The Widow's Strike

by Brad Taylor

  They had to come into play sooner or later.

  President Warren said, “Well, what do you have?”

  Chip laid out his case, presenting the doctored e-mails, forged reports, and other damning evidence, concluding that the laboratory had willfully risked great harm in order to make profits. All in all, the briefing took thirty minutes, with the president asking no questions.

  Chip ended with his own culpability and delivered his rehearsed lines about accepting responsibility. The president’s answer was not what he had expected.

  “I’m glad you’re willing to accept responsibility. Do you know how many people are going to die on the cruise ship?”

  “Uhh . . . no, sir.”

  “Well, it’s day three, and we have twenty-three cases. So far. With a seventy percent mortality rate, sixteen are going to die. That’s on top of the six who died in New York. You state you should have known, and I agree. If you’d had that knowledge, we would have known immediately what this was about the minute the doctor’s son from Cailleach Laboratories was kidnapped. We could have stopped this before it even began.”

  Where is this going? “Yes, and as I said, I regret that immensely, but I can’t possibly know every single thing that goes on in every firm in my portfolio.”

  President Warren said, “The Cailleach people reached out to Justice today. They claim you did know.”

  The conversation not going the way he thought, Chip became slightly belligerent, puffing up his anger at the slander. “Of course they’re saying that. They’re doing whatever they can to spare themselves. They know we’re friends and are hoping a political taint from dragging me into this will cause you to sweep it under the rug.”

  “Are you hoping for the same thing? That our friendship will cause me to sweep this under the rug?”

  “No! I told you I accept limited responsibility already.”

  “Chip, what would we have done if the carrier’s plan had worked? If the boat had reached American shores and released the passengers? It would have been the end of our way of life, all over a little greed. Don’t you agree?”

  “Yes. Of course I agree. I’m not sure why you’re asking. It’s horrible, and I’m glad we stopped it in time.”

  “‘In time.’ Funny choice of words.”

  President Warren leaned forward and pressed a button on a laptop. Chip heard his own voice and felt his world dissolve.

  “What the hell do you mean a lab tech died? You guys assured me you could get this done in accordance with all applicable regulations.”

  The tape droned on, Chip hearing the lab tech describing again the initial death at the makeshift biosafety facility in Singapore and his rejoinder to shut the entire project down.

  President Warren said, “That was recorded before we knew about Cailleach Laboratories. Before we learned of the doctor’s son.”

  Chip switched gears. “Yes, yes, now I remember. You heard me tell them to shut it down. That’s why I didn’t bring it up when I found out about Cailleach’s involvement. I ordered them to quit the project. They’re the ones who kept the virus. Against my orders. I was going—”

  The attorney general held up a hand, cutting him off. “Stop. These two men are special agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and you have the right to remain silent.”

  They both stood, flanking him, and Chip played the only card he had left. “Sir, you don’t want to do this. I know how the virus was stopped. I know about who did it.”

  He saw the attorney general get a curious look on his face and hoped it would be enough.

  It wasn’t.

  President Warren turned red, but it was Alexander Palmer who spoke first. “Remember what Kurt told you about Pike? About what would happen if you went after him? Well, so far he doesn’t know who caused that pain. But I do. Remember that, because if it were to leak, the only place you’d be safe is a federal prison.”

  Chip assimilated the words and began to tremble. He’d seen enough Taskforce activities to know Palmer was telling the truth. Losing his strength, he sank to his knees, placing his head in his hands on the floor of the most powerful man on earth.

  77

  Day four of the quarantine, and I was going a little stir-crazy. The room I was in was the size of a closet, and I hadn’t been allowed to leave for a single moment. I was visited twice a day by some CDC turd in a moon suit who’d take a vial of blood and leave me some food. None of which was cooked. I’d been living on peanuts, beef jerky, and bottled water, staring at the mirror every five minutes to see if I was going bloodshot.

  The anxiety was incredible, wondering if the next knock on the door would be the one where I transferred rooms to what they called the “hot zone.” They’d moved at least five people on my floor so far, some going kicking and screaming, knowing it meant they were infected. I hadn’t been moved, which led me to believe the vaccine had utterly failed because I hadn’t come up hot immediately on an antibodies test. Well, failed in the men. A small comfort now, although I was glad I didn’t know it when we hit the deck of the ship.

  It was made worse because I had no idea of the status of my team, especially Jennifer. All of us had been locked up, but she had been the closest to the carrier. The most likely to be sick. I couldn’t imagine what some mother or father was feeling right now, separated from their loved ones, not knowing if they were alive or dead. Especially since I knew for a fact at least four children wouldn’t be going home. Four sets of parents who would get the news.

  I heard a knock on my door, and my apprehension skyrocketed. It wasn’t blood-vial feeding time.

  I opened it to see another moon suit. “Yes?”

  “Jesus, this place stinks.”

  Huh? He can’t smell anything in that suit. I peered closer to the flow hood and saw Kurt inside, smiling.

  “You ready to leave?”

  “Hell yeah!”

  “Come on. You’re clear, and we want to get you guys off before anyone asks any questions. Put this on. You’ll go out as CDC personnel.”

  He handed me my own moon suit, and soon enough we were out of the confines of the ship and on the basketball court. I counted four other moon suits. Which meant someone was missing.

  “Who’s not here?”

  Kurt said, “Jennifer.”

  That one word was a hammer blow, almost bringing me to my knees. Kurt quickly put his hand on my arm.

  “She hasn’t come up hot. Not yet anyway, but they can’t trust the vaccine. They just want to make sure she’s not a carrier.”

  “How much longer?”

  “Another day. Maybe two.”

  I saw a Dolphin helicopter in the distance and knew I wouldn’t have much more time to talk before we were in its rotor wash.

  “What’s the fallout?”

  “There’s thirty confirmed on the boat. In the running around after the body bomb, somebody spread the virus, but they think it’s contained at this point. They’ll dock the boat today or tomorrow and let everyone off. Everyone except the ones infected.”

  “What about them? Any hope?”

  “Not really. They’re getting the best treatment available. Shit, better than what they’d get at a hospital. The top doctors in the country are on this boat, and they’ve turned the hot zone into a floating hospital. Even with all that, most will die.”

  “What about Iran? Did we nuke them or something?”

  Kurt laughed, the sound muffled by the flow-hood speaker. “No. They claimed it was a rogue Quds general and that they’ve inflicted the appropriate punishment.”

  “And we believe that shit? Really?”

  “They sent a video through a back channel. It was Malik getting hanged. Honestly, most of the administration’s national security team thinks they might be telling the truth. There was no way for them to protect their own country from th
e virus, and it just never made any sense for them to use it. Threaten use, maybe, as a last-ditch effort should we attack them, but come right out and use it?”

  “You believe that?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  The helicopter pulled overhead, and the basket began to lower. Knuckles walked up to me and said, “Here we go again. Riding like a bitch.”

  I didn’t smile, and he said, “Hey, don’t worry. It’s going to be okay. You’ll see her in a couple of days.”

  78

  Jennifer was awakened by a scream. A wail of suffering that permeated the confines of her stateroom like a gangrenous fog, reminding her of what her future held.

  Someone looked in a mirror.

  Someone had learned the awful truth about his or her fate. A fate that was particularly disturbing in its pernicious timeline. There was no executioner to flick a switch and be done, nor was it a six-year battle against some other, more forgiving invader. The former gave the benefit of being over instantaneously, while the latter afforded hope and the chance to prepare. This fate allowed neither. It would be a torturous demise spanning four days of agony.

  She wondered if she would scream when she found out.

  She had been placed in her original quarantine room for a mere six hours, then had been hustled to the aft section of the ship based on the results of her initial tests. To the hot zone. She held a thin hope that it was because of the vaccine she’d taken and that the doctors were simply not taking any chances, but she had mentally begun to prepare herself for the worst. After the initial twenty-four hours she had steeled herself and looked in the mirror for the first time. Her eyes had remained clear. No crisscrossing of blood signaling the sickness inside her.

  In truth, she knew she was unique because of the vaccine. The virus wouldn’t eat her whole as it would everyone else it contacted, but she would become a walking time bomb. A modern-day Typhoid Mary who wouldn’t—couldn’t—be allowed to set foot again in the outside world.

  Sitting alone with her thoughts, she had clinically considered taking her own life, should the mirror speak. She had heard others in the hot zone do it already. A muffled, panicky stampede of doctors in the narrow hallway and snatches of conversation bringing to light the decision.

  She knew she couldn’t spend eternity locked in hospital quarantine.

  She thought of Elina and how calm she had been. How she had sacrificed her life with a surreal devotion. In the end, Jennifer wasn’t sure she held the same iron strength. A part of her felt it was just punishment for the man she had killed.

  The death of Elina’s protector had haunted her almost as much as the wails of the sick. Him staggering toward her like something out of a zombie apocalypse, his body coated in the remains of Elina. Her begging him to stop, then squeezing the trigger. His head snapping back in a spray of gore. Him lying on the deck, his clean blood mingling with the ravaged blood of the person he had tried to save.

  Her greatest fear had been that Elina wasn’t infected and that she’d killed a man for no reason. She had drawn a small bit of comfort from the contagion sweeping the ship, a twisted blessing that had alleviated some of her pain, but she couldn’t get over the fact that he only might have died had she done nothing. Instead, she had ensured it.

  In the end, she knew she had made the right call but desperately wished she had shot him in the legs or stomach or anywhere that a doctor could have helped. A nonlethal location, so that if he was to die, it would have been because of the virus. Because of Elina and not her. A rational part of her understood that that was just selfish wishful thinking to alleviate the mental cost of the decision she had made. There was no way the CDC team could have treated him in the middle of a hot zone, and he would have died just as easily from the wounds she had created. A slow death much like the virus.

  The edges of her room gradually appeared in the thin reed of light penetrating her small porthole window, signaling the start of a new day. Signaling another visit.

  The doctors will be here soon.

  They came twice a day delivering awful food and bottled water, one set clinically dispassionate and the other almost fawning underneath the biohazard suits, desperately trying to salve the worry. She wondered which set would show up this morning. She glanced at her forearm; the needle tracks in it made her look like a heroin addict.

  Each time they came, they drew blood and gave her an update on her status, which to this point had been inconclusive. She hoped if she came up hot, it would be the clinical ones who told her. She couldn’t take the pity from the other team.

  She sat up and felt an ache in her head. A small bit of pressure right between her eyes. A symptom that could have just been her imagination. She felt the fear of her neighbor invade her. She felt like screaming.

  She stood and went to the small sink, leaning into the mirror, afraid of what she would find. Afraid of what the mirror would tell her.

  She couldn’t see in the darkened room and fumbled for the switch with a trembling hand. She flicked it up, blazing the room with light.

  And the mirror spoke.

  79

  Exactly three days after I was hoisted off of the ship ingloriously in a basket, I stood outside the port of Cape Canaveral with about five hundred other people waiting to see who would get off the boat. The difference was that everyone else had a name on a manifest. All I had was the word of the Taskforce that Jennifer had been cleared and would be exiting with the rest of the passengers.

  The entire affair had been horrific, with the boat devolving into some sewer existence reminiscent of the worst of Charles Dickens. The government had done what they could, but the ship just wasn’t designed to house so many people without the ability to service them. Every crew member who’d had the job of keeping it functioning had been quarantined.

  The government had done an admirable job on the medical front but had trouble finding enough people qualified to do the mundane work of keeping the boat functioning. I couldn’t blame them. How would you react if someone said, “We need you to help out on a cruise ship because of your special skills. By the way, it’s a floating death trap. You might die just by showing up. Did I mention you’d have to spend every waking moment in a moon suit?”

  Surprisingly, they’d found enough dumbasses to show up. And now we waited. For the first time, I felt a little bit of what my family had when I deployed. This time it was me waiting on the steps to see the loved one coming home. Only I had the added angst of not being really sure she’d step off.

  Kurt had said he “thought” she was cleared and that he was “sure” she’d be on the dock, but he’d also said the communication to the CDC was convoluted, something I’d seen on the news with my own eyes. Everyone was screaming about the lack of information, which, given what had occurred and what the administration was trying to keep hidden, was to be expected.

  I was a little pissed that they couldn’t find out about Jennifer, though. After all, she was the person who had stopped every damn one of them from getting sick. But I understood why. My team had been evacuated before the press started really going into a frenzy, looking for the government cover-up, so we no longer existed for them to find. Pushing too hard into Jennifer’s status might have caused questions.

  My eyes were drawn to a television set on a pole, much like you see at airport departure gates. A crowd was forming around it, and I followed, recognizing the presidential podium from the White House briefing room.

  President Peyton Warren arrived on-screen, and the crowd around me began making shushing noises. He looked particularly somber, which, given the circumstances, was probably not an act. He gave a prepared statement, blending fact with fiction, stating a terrorist strike with a biological weapon had been averted, but making no mention whatsoever of Iran’s being behind it. He left it as a “Chechen separatist” event, keeping us out of a full-sc
ale war.

  It was a skillful display, as he walked the line of what to give out based on what he knew would leak, starting with the deaths in New York City and ending with the numerous witnesses to Elina’s death on the boat. When he was done, he opened the floor to questions.

  The first, of course, had to do with who had stopped the attack. The press and the American public routinely slobbered at the mouth for stuff like this, spinning themselves into the ground trying to find the super-secret SEAL team, the Special Forces killer-commandos, or the Impossible Mission Force that operated beyond the usual classified units. Trying mightily to penetrate the facade to find a unit that didn’t exist in the real world. Except in this case, there actually was one. I leaned in to hear his answer.

  “A combination of indicators from our intelligence community led to the threat being exposed. Once we had actionable intelligence we initiated a direct-action operation utilizing Special Operations forces. Unfortunately, during the interdiction, the terrorist initiated her suicide device, precluding a perfect outcome.”

  A clamoring of voices emerged, all shouting essentially the same question: “What do you mean, Special Operations forces? What unit? Who was it?”

  I smirked at that. Like it made a bit of difference who actually executed the mission. All that mattered was the outcome. But the press would not be denied.

  President Warren said, “I’m not going to divulge which unit for both the protection of our capabilities and the safety of our forces.”

  A perfect answer.

  Another reporter chimed in: “Were there any casualties from the team?”

  Smart journalist. He was going to try to locate the unit by walking up the thread of a casualty list from the Department of Defense. Except he’d get nowhere with this one, because even if there had been a major casualty from the Taskforce—which there wasn’t—it would never enter into the Department of Defense database.