in the entire room before they moved to stand on either side of the intruder.

  “Sir,” one of them said. “You don’t have the credentials to be here.”

  Oh boy, that was going to set Halverson off.

  “How dare you,” the angry doctor shouted at the guard. “I have two doctorates in medicine and virology. I’ve worked for the CDC for more than ten years. I have more than just the credentials to be here—I’ve earned the right to be here.”