Midnight Fever

by Lisa Marie Rice

  She nodded then reached for his outstretched hand. At the last minute, she realized he was holding it palm up. Not to shake hands but to receive something. Kay handed over the flash drive. Mike’s long, pale fingers closed over it, then he raised somber eyes to hers. Two people had died for that flash drive, as he well knew.

  “Did you make a copy?” he asked.

  Kay shook her head. “I tried. But it was so strongly encrypted I simply couldn’t. I couldn’t even read the data. Priyanka said to get it to you if something happened to her and that you could decrypt it.”

  Mike nodded solemnly. “Yeah. I can decrypt it. And if I have problems, one of the people I work with used to work at the NSA.”

  Kay just then realized that the hard encryption was Priyanka’s way of shielding her. Priyanka didn’t want Kay to be in danger, only to act as a courier.

  The message had come two days after Priyanka’s death, like her friend rising from the dead. They’d set up a message board in Tor under an untraceable account they both had the password to. The messages were always in draft.

  Kay had logged on, simply to read some of Priyanka’s old posts. Priyanka had been on someone’s trail and her usual sense of humor had deserted her lately.

  Kay missed her so much and wanted to read some old posts, just to feel near to her friend. But what she found was a new post, sent the day after her funeral, with a video attachment.

  “Kay,” her friend said solemnly on her computer screen. “If you’re reading this, it means something happened to me. I’m sorry to ask this, but this is what you need to do.” Suddenly her friend’s face broke into an uneven smile, tears welling in her eyes. “Help me, Obi-Wan Kay-nobi. You’re my only hope.”

  They were both Star Wars nerds and hearing Priyanka say that, Kay had burst into tears.

  “There—there will be a lot of science data on the flash drive,” Kay said hesitantly. “If you have any trouble understanding the data, you can count on me to—”

  “I have a double PhD in biochemistry and computer science from Stanford,” Mike said.

  “Oh!” Kay’s eyes widened. “I’m sorry, I—”

  He waved her apology away. “No need to be sorry, you couldn’t know. And I’m sure if I didn’t have a strong bioscience background, I’d have needed help. I have a rough idea what’s in the data. I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think I am.”

  Meaning—people high up in the nation’s science and health establishment had gone over to the dark side of the force. It hurt Kay’s heart to even think of it.

  “Is there anything in the data that can be linked back to you?” he asked.

  Kay shook her head. “I don’t think so, but really, I have no idea. Certainly Priyanka wouldn’t want to endanger me. But…” she hesitated. She didn’t know Mike Hammer at all except through his articles. But Priyanka trusted him and so should she. “Some of the data probably came from my lab. Not much but some.”

  He nodded. “I’ll anonymize as much as I can, but I can’t promise that nothing will be traced back to you.”

  Kay took in a deep breath. “Understood.”

  “I think it would be a good idea for you to go underground, or away, for a while.”

  “A while?”

  She’d expected this. Feared it, too. Whistleblowing didn’t have a great tradition in terms of enhancing lifestyle. Most whistleblowers ended up fired, their reputations trashed, colleagues avoiding them. Some ended up dead, like Priyanka.

  She’d put in a preemptive request for a two-month leave. It hadn’t been accepted yet. If she disappeared before it came through, it would cost her at the very least her job. At first that thought had cut her like a knife, made her bleed. But now that anger had taken over, the pain was less piercing

  His lips thinned. “Yeah. I don’t know how long it would be. Whoever came after Priyanka and Bill Morrell will come after me, only I know how to defend myself and nobody knows my real identity. But you’re different, you have a high profile, you’re in the business, a lot of people know you were Priyanka’s friend. At a rough guess, I would say that if your name doesn’t pop up in the first ten days after publication, you could maybe consider yourself safe.”

  Kay nodded. “I asked for a two-month leave when I received Priyanka’s message.” Kay bit her lip and looked to the side for a moment. Mike said nothing. He knew that the message had come after Priyanka’s death and that the pain would still be raw. “My request hasn’t been accepted yet, but I think it will. Actually…” She hesitated.

  “Yeah?”

  “Actually, I was thinking of resigning.” There. This was the first time she’d said it out loud and just like that, it became real.

  Resigning from the CDC. Not an easy decision. For a scientist, a job at the CDC was top tier, a sign of scientific excellence, and you left the job only if you were planning on going into private industry for about ten times the salary. “For the moment, I can say I have health issues, ask for medical leave. And I have a place I can go to for ten days. It’s—” She stopped when Hammer held up a long, thin hand.

  “Don’t tell me. I can’t betray what I don’t know.”

  Kay shut up. He was absolutely right.

  She’d worked out a place to go. What she hadn’t worked out was how sad it made her feel to abandon her job, abandon Nick, to hole up and…wait. Depending on how Mike published and what happened after that, she’d know whether she’d have to leave the country.

  Felicity could get some fake documents for her. She’d done it before.

  Kay cleared her throat, which had suddenly tightened. “Like I said, I might quit. I can’t work in a place where I don’t trust my bosses.”

  “There aren’t many places anymore where you can do important work and can trust your bosses completely,” Mike said seriously.

  Kay nodded. It was true.

  They were both silent. Bad things were happening everywhere, it seemed, and bad people were rising to the top. Staying clean was becoming harder and harder. One of her college friends had quit working at a biotech company and had become a baker. Said getting up at 4 a.m. was better than making drugs that made people sicker.

  Okay. Kay had done what she was supposed to do. She had honored Priyanka’s request from beyond the grave. It was her last link with her best friend, who’d died to get that information to her. Kay had to swallow the lump in her throat.

  But, she’d done her duty. She’d handed off a problem to a very capable man who would know what to do with the flash drive and its contents. He’d know how to investigate it and publish the findings in a way that couldn’t be covered up.

  And Kay would be without a job, possibly without a career, and alone. She wasn’t dragging anyone into her problems.

  She’d always been a future-oriented person, always thinking ahead. Now a gray veil had been drawn across the world. There was no future she could see. All she could see were walls and darkness.

  She’d already decided to quit in her heart. The feeling was there, she just hadn’t recognized it yet because it was so painful to think about. No matter what, she was done. There was no way she could work where she wasn’t sure what they were working for. Were they trying to eradicate diseases or creating new ones?

  “Disappear,” Mike said, new lines appearing in his face. “For a while at least. You have somewhere you can disappear to, you said?”

  She nodded. An old family homestead that belonged to her maternal grandparents, and was still in their name twenty years after their deaths. Her grandfather had insisted on keeping the records murky, essentially untraceable. She remembered being amused at his paranoia when she was in college, certain that the world was rational and filled with rational and good people. She’d thought it a minor eccentricity of her grandfather’s to keep what was essentially a bolt hole no one knew about.

  It was entirely possible that the small country house in the woods near Denver was going to save her life. She’d rent a car with cash and drive there.
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br />   “Like I said, don’t tell me where it is,” Mike said. Their eyes met again in perfect understanding. “But I need a way to communicate with you. We continue with our old system?”

  “Yes.” He’d taken over Priyanka’s password to the message board.

  “If I’m being forced to send the message, if there’s danger to you, I will include the word ‘passage’ in the message. If you read ‘passage’ in the message…run. Immediately.”

  She bowed her head. “Understood.”

  This was stuff she read about in thrillers. Never in a million years could she have imagined her life would take this turn, that it would be dependent upon passwords and safe houses and keeping her head low.

  “Here.” He held out a stiff blue and gold passport. She took it, flipped through it. It was a passport for a woman, Flora Nunes, with her photograph. She couldn’t read the text. It was in Portuguese.

  “What’s this?”

  Mike sighed. “A Brazilian passport. Don’t worry, it’s genuine. I had one for Priyanka, before—before—”

  He stopped, swallowed.

  “Before Priyanka was killed,” Kay said softly.

  “Yes. If this breaks unexpectedly or if you feel you are in immediate danger, buy a round-trip ticket for the first flight you can to Rio with this…” He held out a VISA card in the name of Flora Nunes. “Throw away the return ticket. I’ll know if you have to run. By the time you’re in Rio, check our email and I’ll have arranged a safe house.”

  Kay held the passport and the credit card tightly. The card bit into the palm of her hand. She welcomed the little bite of pain, it helped ground her. Fleeing to Rio would make her an international criminal. She had good reasons, but if the truth never came to light, if all the good guys died, then she’d live the rest of her life in hiding.

  “It’s a lot to take in,” she said, meeting his sad eyes.

  “It is. And we’re asking a lot of you. But—you know what’s at stake.”

  She nodded. She did know. Perhaps the fate of the world. If a worldwide pandemic hit, it could take generations for mankind to come back from the brink, if it ever did.

  “In the meantime,” he waggled the flash drive, “it will take me some time to digest this material.”

  Kay gave a crooked smile. “Yeah. I think there’s well over a petabyte of information.”

  “When Priyanka contacted me, she gave me an indication of the data and how to sort through it.” His tired, serious face lost a little color. “If even half of what she suspected is true, it would be catastrophic. We’ll go through every word, every chart and table. I have people and I have software. But still. It’ll take a couple of days to decrypt it and go through it with my team, and it will take us a week to put together an article. Probably a series of articles. So, stay underground for at least ten days, more if you can. It’s good that you asked for leave. If you need to, say you’ve taken ill and need treatment. Keep an eye on my site and when the articles start coming out, you can reassess. Nothing should happen to you once everything is out. You’ll be the last person they’d be interested in. You should be safe.” He looked suddenly fierce. “I don’t want what happened to Priyanka to happen to you.”

  “No,” she said softly. “I don’t either.”

  “I will protect your identity no matter what. No one—” He broke off and looked around with a frown. “What’s that?”

  “What’s what?” But she heard it too. A soft buzzing, louder by the second. The louder it got, the more she realized it was coming from above their heads. Some kind of electricity glitch?

  She looked up, puzzled, when Mike suddenly shouted, “Drone!” and pushed her head down. She was initially stiff, not understanding. “Keep your head down,” Mike shouted. “Don’t let the drone photograph your face!”

  Oh God!

  Somehow the bad guys had followed Mike! Oh God! She couldn’t allow the drone to photograph her! As a government employee, her face was in the CDC database. Two people had been killed for the information she’d handed over to Mike. Kay pulled the wide-brimmed hat lower, glad she had sunglasses on. “Let’s get out of here.”

  He nodded, took her elbow, ready to run for it. He kept his head low, features in shadow from above.

  Maybe it would be okay.

  Holding on to the hat, Kay risked a glance up and saw with horror that the drone wasn’t hovering.

  It was diving. Straight at them.

  Mike put one hand on her head, pushing her face down, and the other on her shoulder, rushing them to an iron service door set in the wall. He ran them toward it, taking his hand off her head—she’d gotten the message loud and clear, staring straight at the ground—reaching out for the handle. The buzzing grew louder and Mike gave her a big shove against the wall, so hard she bounced.

  The drone dove down. Kay turned away, back to Mike. She heard a click and felt moisture in the air, a fine mist coming down. Swiveling her head away from the drone to peer up at the cloudless sky she saw nowhere the moisture could have come from.

  The drone lifted, hovered for just a second, and then flew away, straight along to the end of the alleyway, where it lifted farther up to the rooftop and disappeared. The buzzing sound was gone and there was total silence in the alley.

  “It’s gone, Mike,” she whispered, rubbing her shoulder. In his attempt to shield her, hurling her against the wall, he’d hurt her. “We’re safe. Where do we—”

  Mike collapsed. One second he was upright, the next he was sitting against the wall, legs at an unnatural angle. He’d been holding on to her arm and almost brought her down with him.

  “Mike?”

  Kay couldn’t make sense of what was happening. Mike had been standing next to her and now he was collapsed on the ground. She kneeled, tried to pull him up. But he couldn’t stand.

  He was wheezing, red-faced, one hand clutching his throat. His back arched like he’d received an electric shock and his heels started drumming on the pavement. It was some kind of seizure. Kay bent his head back, looking for obstructions, getting ready for CPR.

  Mike shook his head violently. “No!” he gasped.

  She sat back on her heels, desperate. What to do for him?

  He placed the flash drive in her hand, curling her fist around it.

  “Too late for me,” he wheezed. His chest expanded uselessly as he tried to draw in air.

  “Wait!” Kay’s shocked brain started into motion again. She scrabbled in her jacket pocket, where she remembered she’d put the cheap conference pen that had been handed out with the conference binders. She stripped the internal tube away, leaving the exterior. On a side zipper of her purse were her house keys, attached to a series of small, useful tools. Screwdriver, file and—yes!—a tiny but sharp knife. None of it was sterilized, but that was the least of her concerns right now. Right now, Mike needed to breathe.

  Mentally, she went through the steps as she pulled out the knife blade. Tilt Mike’s head back, trace with her finger down the Adam’s apple to a point an inch below it, make a short, deep horizontal incision in the trachea, put a finger inside the cut to open it, insert the pen and blow.

  She cradled the back of Mike’s neck with one hand, holding the knife above his throat. She was so busy preparing for the tracheotomy that she wasn’t looking at him, just at the point of his throat where the incision had to be made.

  He reached up, held her hand still with surprising strength.

  “No.” Every muscle in his body was straining. His voice had no air behind it. She had to lip read. “It’s the virus.”

  She froze. The virus?

  Priyanka had been sure that Bill had been working on a weaponized form of one of the deadliest viruses on earth, the Spanish flu virus. The virus that had killed fifty million people in 1918.

  This virus would be worse by a factor of a hundred.

  But her face was still wet with what had been sprayed in Mike’s face. She must be infected, too, though she felt nothing. How was
that? Mike was the only one suffering.

  Kay met Mike’s dull eyes. He wasn’t even struggling anymore. In his eyes, she saw the truth. He was dying. It was an animal recognition that predated civilization—the hard truth was that Mike couldn’t be saved, and he knew that. He beckoned with trembling fingers. She bent down to him.

  There was a knocking noise in his chest, terminal secretions collecting in his throat and upper chest. The death rattle.

  His eyes were fierce, locked with hers.

  “Run,” he gasped, pushing the air out. “Hide.”

  His entire body convulsed, legs shaking, hands trembling, horrible choking sounds coming from his mouth. And then silence. And then he died. The life force simply left his body and she was holding onto a husk, a shell of a very brave man.

  Kay couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. She looked around for help for a second before admitting to herself that nothing and no one could help Mike. All she could do was safeguard the information he and Priyanka had both given their lives for.

  Why wasn’t she dead, too? The whole point of a weaponized form of Spanish flu was that it would be quick-acting, immediately fatal. She should be on the ground as well, just like Mike, drowned by the fluid in her lungs. She wasn’t. She didn’t even feel short of breath. She didn’t feel anything, except terrified. If it were to act on her, she’d be dead already.

  Clearly, for some reason, she was immune.

  Her scientist’s mind tried to figure that out, reason out by what kind of mechanism she could be fine and Mike on the ground, dead. But she couldn’t think straight above the drumbeat in her head. Run run run!

  Kay stood on shaky legs, glad she’d changed into flat shoes. She would have fallen on heels.

  What to do?

  Her thoughts were slow, like molasses. Shock, she knew. She even knew the hormones that coursed through the body after shock. Adrenaline. Norepinephrine. Cortisol. Hormones that were supposed to provide heat and fuel to the muscles to flee. But flee where? She was quivering with the need to run and hide, but had no idea how. And no idea where.

  There was no one in the alley. All sounds were eliminated, an effect of shock. Going out onto the street would be the obvious thing to do, but there were enemies out there. There was a drone. She glanced up, then looked straight back down. The drone could be above her right now and she couldn’t see it. It could be photographing her right now. Whatever the drone had done to Mike, it could do it to her, and all of this—the courage of two brave people who’d lost their lives—would be for nothing.