by Jack Mars
Drinan hung his head. A long moment passed. When Drinan finally spoke, his voice was small.
“Yes.”
Luke nodded. The whole picture came together for him with an almost audible CLANG. “Her access to the BSL-4 lab and the materials in the lab was quite a bit accelerated, wasn’t it? And that happened as a result of her relationship with you.”
The man nodded. He mumbled something under his breath.
“I’m sorry,” Luke said. “I didn’t hear you.”
Drinan nearly shouted. “Yes!”
Suddenly, the deputy director rose from her seat, turned, and stalked out of the room. She slammed the door behind her. The sound of her heels echoed down the hallway.
“Mmm, mmm, mmm,” Ed said. “Maybe there were two affairs going on.”
There was a moment of quiet.
“You’re in a lot of trouble,” Luke told Drinan. “What it boils down to is you traded access to a high-security lab for sexual favors. These are grounds for immediate dismissal, of course. You have a wedding ring on, so I’ll assume you’re also headed for a rough patch there. More important, you’ve committed half a dozen felonies that I can think of right off the top of my head. You’re looking at years in jail even if we get that vial back this afternoon. Last but not least, as a byproduct of your incredibly selfish and unprofessional behavior, you’ve put countless civilian populations, and possibly the entire world, at risk.”
Ed barely stirred from his slouch. “I hope she was worth all that.”
Drinan began to cry now, his head hanging almost to his knees.
“What am I going to do?” he said.
“Well,” Luke said, “for starters, you’re going to grant me access to that lab.”
*
Luke’s breath sounded loud in his ears.
He wore a blue jumpsuit inside the white containment suit. Inside of his suit, no part of his skin touched the air of the laboratory. An orange hose ran from his suit to the ceiling, pumping air into the suit. He knew the design. The air wasn’t so he could breathe. It was to create positive pressure, driving air into the lab and away from him. Theoretically, no virus molecules could enter the suit as long as the hose was pumping.
He was the only one in the lab. To the uninitiated, it looked like a pretty normal microbiology lab. Clean metal surfaces, spotless floor, glass cabinets, and stools for studying samples. But Luke knew it was much more than that.
He had studied the map of the lab before coming in here. Standing here was like being inside a submarine—a submarine parked deep inside a giant vault. The entire facility was surrounded by double HEPA filters, catching 99.99 percent of even the tiniest airborne particles before they entered the air of the vault. Airborne virus particles were far too big to make it through the filters.
Luke had passed through a buffer hallway, several locked doors, and finally an airlock to get in here. It was a complex, highly technical arrangement, with numerous built-in redundancies. There were video cameras and security protocols at every turn.
And none of it had worked. When push came to shove, a beautiful woman simply walked out of the facility with the virus in her hand.
“Luke?” Ed’s voice was everywhere at once.
“Yeah, man.”
“How’s it going in there?”
“It’s okay. I’m just getting acclimated.”
“You almost ready?”
“Yeah. Just give me another minute.”
Ed was up in the security room, watching through a camera. He was up there with the guard, Tom Eder, who had let Aabha walk out of here. Eder was already on record that he had a crush on Aabha, and enjoyed watching her through the security cameras.
She must be quite a creature, that Aabha. A creature of the night. According to Eder, she was often here until midnight or later.
“Okay, Tom,” Luke said. “What would I do?”
“Okay,” Eder’s voice said. “You would walk to that cabinet in front of you, enter your personal four-digit security code, and remove the material you want to work with.”
“Every person in the lab has their own code?” Luke said.
“Yes. It makes inventory easier. The system time stamps when a person went into the cabinet. If something turns up missing, we know who the last person inside the cabinet was.”
Luke nodded. All the more reason to know right away that Aabha had taken the virus. All the more reason to hang Wesley Drinan out to dry.
“For today, we’ve given you a twenty-four-hour dummy pass code. It’s 9999.”
Luke went to the cabinet, slowly punched in the code with his thick-gloved finger. The light on the keypad went from red to green, and Luke opened the door. There were dozens of vials in the cabinet, each sitting in a round slot. It was impossible for him to tell what was what. He took any vial, palmed it, then shut the cabinet.
“Okay, Luke,” Tom said, “now you would turn to your left and walk toward the biosafety cabinet there, as if you were going to study the contents of the vial. That’s when the lights will go off. Are you ready?”
“I’m ready.”
The lights went out. For a long moment, Luke stood in absolute darkness. There were no windows in this lab. When the lights went off, all light went out of the room. He couldn’t see anything.
“Don’t turn the lights on yet,” he said. “Give me another minute.”
He stared into the black. His eyes didn’t adjust to the low light. There was no light to adjust to. It did something funny to his balance, being in darkness so total. He took a deep breath and held it. The air pumping into his hose slowed to a stop. The fans in the room slowed to a stop. In a moment, there was no sound.
He pictured what it was like for the woman called Aabha. She has the Ebola vial in her hand. She is going to leave with it. She knows Tom has a crush on her. She knows she can manipulate him easily. Manipulation is her stock-in-trade.
Is she nervous? Is she excited? Is she such a cold-blooded pro that she doesn’t feel anything?
Where is she going when she leaves here? Why is she doing this?
Where is she now?
Luke didn’t consider himself psychic. He didn’t know if he even believed in psychics. But he did believe that human intuition, the subconscious, could solve problems the waking mind could not. There were links to the larger world, and to other people, deep inside the mind.
In his mind, he searched for Aabha. A beautiful woman in an expensive sports car. A woman with no past. A woman with no future.
He saw her driving in the night. She was very confident. She felt she could navigate this shadow world, this black world of lies. But she was wrong. Once she stole the Ebola, she became nothing more than a loose end. Her handlers had no reason to let her live, and every reason to kill her.
Luke reached for her in the darkness, but she wasn’t there. He nodded to himself. He couldn’t know it, and yet he knew it anyway.
Aabha was dead.
The lights came on suddenly. Not the low-level emergency lights and the EXIT signs like they had agreed upon—all the overhead lights. The brightness briefly staggered him. His hose came back on, once again delivering air to his containment suit.
“What’s going on?” he said. “I thought we were going to make this the way it was that night.”
Ed’s voice: “Luke, we need to cut this thing short. I just got a call from Trudy upstairs. She and Swann think they might have found Aabha.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
12:45 p.m.
United States Naval Observatory – Washington, DC
“You were very lucky,” the doctor said.
His name was Otto Jazayeri, and he had flown up from Jupiter Island, Florida, this morning to give his opinion on the new President’s facial burns. He was overweight, bald, with thick glasses. He reminded Susan of a sitting Buddha in a blue suit and tie. He wore a scope over his right eye, which made the eye seem enormous, like a cow’s eye. He flicked off the light on the apparatus and pl
aced the scope on the table.
They sat together in the upstairs reception room. Susan had banished the Secret Service from the room. She knew that three of them waited just outside the door. The Secret Service was hesitant to allow her out of their sight, but they relaxed the rules here at home. In the past forty-eight hours, all of the windows in the house had been reinforced with an extra layer of bulletproof glass.
Susan’s daughter Michaela sat on the floor nearby, leafing through a US Weekly magazine. Michaela was one of the eleven-year-old twins, growing up without a mom. Lauren lounged on the sofa on the other side of the room, her ears covered by fancy headphones, her mind absorbed by whatever was happening on her iPhone. They were beautiful, beautiful girls. Long brown hair, blue eyes—in another few years they could probably begin their careers as models. Of course, Pierre wouldn’t hear of it.
He stood by the floor-to-ceiling window, gazing out at the grounds, his arms folded behind him. This was Pierre being pensive, quiet, possibly depressed. In Susan’s experience, he was one of the most exuberant and expressive people on Earth. He had a mind that never stopped.
“What’s the story?” Susan said.
She spoke normally, in a controlled manner. Inside, she felt like she was cracking apart. Her face had been burned! It seemed so stupid, so vain, in a time when hundreds of people had been murdered, people she had known and respected, people she had hated, the best and the worst all torched together… and Susan sat here with her stomach in knots, worried about her face.
She blinked and for a split second, she could see the flames erupting through the doorway to the Mount Weather media room, a fireball coming down the hall. She could feel the big Secret Service man tackling her again, her head hitting the floor. She could almost remember dreaming in darkness as hundreds of people were incinerated thirty yards away.
She could get her face fixed, she supposed. But who was going to fix her mind?
The doctor pursed his lips. He had a vague accent that Susan couldn’t place. He had probably been in the United States a long time.
“The first doctors who saw you did a decent job, and diagnosed you more or less correctly. You have second-degree burns across the right side of your face, your neck, and on your right hand. Most of the burn surface is superficial and will heal on its own. I’m going to prescribe you a certain antibiotic ointment, which will protect you against infection. You should apply this several times a day. In two weeks, you will notice marked improvement and fading of the red discoloration.”
Susan released her breath. “I can’t tell you what a relief that is.”
The man raised a hand. “I’m not finished. I was referring to most of the burn surface. But a small portion of your burns are what we call partial deep burns. In those instances, almost the entire skin-producing architecture has been damaged. With this type of burn, the healing process is slower and may extend beyond fourteen days. If the healing process stops, we will be looking at the potential for permanent scarring. In such a case, it’s best to excise the burn and cover the area with a skin graft. You have a beautiful face, as you know, and very well preserved skin for a woman your age. In my opinion, it will be worth undergoing surgery to save your appearance.”
“You’re saying you want to operate?” Pierre said from the window.
“I’m saying I want to wait ten days or two weeks, see how the healing is progressing, and if I’m not satisfied, then I will want to operate.”
“Is there a recovery period?” Susan said.
The doctor nodded. His head movement was barely perceptible. “There is a tolerable recovery period, during which your face will be bandaged, and will not be exposed to light or air.”
“I’m in the public eye a lot.”
“I know. I was thinking that it would add an element of interest. People will watch to see how your healing is progressing.”
Pierre turned around. Suddenly he was the billionaire businessman. It was a side of himself that he rarely showed anymore.
“Otto, are you out of your mind? That’s about the dumbest thing I’ve heard in all my days. This isn’t a reality TV show. Susan is the President of the United States.” He lowered his voice so the girls wouldn’t hear him. “She was nearly killed less than a week ago. We don’t need any more elements of interest around here.”
The doctor was unmoved. He addressed Susan. “My flight is at four p.m., so I should be going. I will leave you to discuss this with your husband. I can return in another week. We’ll move forward however you prefer.”
When the doctor left, Pierre moved close to her. She studied his pale blue eyes and the lines that had formed on his face.
“You don’t seem yourself,” he said.
She shrugged. “How would you seem, if you were me?”
He smiled. “I’d be in a straitjacket by now, curled up in a ball in the corner of a rubber room.”
She laughed, and for a moment, things were good.
He gestured with his head toward the bathroom. She followed him in there to get a moment away from the girls. The bathroom was large, modern, sterile, out of place within the 1850s style of the house itself. It was a bathroom for visitors.
“Are you okay?” Pierre said.
Susan didn’t even have to think about it. She glanced around the room for a second, wondering how many microphones there were in here. Oh well. She had to speak sometime. She had to tell someone what was real. Pierre was one of the few people on Earth she completely trusted.
“No. I’m not okay. I’m barely holding myself together.”
Suddenly, the tears were about to come. She held them back for the moment, but they were like flood waters, rising and rising. Pierre stepped close and took her in his arms. She melted into him, and it felt so good, almost like it once did.
“They want to kill me, Petey. I can’t stand it. I’m so afraid.”
“I know,” he said. He held her. Her body started to shake.
“Luke Stone… the day after the attacks… he went to the house where his wife and son were held. He murdered four men like it was nothing. Two of the men were identified today. They were both former CIA agents. These are the type of men who tried to kill me? Why? How can I stop them?”
Pierre just held her.
She couldn’t breathe. “My face is all burned. God, my face! They’re going to kill me. I know it. I can never be safe again. Oh my God.”
The tears came now. In a moment, they were more than tears. Her body was wracked by sobs. Her legs felt weak. She clung to him, wishing he could protect her, knowing that he couldn’t. His money, his prestige, it wasn’t enough.
She pushed herself against him. Her mouth opened wide in a silent scream. His neck was wet with her tears.
“Please,” she said. “Please make them stop.”
He held her while she cried. After a while, he began to rock her like a baby. “It’s okay,” he whispered to her. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”
After a long while, she began to feel better. She leaned her head against his chest and took a deep breath.
“I want to tell you something,” he said. “I’m going back to California. I’m taking the girls, and I want you to come with me. We can leave as soon as tomorrow. We can leave tonight, if we really want. We’ll hole up at the Malibu house with a hundred armed guards. Eventually, the killers will forget all about you.”
“How can I go to California?” she said. “I’m the President of the United States.”
He pulled away just slightly and looked directly into her eyes. The boy she had married was gone. The laughing, carefree man-child who created vast fortunes with his mind—where did he go? Also gone.
It was bad. Pierre wasn’t built for this life. He had been pampered since his earliest days. He had never grown up. His parents—a brain surgeon and a daughter of the French nobility—had given him whatever exotic toys he wanted. He had never stopped playing with toys. He was badly out of his element.
Susan coul
d see it in those beautiful pale blue eyes. Pierre was afraid, maybe more afraid than she was.
“Quit,” he said simply. “You don’t owe these people anything. You’ve said it to me yourself. You never wanted to be President. Why get killed for something you didn’t even want? Just walk away from the whole thing. I’m sure they can find someone else who would love to be in your shoes right now. Let that person die for nothing.”
It was tempting, the things he was saying. But it was also wrong, so far wrong that she almost couldn’t imagine where it was coming from. She looked away for a second, then back into his eyes. Her paranoid self, the one who had survived the Mount Weather disaster, the one who had been strafed by machine gun fire while riding in an armored car, could almost believe that Pierre had somehow been replaced by an imposter.
But no. It was him. He wanted out from this, and he wanted her out with him.
“I can’t do that,” she said. “I do owe them. The American people voted for me, they hired me for this job.”
“They hired you to be Vice President.”
She nodded. “Right. And to replace the President if he died. So I’m it. The country is in crisis, one of the worst in American history, and I owe them my leadership. I owe them the best I can do, such as it is.”
As she spoke, she felt a certain strength and confidence coming back. She was tough, tougher than Pierre would ever be. She knew that about herself. She had grown up fast as a teenager in the shark-infested waters of elite fashion modeling. She had fought and won the bruising political battles necessary to become a U.S. Senator from California, and then Vice President. Somehow, she would fight her way through this.
“I’m sorry to hear you say that,” Pierre said.
Susan smiled then, just a touch. “I’m not.”
A knock came at the bathroom door, startling them both.
“Yes?” she said. She glanced in the mirror. Her makeup had smeared. Her mascara had run down from the corners of her eyes. She looked a little like a circus clown.