Sleight of Hand (Outbreak Task Force)

by Julie Rowe

  Her stomach muscles tightened. What a huge, steaming pile of crap. “That’s all we need,” Joy said. “Until we know what happened here, drawing any kind of conclusion is irrelevant.”

  Gunner laughed, but it wasn’t a happy sound. “It’s all over social media that the next great plague has started and we’re all going to die.”

  “Don’t joke,” one of the cleanup guys said. “Someone might overhear you and report it as fact.”

  “The online mob mentality is going to hurt a lot of people if the information on this is mishandled,” she said.

  “The PR department is doing their best,” the cleanup guy replied. “It’s the dozen or more private citizens taking pictures and video of everything that’s the problem.”

  “Fucking cell phones,” Gunner muttered. He looked at her. “Ready?”

  Her limbs felt disconnected from her body, but there was only one answer she could give, even though it felt like a lie. “Yes.”

  “Let’s go.”

  The mob of people had only gotten bigger since she’d been outside. There was a lot of shouting, pushing, and throwing of crap at the cops.

  Why are people so stupid? Did they want to get sick?

  She and Gunner got into the van, and they managed to drive down the street without hitting anyone. A couple of students with open cans of beer in their hands pretended to step off the curb in front of their vehicle.

  Gunner stepped on the gas…swerved at the last moment, and swept past them.

  Her stomach, which had attempted to crawl up and out of her throat, bounced around, leaving her sweating and out of breath.

  Joy had known he was angry, but playing chicken with those two students showed her he was riding the edge of his volatile temper into a place where fear didn’t exist. If he could harness his anger, he could use it to sharpen his focus, think faster on his feet, and make better decisions. If he couldn’t, the results could be very, very bad.

  Chapter Five

  Sunday 4:00 p.m.

  Gunner squeezed the steering wheel tight to conceal the shakiness of his hands. He literally vibrated with the need to kill something. Or someone. Preferably one of the idiotic protestors or members of the press shouting at the top of their lungs outside the fraternity house.

  Who in their right mind protested outside the location of a possible mass poisoning or disease outbreak without a mask or any other protective equipment? If it was contagious, and it could be, running over them with the van would be a much kinder death.

  The thought didn’t scare him. How long he considered the thought did scare him.

  Was this what burnout felt like? A lack of energy and enthusiasm for everything, impatience with the stupidity of others, and a general desire for everyone to leave you the hell alone? Why did the idea of hurting some of the stupid ones seem, for a moment, so…rational?

  Shit, he should sign himself into a psychiatric facility before he did harm someone. He’d stopped seeing his psychologist a couple of weeks ago. Maybe he should go back. She was scared of him, though. He’d known that, seen it in her face, and the fear hadn’t lessened as the sessions went on.

  If he was going to talk to someone, it had to be a person who wasn’t afraid, who’d understand what he’d seen and done, and how he’d survived.

  “Gunner?” Joy made his name a question, and when she spoke his name with her husky voice, he wanted to park the van, drag her into his lap, and kiss the daylights out of her. Even in the orange outfits they both wore she was brain-meltingly sexy.

  That was a daydream that couldn’t happen, because she was his partner. She was intelligent, thoughtful, and worked hard.

  “Joy?” He tried for a normal tone but figured his attempt crashed and burned since he could see her study him out of the corner of his eye.

  “If you want to play road hockey, I’ll buy you some sticks and a couple of goalie nets.”

  He snorted. He hadn’t considered hockey. Fighting wasn’t just legal in the sport, it was encouraged. Huh. It sounded almost fun. “Find me a pick-up league and I might take you up on that offer.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, making those two words a promise.

  He couldn’t decide if he liked or disliked the responsibility that promise assigned to him. He’d been with the CDC for two years, but he still didn’t like the prospect of being personally responsible for the health and safety of coworkers. Oh, he could and did shoulder that obligation, but it wasn’t a comfortable thing. He’d lost too many people in the past for it ever to be comfortable.

  His cell phone went off. So did hers.

  He nodded at her to indicate she should answer. She did, putting the cell on speaker.

  “This is Joy Ashiro and Dr. Anderson,” she said.

  “River here,” a brisk male voice said over the phone. A veteran Special Forces soldier who was the unofficial head of security for the Outbreak Task Force, River never made nuisance calls. “We have a secondary location on your E. coli. Same time frame and symptoms.”

  Adrenaline shot a spear of ice through Gunner’s raging gut. “Are you sure it’s secondary?” he asked. “Not a second, separate event?”

  “We’re not sure of anything, but it’s at a residence hall at George Technical College. The chance that there’s no overlap isn’t big.”

  A secondary location meant one of two things. Either the pathogen was highly contagious, or the source of the pathogen was more widely spread than this one frat house. All it would take was one party crasher from another college to pick up or over-share a nasty bug to hundreds of young people.

  Bad news all around.

  “We’re out of sample containers,” Joy was saying. “Plus, we’ve got another case of samples for Henry with us.”

  “Are you on your way back here?” River asked.

  “Yes,” Gunner answered. His brain suddenly caught up with the real impact of River’s news. Were they the lead investigators on this case? Yes. “We’re going to need more boots on the ground to deal with the public and the press at this new location. The crowd wasn’t cooperative when we left the first one.”

  “It’s in the works. I’ve called in everyone who’s in Atlanta, but we’re going to have to ask Homeland Security for assistance as well.”

  “Do we have to?” Joy asked in a whine that made her sound like she was about five years old.

  “Sorry, sweetheart,” River said, his tone turning playful. “Come on home, drop off your samples, and grab fresh supplies. We need to know definitively if the two locations are dealing with the same pathogen and if they’re connected in any way, or if this is two separate events with different pathogens.”

  “Got it.” She ended the call.

  Just as well. Considering the pet name he’d called Joy, anything coming out of Gunner’s mouth directed at River wouldn’t have been nice.

  “Sweetheart?” he asked Joy. Only after the word was out did he realize how harsh he sounded. Jealous much? “I thought he was engaged to Dr. Ava Lloyd?”

  “He is engaged to her, but he caught me eating the better part of a bag of cookies all by myself a couple of weeks ago. Naturally, he thought I was in a funk and chatted with me until I was darn near rolling on the floor with laughter. Afterward, Dr. Lloyd told me he’s decided to adopt me as a little sister, so I should be prepared to be nagged if he catches me overindulging in cookies, ice cream, and/or chocolate in the future.”

  Gunner thought about what he would have concluded if he’d discovered Joy eating that much sweet stuff alone. “He thought you were depressed.”

  “Yup.”

  “Were you?”

  “Not really.” She gave him a direct stare. “It was that time of the month.”

  Of course it was. “Did you tell him that?”

  “Yup.”

  For a moment he felt sympathetic guilt pains for his fellow male. Nah, the guy deserved it for assuming. “Good.”

  She glanced at him, her eyes wide, then started to laugh.


  “He shouldn’t call you sweetheart at work, though,” Gunner said. “It’s not professional, and other people might make assumptions.”

  Her tone was a little smug when she said, “Like you just did.”

  “I didn’t,” he said. “I asked what was up with the pet name before making any assumptions.” It was a good thing he had asked, because if he’d kept quiet and made those assumptions, he might very well have punched River in the face the next time he saw him.

  Joy was his partner, and he didn’t give a fuck if he stepped on toes to keep her.

  Fuck professionalism. Maybe he should punch River anyway.

  Joy’s laugh had died, and he realized she was watching him closely. “When you were in Doctors Without Borders, what was the most exotic location you went to?”

  Huh. Never thought about where he went in terms of exotic. Finally, he came up with, “Kathmandu, Nepal. After an earthquake. I was there for three months.”

  “I mean, where did you go on vacation?”

  “I came home, spent some time with my folks, and my sister and her kids.”

  “You didn’t go to Hawaii or Mexico to sit on a beach and soak up the sun?”

  He let some of the memories of some of the places he’d gone out of the vault inside his head. Disaster and war zones with orphaned children, widowed spouses, and scores and scores of injured people. He’d gotten lots of sun in many of those places. It hadn’t felt relaxing. The heat sucked too much water out of the air, leaving leathery tongues in sunburnt faces. Dehydration killed just as easily as bullets or landmines.

  “I can live without a lot of sun.”

  “What about mountains or hiking in a forest?”

  She could name every environment on the planet, and he’d probably have some horrible memory to match it somewhere inside him.

  “Vacations aren’t about where I am,” he said, hoping to stop her rather depressing intention to find a location he might want to daydream about. “They’re about who I’m with.”

  “Oh.” She sat up straight. “That’s…” Her eyes were smiling again as if he’d provided the answer to a particularly difficult question. “Smart.” She laughed. “Sort of a home is where the heart is thing.”

  “Hold on, now,” he said with mock outrage. “Don’t go saying I’ve got a heart out loud. You’ll ruin my reputation, and people might actually try”—he leaned toward her and whispered loudly—“talking to me.”

  She closed the imaginary zipper over her lips and tossed away the equally imaginary key.

  He chuckled. An actual chuckle. How had she gotten him from wanting to beat the shit out of someone or something to laughing?

  “What’s so funny?” she asked, looking at him like he were an interesting zoo specimen.

  “I’m a lucky son of a bitch,” he said as they drove through the gate.

  “Oh? No plans to run me off?”

  “Joy, to be honest, you’re the only person I’ve worked with who doesn’t drive me nuts.”

  She blinked. “Well, I’m happy to do my part in keeping you sane.”

  If she was happy, why did she sound so damned disappointed? “You’re organized, efficient, and don’t argue over every little thing.”

  She turned away to gaze out the windshield. “Ah.”

  Okay, somehow he’d made things worse.

  “I know I can be a miserable son of a bitch to work with sometimes,” he said. “Tell me if I overstep.”

  Her gaze was incandescent when she glanced at him this time. “I wouldn’t change a thing about you.”

  That didn’t make sense. He’d been told to his face what a bastard he was by many people. Probably too many people.

  He parked the van and turned to look at her, but she was already getting out.

  Gunner got out himself then waited for Joy to grab the samples before walking with her into the building. She handed over the samples to a tech, then they both went to their gender-specific decontamination rooms.

  Had he been an asshole?

  She never complained, never acted like anything he said bothered her in the slightest. He found the concept of behaving in a way that made her uncomfortable untenable and unacceptable.

  He was out of decon before Joy, so he waited for her. While he waited, Dr. Rodrigues called and asked to see both of them.

  “More trouble?” Joy asked as they walked to their boss’s office.

  “Probably.” He waved away the topic. “I need to know something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Have I been an asshole?”

  She stopped walking.

  He stopped a couple of steps away and turned to face her.

  Her jaw had fallen open. “Why would you even ask that question?”

  “When we were talking in the van. You sounded…” Great, he probably sounded like he’d lost his marbles. “Upset.”

  She sighed. “Just some bad memories crowding my head.”

  “You’re sure? You’d tell me if I were behaving like an asshole?”

  She stuck one hand up in the air and put the other over an imaginary Bible. “I solemnly swear to tell you when you’re being an asshole. Every single time.”

  “Thank you,” he said to her. “I think.”

  “I’ll tell you, too,” said a female voice. Dr. Rodrigues stood in the open doorway of her office. “Come in. I’ve got new information.”

  They entered Rodrigues’s office and took seats in front of her desk.

  “You were told about the secondary location, correct?”

  “Just that there was one,” Gunner answered. “We came back for more sample collection supplies.”

  Rodrigues looked like she’d been carved out of stone when she said, “Field tests are showing E. coli at several other locations as well.”

  “How many other locations?” Joy asked as she sat a little straighter. He’d seen this body language from her before. She was preparing to go into battle.

  “Three.”

  “Is there a common source?” Gunner asked.

  “We don’t know, but we must find out.” Rodrigues’s face made it clear she’d already drawn a conclusion and was simply looking for enough evidence to make her case.

  “You believe this was deliberate?” Joy sounded shocked. “Couldn’t this be a naturally occurring outbreak?”

  “If the lab comes back with the same strain of E. coli from each location, we’ll know. However, the virulence of this infection points to nothing natural.”

  “Who would do that?” Now Joy sounded pissed off.

  Yeah, he liked her reaction way too much.

  Rodrigues looked at the two of them like they should know the answer already. “FAFO claims they did.”

  Joy sat back in her seat. “Did they? Or are they trying to keep their name in the news?”

  Rodrigues cleared her throat. “Cause panic, civil unrest, and take the information out of our hands and into theirs. That’s what they’re trying to do.”

  “The incidents in El Paso, Texas, and Small Blind, Utah,” Gunner said. “I know the FAFO was under investigation for being involved somehow in both incidents. Has it been confirmed?”

  “Not to the public.” Rodrigues smiled. “We’ve worked tirelessly to ensure there’s been no public panic over the FAFO.” She dropped the smile. “If everyone knew how close the FAFO came to starting a true outbreak….” She shook her head. “It’s been an unholy mess to unravel. Aside from a supplier on the dark net, the bastard responsible for the El Paso outbreak refuses to tell us how he got the bacteria he used as a weapon of mass destruction.”

  “So,” Gunner said. “He purchased his pathogen nearly ready to use?”

  Rodrigues nodded. “We’re afraid the dark net supplier is still in business, and still providing anyone with enough money the means to start designer disease outbreaks wherever, and whenever, they want.”

  Chapter Six

  Sunday 7:00 p.m.

  A cold sweat broke out all
over Joy’s skin, making her shiver and forget her irritation with Gunner. If her boss was right and all the E. coli cases in the city were related…maybe the FAFO was behind it?

  “Even if the beer is the source at every location, we still don’t know when or how the bacteria was introduced.” At least her voice sounded calm and controlled. “It could have happened at the brewery, during distribution, or even at the retail store.”

  “We took a lot of samples from the first location,” Gunner said. “There could be other sources for the bacteria we don’t yet know about.”

  “Henry and his team are working as fast as they can to determine that.” Rodrigues nodded at Joy. “And you’re right, the contamination could have occurred accidentally. All it would take is one person not washing their hands, then coming into contact with food or drink. We need more information before I can determine if it’s the beer alone, or if the source is tied to a specific supplier, or if one person managed to contaminate all the locations during a party crawl.”

  And wasn’t that a prickly problem. The line between arming the public with information and starting a panic was so fine it was nonexistent. They needed to work the problem. They needed a plan.

  “How can we help?” Joy asked.

  Rodrigues sighed and rubbed her face. “At this moment, I have six multi-person teams out investigating possible outbreaks within the United States. Which means I’m going to ask you two to take on more responsibility than I would normally saddle a two-person team with.”

  “I hadn’t realized there were that many teams already deployed,” Gunner said, a frown creasing his forehead. “That isn’t normal, is it?”

  “No, but ever since El Paso, we’ve been running with all hands on deck.” She gave them a grim smile. “I need both of you to inspect all the outbreak locations here in Atlanta. Interview everyone you can to find out where the food and beverages came from, who brought them, and when. Look for connections and common points of contact. We need to determine the source and secure it.”

  “Keep in contact with Henry. He’s the lead tech on this investigation. The police are holding each scene for us, though they’re doing their own investigation as well, so you’re likely to be seeing the same law enforcement at all the locations.”