The man growled. “You killed my daughter and my sister, and now you tell me you have released the virus in a heavily populated city?”
“Not just a city. It’s your city.”
“What manner of monster are you?”
Carl grunted. “I’m a man who desperately wants to save his president. If you and your family are in Chihuahua City, you are among the tens of thousands now infected. You have, at most, three or four hours remaining in which the antidote will be effective. All of your antidote was destroyed when I blew up your lab. The only way you and your family live through this is if you receive your antidote from Walter Breen’s supply.” Carl paused, but Gonzales remained silent. He could hear the man breathing.
“Breen paid you months ago to provide the formula so they could manufacture the antidote. Tell me what company it was and then pray the FBI can trace Breen’s distribution network in time. The US government will immediately begin rescue operations for your population…and you.”
For a while, Gonzales said nothing. “Do you speak for your government, Mr. Johnson?”
Simms interrupted. “This is Colonel Brighton Simms of the US Army National Guard. I speak for my government and am fully prepared to commit to rescue operations.”
“And this is Special Agent Guillermo Figueroa of the FBI. Tell us where the antidote is, and we’ll begin immediate recovery and distribution operations.”
Gonzales said, “What guarantee do I have—”
Carl interrupted harshly. “Listen, shithead. Let’s go back to the part where we have the antidote and you don’t, and the part where you’re infected and your family is going to die.”
“Mr. Johnson, I will hunt you and your family to the ends of the earth.”
“Mmm-hmmm,” Carl said. “Your daughter said that, and it didn’t turn out too well for her. But I tell you what, if you live long enough, I’ll be coming for you first. Tell us the name of the company manufacturing the antidote.”
The Triad leader was silent for a moment, then he said, “The company we contracted to develop the antidote is irrelevant. Valiant Pharmaceutical was given the storage contract. You will find the antidote there.”
The man gave up the location of the company’s warehouse. Carl looked at Agent Figueroa, but the agent was busy on his cell phone. He had the device parked on his left ear and was talking fast and animatedly. He had pulled the left cup of his headphones higher on his head, but he was still listening to the comm channel through the right cup of the headphones. His boom mike was folded out of the way.
Carl tapped the helicopter pilot and said, “Terminate that phone call.” After the pilot did so, Carl said, “Colonel, may we land?”
“Agent Palmer, hold your position. You will not be fired upon. Agent Figueroa, land your chopper at the main gate. I will personally escort you in.”
“Copy that. Please have your troops inside the hospital fall back. This is now an FBI operation.”
“Roger that.”
Carl heard Figueroa’s side of his cell phone conversation, indicating the agent was coordinating with his director in DC to initiate a massive FBI and police raid on Valiant Pharmaceuticals in El Paso, Texas. As the helicopter approached the front gate, the exterior lights of the entire medical complex were turned on, and Carl was surprised by its massive size.
There were two main buildings surrounded by huge parking lots. Green army tents filled a good portion of the parking lots instead of cars. There was a cluster of Humvees around a small building sandwiched in-between the two large buildings, so Carl assumed that was where the command staff was headquartered. The burning trucks were located at the east end of the hospital parking lot and posed no danger to life or property. Palmer had chosen her demonstration targets smartly.
The bright flare of exterior light illuminated the rainwater drainage ditch just north of the medical buildings and the empty parking lot just west of the main building. There was coiled wire security fencing around the entire medical center, and dozens of National Guard troops patrolled the perimeter with automatic weapons and truck-mounted machine guns. The parking lot almost directly beneath the helicopter held dozens of army vehicles, and the four-lane road sweeping east to west just south of the complex was empty of traffic.
As the police helicopter slowly drifted toward the main entrance in the Guard’s perimeter fence, Colonel Simms’s voice came back on the channel. There was a hint of confusion to his tone.
“Mr. Johnson, apparently your antidote won’t be needed after all.”
“Excuse me?”
“I was not told before, but the CDC had dispatched a courier with a serum they tested that eradicates the virus.”
“Colonel, it’s an assassin! When that courier gets here, don’t let that person anywhere near the president!”
“The courier has already arrived and was admitted through security over a minute ago.”
Carl heard brief shouting in the background. “Colonel, what’s going on?”
For a moment there was no reply. Finally, the man spoke.
“There has been a report of gunfire in the president’s wing.”
Palmer’s Osprey suddenly banked to the right and headed away from the hospital.
“Carl,” she said. “We’ve got an inbound missile thirty seconds out!”
Chapter 64
2118 hours MST Saturday
Las Cruces, NM
Carl couldn’t concern himself with the inbound missile, but its presence didn’t surprise him. Breen had hit them with a cruise missile before, so Carl should have figured he’d do it again. The double move—an assassin and a missile—underscored Breen’s desperation. Palmer would have to deal with the missile. Even as the thought tumbled through his brain, the Osprey loosed a steady stream of missiles from its wing pods.
Carl ripped the headphones from his head and shouted at the pilot. “Put me down on the roof! Hurry! On the east end. Then get the hell out of here in case that missile gets through.”
The roof lights had come on with the rest of the facility lights when the Guard began to pull back. The helipad was a large white circular slab of concrete with a thick red cross painted in the center. The colonel had turned the communication over to a lesser officer who told Carl he had to go through the roof emergency entrance, down four flights of stairs, down the hallway past the emergency room, make two rights, and then he’d be in the president’s wing.
Carl didn’t even wait until the helicopter was fully over the roof. The pilot was flying too slow, too careful. Carl threw open his door and leaped when the skids were still two feet shy of the roof parapet and six feet above the membrane material of the roof. The aircraft wasn’t even close to the concrete landing pad.
With the metal antidote case tucked in his arms, Carl hit the membrane roof in a tuck and roll. In the next instant, he was up and running. He hauled the emergency door open and flew down the stairs three at a time. His fifty-three-year-old knee joints protested with each step. Other parts of his body joined the protest. His back, where he’d been shot in his tactical vest twice, and his head and his hips, battered by his jump from the Gulfstream, flared with pain with each pounding step.
He hauled open the hallway door right outside the emergency room and saw the dead bodies right away. Two were army soldiers in desert camo and biohazard gas masks. Both had been shot in the head. A nurse and an orderly also lay nearby. Both were dressed in white lightweight medical coveralls and they wore head shrouds attached to black biochemical breathing masks.
His boot steps squished on the blood-soaked carpet as he ran. Two turns later, he saw more bodies. The men were desert camo-clad Secret Service commandos; the same men Carl had seen two days ago when he brought the president’s daughter back across the border. Carl felt a pang of primal fear that almost stopped him in his tracks. He’d been disarmed before boarding the police helicopter, and now he had to face an assassin who had already shot two combat-ready soldiers and four more elite commandos.
As he rounded the last corner toward the president’s private treatment room, he saw the door was still closing. He still had a chance, he realized, because the assassin couldn’t just shoot the president. He had to make the murder look like an accident. So he hit the door with his shoulder at nearly full speed and the door slammed open against the inside wall. He saw a man standing beside the president’s bed, doing something to her IV bag.
Carl pivoted and threw the only weapon he had available—the metal antidote case—at the man. It struck the intruder squarely in the back of his head and knocked him off-balance, but he didn’t fall. In that brief split second, Carl saw a tiny syringe sticking out of the clear IV bag. Blue liquid was spreading lazily into the clear IV fluid.
The man recovered quickly and reached to finish injecting the IV bag, but Carl vaulted over the president’s bed and mule kicked the man away. The assassin bounced against a cabinet, but immediately spun and charged just as Carl ripped the IV line from Shirley Mallory’s arm.
He had a fleeting glimpse of his attacker. The man was tall and slender, dressed in what Carl figured a Secret Service man typically wore—black suit, white shirt, black narrow tie. He had a white, coiled wire stretching from his collar to the earpiece in his left ear. The man had emotionless black eyes and hard facial features.
“Nice moves, old man.”
Carl was scared. He wanted to turn and run away, but he couldn’t. He had to stay between the assassin and the president. He had to delay the man and stay alive until the FBI or more Secret Service commandos arrived. If they arrived. A tremendous explosion rocked the building, but it was too distant to do any real damage.
Carl said, “That would be the cruise missile your boss sent to kill you and everyone else here.”
The assassin smiled and launched his assault, and Carl did the only thing he could. He charged right into the man’s attack. He dusted off a couple of self-defense moves he’d learned some thirty years past. The killer steeled the fingers of his right hand into a rigid blade and slammed that blade straight into Carl’s right eye, but Carl had launched a foot maneuver he’d picked up in a basic Savate class way back. When the agent charged, Carl thrust his hips forward and kicked the heel of his foot into the agent’s thigh. The impact locked the man’s knee and completely arrested his forward momentum. The blade of fingers that would have rammed right through Carl’s eye and into his brain merely scraped his eyebrow in a glancing blow.
Without recovering his balance, Carl leaped forward with an elbow strike that connected with the agent’s face. He aimed for the temple, a crippling blow, but the agent was too fast. He jerked his head slightly and Carl’s elbow bounced against the man’s cheek and did no damage at all.
In the same fluid motion, Carl did a drop-spin kick that swept the agent’s legs out from under him. The man hit the floor on his back, but before Carl regained his feet, he saw the killer launch himself back to his feet like Jackie Chan would. He charged again, and Carl launched a vicious sidekick that hit nothing but air. That was the end of the fight.
Somehow the agent slid under his leg kick, stepped in next to him, and hit him so hard, so many times, all Carl could do was scream in pain and cover his head and neck with his arms. He tried to drop to the floor, hoping somehow his assailant would end his assault. Before he could, the man rammed a knee against his butt, and Carl found himself slammed head-first against the IV post and the wall. He heard the vertebrae in his neck crack as his head and right shoulder took the full impact.
The agent stepped in behind Carl and got him in a chokehold. He pulled him backward and they fell to the floor with Carl belly-up on top of him. The man was incredibly strong, and Carl found himself with absolutely no leverage at all. He lay facing the ceiling with his head hanging off the man’s shoulder. He heard the man gasping in his right ear, putting every ounce of his strength into his grip. Carl knew he was a dead man. He had no leverage to force the man to let go and his own strength was fading fast.
Carl saw speckles of light around the fringes of his vision, and the darkness closed in quickly. He couldn’t breathe and felt a tremendous pressure against his neck. He flailed with his arms and legs. He punched and scratched, but could do no damage. Finally, he simply pulled in vain at the man’s arm until he didn’t even have the strength to do that. There were no guns, knives, or pieces of broken glass lying around he could use for a weapon. There was only the IV bag still connected to the post lying on the floor next to his shoulder. The assassin’s syringe was still protruding from the bag, but the man had only pushed the plunger halfway down before Carl stopped him.
He’d figured the assassin would give the president the antidote, but he also knew the cure would be tainted with something else to cause her death. Whatever else was in the syringe didn’t matter to Carl, because, in a flash of desperation, he recalled the warning from Orizaga and from the videos on the virus development. The doctors had tested the antidote as an inoculation on uninfected subjects, and the result was instant, violent death.
He grabbed at the syringe, yanked it from the IV bag, and rammed it into any part of the agent’s body he could reach. The man grunted as the needle punctured his leg, then Carl withdrew his hand and slammed his open palm against the plunger. He knew the heart needed thirty-odd seconds to pump blood and any other substance carried by the blood from the outlet side of the heart throughout the body and back to the inlet side of the heart. According to the virus doctors’ research, the mechanism employed by the antidote was a nerve agent, and it took effect in a fraction of the time needed by circulation.
Within two seconds, the man’s left leg began convulsing, then the rest of his body began seizing, and he instantly lost all control of his muscles. Carl rolled away gasping and sucking deep breaths. His whole body throbbed in pain, but he watched the assassin’s death. The man’s eyes bulged and his entire body froze.
“Yeah,” Carl said, as he used President Mallory’s bed to pull himself to his feet. “Not bad for an old man, huh?”
The assassin screamed like a banshee. At about the ten-second mark, his entire body convulsed wildly, and Carl heard the snap of bones in his body as his muscles contracted violently. He repeatedly banged different parts of his body into pulp against the floor. He screamed continuously until a gush of blood and vomit erupted from his mouth and sprayed the wall halfway up to the ceiling. Then he lay still. Fifteen seconds start to finish was all it took for the agent to die a horribly gruesome death.
Carl stood leaning against the president’s bed and suddenly his knees became wobbly. He trembled as an adrenaline rush swept through his body. He took a few deep breaths to collect his wits because his mission wasn’t complete yet. He retrieved the metal case and opened it. Miraculously, none of the remaining vials were broken, despite the impact the case had taken against the man’s head and the wall. He’d put all his strength behind his toss, too.
He injected Mallory in the upper arm, then closed the case. He felt dizzy again and leaned his palms on the bed for support. His entire body protested against every movement. He hardly registered the sudden entrance of Agent Palmer. He simply saw motion in his side vision, looked over, and saw her standing there with a wicked machine pistol in her hand. She surveyed the room and regarded the destroyed form of the assassin, who now more resembled a life-size hunk of play dough than a man.
“That’s August Spoke,” she said. “He’s Secret Service. Before that, he was a highly decorated Delta commando. One of the best.” She lowered her weapon and helped him into the hallway as FBI and Secret Service secured the wing. Medical staff went in to check on President Mallory, and a nurse carried the case of antidote into the next room, which Carl assumed was where Melissa Mallory was.
Carl grimaced as Palmer lowered him to the floor. He caught the agent’s gaze as she squatted in front of him. A slight smile curled up her lips, and he offered a discrete smile in return.
He said, “Next time, I’ll take the cruise
missile and you fight the Delta dude.”
Palmer stared at him wordlessly for a brief moment, then looked away. He knew she was thinking about that kiss. Carl found her shyness very attractive. He was just about to say so when an alarm echoed through the hallway.
Carl gasped. “Aw, c’mon, what now?”
Chapter 65
2125 hours MST Saturday
Las Cruces, NM
The speaker in the ceiling announced something about a Code Blue, and a couple more doctors and nurses raced from the president’s room to Melissa’s. Carl had only been seated against the wall for a couple minutes, but he struggled to his feet with Palmer’s help at the flurry of activity. He didn’t know what the code was, but he sensed something critical had happened. They stood waiting in the hall, looking at Melissa’s closed door, their shoulders almost touching. He savored the moment of peace and enjoyed her presence in his personal space. It seemed like it had been forever since he’d experienced either peace or closeness. He was just going to mention that to her when the door to Melissa’s room opened, and one of the doctors came out to update them. The doctor’s nametag on her white bio-suit said Stirling. She pulled a cloth facemask down from her nose and mouth until it rested below her chin.
“She’s had another severe seizure. I don’t pretend to understand the full pathology of this virus, but her body is shutting down. We tried administering the antidote you brought, but it doesn’t seem to be having any effect. Unfortunately, we don’t know the exact protocol for the antidote and since she is Patient Zero….”
The doctor paused, and Carl had the feeling she had worse news. By her expression, Carl sensed she just then decided to come right out with the bad news. “The prognosis is not good, I’m afraid. She needs a blood transfusion.”
American Terrorist Trilogy Page 66