Outbreak

by Davis Bunn

  As the voices receded, the silence was almost total. Cruz remained poised on the landing. Staring at the sunlight beyond the slit window. Checking the terrain. When he was certain, he continued up the stairs. Moving slower now. Cautious. Spooked by things he could not even define.

  forty-four

  Theo began, “Go back to what you said at the start.”

  Avery showed no irritation over being redirected. It was as tight a connection as Theo had known with the scientist. And this was good because Theo’s gut told him they were on to something. The goal was not in sight. Not yet. But they were closing in. Maybe Avery and the two women knew this as well. He could sense the two of them moving a step closer. Leaving room for them to glance at the screen to Theo’s left. Inspect the African waters clouded by the dark green mass.

  “Track the peripheral evidence,” Theo went on, “that’s what you said, correct? What is your aim?”

  Avery replied, “Seek a pattern. Use the pattern to formulate the right questions.”

  “Exactly.” Theo pulled a whiteboard in close, erased Avery’s scribbles, and wrote across the top, Why was Kenny arrested?

  Theo turned around and liked what he found there in the three faces. Maybe they had become connected to the same energy that vibrated in his own gut. He thought he could detect that spark of excitement in their eyes.

  Avery recalled, “That was the question Lanica told us to ask.”

  “Right. She said it would lead us to the hidden reality.” Theo wrote another line, Why was Kenny arrested NOW?

  “Opioids,” Harper said.

  Della shook her head. “No. There have been rumors swirling for over a year. It’s how I got involved, assuming there was a hidden truth behind the tales. If someone had found a smoking gun, something definite, the headlines would shout it from every major newspaper.”

  Harper nodded slowly. “Makes sense.”

  “Timing,” Theo said. “Timing is everything.”

  Avery frowned at the two new lines on the whiteboard. He opened his mouth but no sound emerged.

  Theo took that as his cue and wrote a third line, Who has the power to give the order? He said, “Say it’s not Africa at all. We’ve been assuming it’s some regional power on the other side of the Atlantic. But my gut tells me we need to look closer to home.”

  “Don’t forget the scary man at the airport,” Della said.

  “Right, okay. But how could an African ambassador have the clout to manipulate American federal agents? What if he was sent just to confuse the issue?” Theo gave that a beat, then wrote a fourth line, What is the crisis issue?

  Harper said, “I have no idea what that means.”

  “Political economics,” Theo said. “The point at which all subsequent events must be redefined.”

  “I like it,” Harper decided.

  “So do I,” Della said.

  Avery’s eyes flashed from the whiteboard to the screen and back.

  Theo said, “So the core question is, what could possibly be big enough that powerful forces with a global reach would feel the need to sweep hundreds of deaths under the carpet?”

  Della stepped in close enough to brush against Theo. “And be able to keep their presence a secret.”

  Theo breathed in her scent and felt her closeness add to his sense of forces accumulating. He said to Harper, “Go back to that first bloom.”

  Harper brought the image back on-screen, bathing them in hues of red and danger. Theo stepped out of the light, drawing Della with him. Needing her closeness to fuel his thoughts. Or perhaps wanting it to be so. Which was enough just then. “Draw in tighter.”

  “We’ve already seen the boats,” Avery protested from the screen’s opposite side.

  “Tighter still. Okay. Stop.” The realization fired Theo with such force he felt incandescent. “Tell me what you see.”

  Avery shifted forward until his nose was scarcely a hand’s breadth from the screen. “What are all those little dots?”

  A simple nod of acknowledgment was not enough. Theo rocked his entire upper body. “Go to the next Lupa.”

  Della moved forward until her shadow was joined to Avery’s. “There they are again.”

  “Will you two please step away from the screen so the rest of us can see it?” Harper did not wait for Theo’s instruction. “Okay. Here’s Lupa number three.”

  “More dots,” Della said.

  Harper asked, “Can you get any closer?”

  “That’s as tight as they allow,” Della said. “You have to buy into a different feed, and that requires formal approval from one federal agency or another.”

  Avery said, “This isn’t Google’s photo view of your local neighborhood. These are conflict zones and contested regions.”

  “It’s close enough,” Theo said, and he marveled at how the thrill of discovery did not seem to touch his voice.

  Della glanced over. “You know what they are?”

  Theo nodded. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the smoking gun.”

  forty-five

  Cruz entered the top floor and raced along the empty corridor to the hall’s opposite end, then back down the second stairwell. He paused by the exit doorway long enough to ensure the Glock had a round in the chamber and the silencer was on tight. Then he pushed through the door.

  As soon as Cruz exited the stairwell, he knew something had changed. The second-floor corridor had a breathless quality, like all the air had been sucked from the building. He padded silently to the lab. The two technicians were still there, hard at work, bent over their equipment. The late afternoon sun shone off their gloves and lab coats. One of them said something, the other laughed. The room adjacent to the lab with the waist-high glass partition was still dark. This time nothing flashed and there were no murmuring voices as Cruz approached the door. He opened it softly, and felt the air around him blister when he saw the room was empty.

  Cruz realized he was no longer alone. He slipped the Glock back into his pack before stepping out of the room’s shadows.

  The woman was small and very dark. There was a singular intensity to her gaze and a bitter cast to her features. Cruz had the distinct impression she was not American, at least not by birth. He knew a number of recent immigrants who still carried the imprint of their past and whatever had forced them to leave their homeland. Bloodlines of such people were often much purer than those of most Americans. The woman’s face was slanted by cheekbones that rose like twin mounds beneath almond-shaped eyes. She carried herself on her toes, like someone who had spent her entire life running. Cruz put her age at mid-twenties. Her dark hair was cropped short to her head, and her smile was slightly canted, as though the weight of her life pulled down one side. She wore tan shorts over muscular legs and running shoes with those little tab socks that left her ankles bare. She said, “How are you doing this fine day?”

  “Could be better.” He had no idea why he spoke at all. The woman had a honeyed accent he could not place. And the smile. It was very knowing, a magnetic draw that momentarily diminished his rage over the target’s ability to keep just beyond range. “You?”

  “Oh, this day just keeps getting finer.” She moved past him with a dancer’s lithe motions. “You stay cool now.”

  Cruz was tempted to follow her. But the day’s course was set, and he had not the time for distractions, however magnetic. He kept to a calm pace until he reached the stairwell, and then he bounded down to the mid-floor landing. Through the slit window, Cruz watched the target and the other man and one of the women climb into the Jeep. The dark-skinned attorney got into a second Cherokee. As she reversed out of the spot, she said something through her open window that caused Theo Bishop to smile.

  Cruz felt the rage coalesce once more. He slapped the glass, then started down the stairs again. If they went straight back to the Fairview residence, Cruz would not be able to position himself in advance of their arrival. He could not rise from his carefully chosen lair. He had to take them all ou
t. A frontal assault. The best he could hope for was that the kids were not home.

  He left the building and ran for his car.

  forty-six

  Avery spent the entire journey back to Fairview talking through his next steps. Much of what he said made no sense to Theo. Perhaps if he had focused more intently, he could have followed the discussion better. But just then he was filled with a weary satisfaction. They had their target in sight.

  “Numerous viruses infect plants,” Avery said. “But very few of these infect humans. Only three, in fact. Bunyaviridae, Rhabdoviridae, and Reoviridae. Three out of thousands. The most common genus is the Tobomovirus. Highly stable and highly contagious. It requires no specific vector for transmission. But to my knowledge it has never been found in ocean vegetation.”

  Avery’s voice carried a soft quality Theo had never heard before. He suspected Avery was not in fact speaking to them at all. Avery continued, “My guess is, we’ll discover this outbreak is caused by a nanovirus, a genus not specifically tied to seaweed, which of course means it will be dismissed by many of my colleagues. But there are three reasons why I suspect they are wrong. Nanoviruses are extremely sensitive to pollutants. They can rapidly shift structure and adapt their DNA so as to feed off whatever nutrients are available. Secondly, nanoviruses exit the host plant by nuclear pore export and tubule-guided viral movement. Which means they could easily become airborne infections.”

  Avery was in the passenger seat, with Della seated directly behind him. She typed swiftly and looked up only to frown at the back of Avery’s head. Avery tapped an index finger on his thigh in the tempo of his words. “The third reason why I suspect nanoviruses are our target is histocompatibility. There is a binding affinity of coat proteins that play an important role in the host immune and autoimmune systems. If pollutants have caused a mutation, granting the nanovirus the ability to cross species, they could carry this threat to humans.”

  Theo only half listened as the scientist droned on about how to identify the nanovirus and replicate the antibodies so that a vaccine might be created. The words formed a flowing backdrop as Theo worked through his own next steps. Then he realized Della was studying him in the rearview mirror. When he met her gaze, she said, “Is something troubling you?”

  He liked how they were so in sync. The desire to tell her how he felt bubbled up inside him so intensely that Theo had to swallow to keep it down. He pulled up to the estate gates and lowered his window. “Does anybody remember the code?”

  Both of his passengers looked askance. Della said, “The same as for all the doors.”

  “Sorry, doesn’t help.”

  “Two-three-seven-four-six,” Avery said. “How do you get into your apartment?”

  “Simple.” Theo leaned out, punched in the numbers, then settled back behind the wheel as the gates swung open. “I never lock the door.”

  “Is that wise?”

  He accelerated up the graveled drive. “Probably not.”

  Della leaned forward. “What’s the matter, Theo?”

  He replied, “There is something we haven’t covered that might hold—”

  Then he noticed the car.

  forty-seven

  His name had once been Barry. Nowadays he thought of the name as having belonged to a set of borrowed memories. Something left in a box by the roadside, just beyond the perimeter of a burned-out village. There had been a lot of those in his native Zambia. As a child he had often watched stragglers wander the roads leading out of fire-blackened townships, all their belongings piled on their heads or pulled behind them in carts. It would hardly have been a surprise to find a box of discarded memories lying there in the dust.

  Barry’s connection to his own past was just like that, blasted by heat and dust and emotions that blistered the brain. There had been so many uprisings to mar his childhood. The one that had killed his father did not even have a name.

  His mother had left behind the farm that had been in her family for six generations and fled to South Africa. They had settled in a white township, in a hardscrabble cinder-block home with no running water and sporadic electricity. Barry had entered school with a silent, burning rage and a complete indifference to his own pain. He had fought when necessary and soon earned himself a reputation for being someone to avoid in battle.

  An observant teacher had taken note of Barry’s strength and his intelligence and his swift hands, and introduced him to a local boxing club. The club’s owner had served with Barry’s teacher in the armed forces under Botha, the disgraced leader of white South Africa. Both gentlemen maintained a close connection within the new army, renamed the South African National Defense Force. They brought in a mutual friend, a newly retired master sergeant, now serving as hunting guide to rich tourists. The three of them took Barry on a series of excursions deep into the African veld. Gradually the young man found himself able to reknit his world and develop a deep and abiding love for the continent’s secret grandeur. By his eighteenth birthday, Barry was ready to claim a new destiny.

  When it came time to sign his enlistment papers, he gave a different name. It was time to leave more than just his memories in the roadside dust.

  Just as his three mentors had expected, Bruno sailed through basic training. He was then tapped to enter the South African Special Forces Brigade, colloquially known as the Recces. The Recces were South Africa’s special ops unit. They were classed as the nation’s counterinsurgency elite, specializing in long-range combat reconnaissance and airborne insertions. Bruno found a home there and would have stayed for life, but then a roadside device outside a Zimbabwean village ended all that and left him with seven bits of shrapnel embedded in his hips and spine.

  His commanding officer offered Bruno an administrative gig, but he was not made for manning a desk. He took his pension and his medals and resigned his commission. Then he waited. Three weeks later, he received a different sort of enlistment offer. One that sent him out wherever and whenever the client said. The pay was far better, the medical care something else entirely. The group that arranged his contracts had doctors on staff who were specialists at solving problems like Bruno’s. He would carry three of the shrapnel bits for the rest of his life. And his new gig had earned him four more wounds, one of them serious enough to have laid him out for three months. But Bruno walked upright and slept well and lived mostly without pain. It was far more than most people in his line of work could ever expect.

  His current gig had started out as just another quick insertion and security operation. It really did not require someone of his skill set or level of experience. Yet the client was important enough and rich enough to demand the best. From the very outset, Bruno had the distinct impression that more was at work. This was confirmed when a new series of instructions arrived, ordering him to drop everything and fly with his crew to the United States. Where none of them had ever operated before. Even so, Bruno was assured he and the team would be met planeside by a man with enough authority to obtain them all visas. And weapons. If anything went wrong, or the man was not there to greet them, Bruno was ordered to sit tight, say nothing about who they were, and ask anyone within earshot for Martin Thorpe.

  Soon as they hit the ground in Asheville, Bruno was convinced the threat was real and a hunter was out there. Someone so skilled that Bruno never actually spotted the hunter. But every good frontline soldier developed the ability to detect the unseen threat. It was what separated the survivors from those who did not make it home. And Bruno’s spider sense told him that Theo had been right to ask for his help.

  Knowing there was a valid threat was halfway to surviving the attack. Bruno kept himself on high alert and spread out his team, forming a loose and hidden net around Theo and his crew.

  The instructors who had trained Bruno taught him all there was to know about operating in densely congested areas. The key to residential sweeps was keeping things fluid. Adapting constantly to the change of place, time, people, conditions. Bruno saw himse
lf and his team as part of an unseen river, flowing silently in and out of spaces, finding the tight niches that most would miss, and doing so without losing a single second. His team’s movements were blindingly fast and utterly silent.

  Their goal was to bring the target in alive. With enough evidence to extract not a conviction, but a confession. Bruno had tried to tell the client this reduced their level of success. And failure meant bloodshed, he made that clear as well. But the client was insistent.

  They stayed on high alert. Knowing that when the attack came, they would have only a very brief instant to keep things from going very bad indeed.

  forty-eight

  Cruz tracked the target’s Jeep Cherokee from a position three cars back. He had come no closer because he was fairly certain where they were going. Plus, he could not risk having them notice him. The element of surprise was crucial to his attack. When the Fairview turnoff came into view, Cruz slowed further. He waited until they had passed through the stop sign at the top of the exit ramp. Then he hammered the gas pedal to the floor.

  The rental vehicle’s lousy engine sputtered, as if it were indignant that Cruz would punch it so hard. Then the motor slipped into overdrive and the car accelerated up the ramp. The local road was empty, but he halted at the stop sign and pretended to check carefully in both directions. The professor sped through a yellow light and took the next right, on the road home.

  The pickup behind him beeped its horn. Cruz turned right and floored it again. He passed the flashing light and turned just as Bishop pulled up to the estate and lowered his window. Cruz watched as he turned away from the electronic control box and spoke to the passengers. Cruz clenched the wheel but otherwise he showed no response. Accelerating, he left the estate behind and was going almost eighty when he reached the next curve. He braked hard and spun the wheel. The car squealed its way through a 180-degree turn. Thankfully the road remained empty. As the car came out of the turn, Cruz jammed the gas pedal against the floor. The gates had just begun to close. Somehow he managed to squeak by with only an inch or so to spare on either side.