He’d alternated between sitting in one chair or the other, then pacing to try to sober up, but he had yet to so much as perch on the bed, no matter how strong he felt the urge to lie down. Arms crossed, back aching, ribs and knee shrieking with pain that reminded him of the impact of Oscar Hecht’s car. Had his body cracked the BMW’s windshield? He couldn’t remember now, but he thought it must have.
Images of Logan and Ellen paced around the edges of his mind like wolves just at the edge of the firelight, ready to attack once the fire burned down. He couldn’t think of them now, though. His daughters needed him.
Maeve had needed him, and instead of being the father he should have been, he’d let shock and pain and grief take control. And addiction, he thought. Don’t forget that.
His tongue pushed out, moistening his lips. A sheen of sweat covered him, though the climate in the MacJail had been set to the perfect temperature. Whiskey would help, but he and the whiskey both knew it wasn’t sufficient. Like a husband always in the shadow of his wife’s first love, the whiskey knew it would never be enough. He wanted painkillers. Morphine. Heroin. If he had been locked in here before he’d done rehab, Ted knew he would have been crawling out of his skin, would have hurt himself, would have done anything to get out of here.
He stood up from the chair, flushed with fresh anger.
Maeve still needed him. Rose had gone after her because Ted had been too weak or too selfish or too broken—the “too” didn’t matter. Rose had put her life in jeopardy because Ted hadn’t been the father his daughters needed.
For heroin, he’d have done anything to escape.
“What about for your daughters, Ted?” he said aloud.
Do they mean less to you than addiction?
He rushed at the door, planted his hands on the smooth surface, and started kicking. The door shook in its frame. He had tried to smash the lock, tried to pry the door open, to no avail, and even as he kicked and pounded against it, he knew he would only succeed in bruising his hands and scuffing his boots.
Helpless, furious, he kept pounding.
Ted opened his mouth to shout for someone to come talk to him, listen to him. Anything. Set him free, let him keep looking. Keep him locked up if they had to, but don’t leave him alone.
“Just tell me!” he screamed. “Tell me they’re still alive!”
Every impact of his boot or his fist sent shock waves of pain through him. He felt cracked ribs shifting, felt something behind his knee tug and tear. Ted didn’t care. There were two kinds of pain, and when you’d experienced both it was easy to see that only one of them mattered.
He hauled his boot back again, took a breath to shout, and in that slim, quiet instant, he heard something outside the door. Ted pressed his ear against the door. Out in the corridor, boots thundered past. Urgent voices barked sharp commands. The door vibrated against his cheek.
Something had happened. No alarms blared, but those sounds were an alarm all their own. Ted couldn’t tell if it boded well for Maeve and Rose, but one thing seemed certain—inside Garland Mountain Labs, the shit had hit the fan.
* * *
Justin W. Jones had lived his share of bad days. He’d held his mother’s hand while she closed her eyes for the last time. At the age of eleven, he had stood on his front lawn and watched his father drive away, knowing in his gut the son of a bitch would never return and hating himself for wishing it weren’t true. While pursuing his Ph.D., he had kissed the woman in charge of the lab where he’d spent three years and intended to spend at least two more. His first inkling that he’d misread their intimate rapport was her fist smashing his nose.
Today, though. The worst day of his life. No contest.
Justin strode along the corridor with six Garland security guards in their crisp tan uniforms. All of them wore sidearms and grim expressions. Several managed to keep a cold glint in their eyes, and he wondered if they were simply good at hiding their emotions or if they truly were unruffled by the path events had taken. People were dead, more were dying. The security team might not know the nature of the contagion that had escaped the lab, but they surely knew those with upper-level clearance considered it catastrophic. How those few stayed so calm, he would never know. And Justin couldn’t ask them. He only knew their names from the ID badges they wore. Before today, they might as well have been masked storm troopers, for all he had given a crap about them.
Now he needed them to care about their jobs. Needed them to care very much. Maybe even care about him.
At the end of the corridor, he bent to press his eye to a retina scanner. The light above the door pinged green, and the door unlocked. He shoved it open and marched through with the security team in his wake.
On the other side of the door was another corridor, the mirror image of the first except that its walls were glass. To the left, the glass looked down into the central axis of the private lab space. To the right, the glass made up the windows of smaller labs, offices, and small conference areas.
“Dr. Jones, should we expect resistance?” one of the guards asked.
Justin glanced back at her, a flutter in his chest. “Be ready for anything.”
They reached the end of the glass corridor. The last door on the right stood open. He could hear a voice shouting from inside the large office. Seven steps from the doorway, he wanted to turn and run, but there would be no running from any of the colossal fuckups of the past couple of days. Justin hoped he could live through it, and fortunately the best chance of that had just been handed to him by his contract manager at DARPA.
He knocked on the open door, and the three men inside looked up. Justin didn’t wait to be invited in, just stepped through the door with the security team following. They spread out to either side of him, taking up half the office.
General Henry Wagner sat behind the desk in his on-site office, what he’d often called his home away from home in the many months that he’d been working in tandem with Garland Mountain Labs on Project: Red Hands. The two men from White Oak Security who stood behind him at attention were the only Blackcoats who hadn’t been detailed to search for Maeve Sinclair, which was fortunate.
“Justin,” the general said, even the name a scowl of dismissal. He scanned the faces of the security team, and though he must have known the answer, he asked the question, anyway. “What the fuck is this?”
At six foot four and on the high side of 250 pounds, General Wagner was an intimidating presence. He scared Justin far more than the two stone-faced Blackcoats. If the general had leaped up from his desk and started bellowing, as he’d done more than once in Justin’s presence, things might have gone even worse. But Project: Red Hands had turned into the worst thing that had ever happened to Justin W. Jones, a storm of black clouds, crashing thunder, and death-strike lightning. The path to blue skies ran right through General Wagner—ran right over him, if Justin were being honest—and so fear would have to be forgotten.
“I’m sorry, General,” Justin said in a quiet voice that cracked as he spoke. He cleared his throat, lifted his chin, put more authority into the words. “I’ve received direct instructions from DARPA director Steven Delacruz that you have been relieved of your authority in this matter and at this facility.”
Wagner’s upper lip curled in disgust. “Oh, have you? And to whom has that coward handed the reins?” The general smashed his hands down onto the desk. Through a sneer, he rose from the chair, towering over the rest of the people in the room. “Never mind. I know the answer to that.”
“I’m sorry, General,” Justin said.
“You have no gift for lying, Jones,” the general said. He glanced back at the two Blackcoats, perhaps considering making a fight of it, but then he looked at the security team again. “This is your mess. I’ll make certain that’s not forgotten. When the cleanup begins, I promise you will be swept away with the rest of us.”
Justin stiffened. He stared at the Blackcoats, realizing they planned to do nothing to aid the general.
Wagner himself simmered with anger but did not appear ready to die in a useless gunfight over an order from his own superiors.
“I guess we’ll see, General,” Justin said. “But either way, we won’t be the ones doing the cleanup. Whatever happens next, at least there’s that small mercy.”
General Wagner came out from behind the desk. The Blackcoats stayed where they were as the security guards surrounded the general and escorted him out of the office.
“I never asked for mercy,” Wagner said as they led him away.
“Probably for the best, then, that no one’s offering it.”
Justin hung his head as he walked behind the security team. The procession made him think of his youth as an altar boy, and that rang painfully true. Penitent then, and penitent now. But in those days, he had been far more likely to be forgiven.
All he wanted now was for it all to be over. Whatever his penance, whatever the cost to bring this to an end, he would gladly pay it.
* * *
All of her adult life, Rue had looked different from most people. The hairstyle and color, the tattoos, were her way of letting the way she felt on the inside make its way to the surface. As a girl, she had considered herself quite ordinary-looking. Not ugly, not pretty, just unremarkable. So often, she had felt invisible, ignored by a world to which she had much to offer. Peacocks could spread their feathers, show the full kaleidoscope of their colors, strut with pride. More than anything, Rue wanted to be seen. She wanted to be a peacock, to be fully herself, to show all the colors inside her. She didn’t need to be admired for them, but she refused to stay invisible.
Tonight, she had regretted that choice for the first time in her life.
“Stop panicking,” Kat Isenberg said, reaching over to take her hand. “Take a breath, be still, and focus on the work.”
Rue tried to take her advice, took a deep breath and let it out. They were inside Garland SL2-Alpha, the one lab inside Garland Mountain that was not under the auspices of the lab’s director but those of the federal government. General Henry Wagner held the top spot, overseeing SL2-Alpha. Dr. Cristina Vargas was the lab supervisor, with Dr. Isenberg as her deputy, and a guy named Justin Jones was the project manager specifically overseeing Red Hands. None of them were in SL2-Alpha tonight. The shit had hit the fan, and they all had more important things to worry about. Red Hands had been born in this unit, and the research had blown up into absolute catastrophe for them.
Any other night, Rue would never have made it into SL2-Alpha, never mind into the restricted access sublevels of Garland Mountain Labs. But this wasn’t any night, and she had Kat Isenberg with her. With Dr. Vargas absent, Kat was in charge.
“You’re going to be fired,” Rue said to her now, quietly, as Kat bent to peer over her shoulder. Kat had typed in her password to give Rue access to all the Red Hands research. It was not only a breach of security but would likely be considered a federal crime.
“Possibly executed,” Kat replied, and Rue couldn’t tell if she was joking. “Just do the work. Let me worry about the fallout.”
It hadn’t surprised her that Kat had gotten her into Garland Mountain. Without Vargas there to recognize her, and with the pressure and chaos unfolding, Kat’s authority had been enough. But when they had gotten onto the elevator at the center of the facility’s hexagon and Kat had used her ID to select a classified sublevel, Rue had been certain that a voice would come over an intercom or an alarm would go off, and the two of them would end up in plastic handcuffs or something similar.
Instead, several other people had gotten onto the elevator, looking harried and anxious, even a little afraid.
“What’s going on?” Kat had asked.
A skinny thirtysomething guy with his beard and hair shorn down to about an inch—the sort of thing someone did when they didn’t want to ever have to fuss with their appearance—looked at Kat with an angry spark in his eyes.
“You oughta know,” Skinny replied. “It’s your project that’s causing all this bullshit.”
“Jason,” one of the others cautioned.
Skinny Jason rolled his eyes. “Please. It’s just the truth. Dr. Isenberg is a grown-up. She can handle a little truth.” He cut a sidelong glance at Rue, his expression full of disapproval of her as well, though it seemed more for her association with Kat than for her appearance.
“I can, actually,” Kat said. “So share it with me?”
Skinny Jason tsked and fixed her with a glare. “We’re all in the dark here. Aside from your people and maybe a handful of supervisors, we don’t even know what you’re all doing to fix this. All we’ve been told is that Dr. Hecht was infected and he took off and infected a bunch of other people, and now they’re all fucking dead. Great job, government scientists.”
Rue saw the way the words hurt Kat, the way her eyes crinkled as the sting set in.
“Hey,” Rue said. “There’s no need for—”
“Who the fuck are you?” Skinny Jason asked.
Kat didn’t give her a chance to answer. “She’s a consultant we’ve brought in to try to resolve this quickly.”
Skinny Jason reappraised Rue. “Well, I hope you’re smarter than this batch.”
The elevator door had opened and they’d all gotten off at sublevel 2. Others were moving through the common area that surrounded the elevator bank. Some carried boxes or metallic containers in their arms and were waiting for the elevator to go back up. Several of the labs around the hexagon on sublevel 2 were dark inside, the doors closed and presumably locked. Rue had wondered but said nothing.
Inside Garland SL2-Alpha, two research assistants were still working when Kat used her ID to unlock the door, ushering Rue inside. It had been from those assistants that they’d learned General Wagner had arranged for the COO of Garland Mountain to order the rest of the labs shut down and the research teams sent home if they lived inside the quarantine zone. Others were to evacuate if they could find somewhere else to stay.
“It’s like last call at the bar,” one of the assistants said. “They don’t have to go home, but they can’t stay here.”
Wagner had also sent Dr. Vargas and several others from SL2-Alpha over to join the Blackcoats. Maeve Sinclair had apparently been located. It would only be a matter of time before she would be brought in, dead or alive, and Vargas had been tasked with overseeing the process of getting her back to Garland Mountain without allowing anyone else to be exposed to Red Hands.
“General Wagner asked that we let him know as soon as you returned,” the other assistant said, reaching for a phone.
“Don’t do that,” Kat had said.
The two assistants shot her twin looks of concern. General Wagner had given them an order. They were scientists, but they worked for DARPA, and Wagner was the top of their hierarchy. Could Dr. Isenberg countermand his order?
“The general—”
“Is only going to get in the way of the work we have to do, right here and right now,” Kat said.
The assistants both hesitated.
“Hi,” Rue said, getting their attention. “I’m a new face and a new name, but all four of us have the same goal here—trying to make sure nobody else dies. If not a cure, we need a counteragent, something that will save Maeve Sinclair’s life if we can manage it. If not, then something that will inhibit infection in others. You wouldn’t be a part of this project if you weren’t all brilliant. I don’t know about you, but I don’t trust your General Wagner to use that brilliance to save lives instead of using it to help cover his ass. You want to call him, get him down here to give Dr. Isenberg her marching orders? Be my guest.”
“Actually,” Kat said, “you two should go with the rest. The way things are going, you’ll be safer outside than inside.”
The two assistants had stared at her. The standoff lasted all of three seconds before they gathered their things and departed.
Rue had spent the past couple of hours poring through the work Dr. Hecht had done on Project: Red Hands be
fore he had purposely infected himself. The bacterium presented as unlike anything Rue had encountered before, and yet there were elements that were familiar, strands that mirrored the structure of other germs. Like linguists managing to translate a few specific phrases in an ancient, unknown language, she thought she and Kat could use those few strands to unravel the rest of Red Hands and find a cure. Or if not a cure, at least a treatment.
If they had the time.
“That was a big sigh,” Kat said. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
“I think we can do it,” Rue replied. “If General Wagner will let us. If we can work it out before they drag us out of here.”
A buzzer sounded inside the lab. Rue glanced up to see that Kat had stepped back and was looking out toward the door.
“Um, I think you need to see this,” Kat said.
Rue swore, thinking she had jinxed them with her own words. She rose and followed Kat through the lab, out to the glass wall at the entrance, beyond which they could see the common area and the elevator bank. Men and women in white shirts and dark jackets hustled through the common area.
“Who the hell is this now?” Rue asked.
Kat shook her head. “Not a clue.”
A woman arrived at the entrance to SL2-Alpha. She gave them a little wave, then knocked at the door to the unit. Only then did Rue spot the three bold yellow letters inscribed over the left breast on her navy-blue jacket.
DHS. Department of Homeland Security.
“Holy shit,” Kat said. “General Wagner must be furious.”
Rue smiled. “For better or worse, something tells me General Wagner isn’t your boss anymore.”
The DHS agent knocked again, looking less pleasant and less patient than a moment before.
“For better or worse,” Kat echoed.
She buzzed the agent in.
26
Maeve drifted in a red limbo, a space that might have felt like sleep if not for the taste of blood and sorrow on her lips. She thought her eyes were open, but could see only a kind of crimson fog. Or perhaps it might have been a cloud, and she was flying through it. A sound reached her, someone shouting. Metal clanged against metal, perhaps swords clashing or armor turning away a dagger strike. There came a roar that might have been a black bear or …
Red Hands: A Novel Page 27