Sam’s stomach dropped. “Who are you calling?”
“Sit down, Dr. Bower. I think we’re going to have a long night.”
46
Samantha sat in a chair across the room from Jason, who was now the one pacing. He stopped and planted himself in front of the chain-link fence leading into the lab. He folded his arms and didn’t speak. His entire manner had changed, his presence, the way Sam felt around him.
“Jason, what’s going on?”
“Probably better you speak to him.”
“Who?”
He glanced at her. “Hank.”
Within a short time, she heard a car roll to a stop in front of the building. The door upstairs opened, and she heard people, though she couldn’t tell how many. The door by the pantry opened as well, and now she clearly heard two sets of footsteps coming down to the lab.
A young man came down, followed by an older man in a suit. The older man smiled when he saw her, his hands in his pockets as he stood in front of her. He took one hand out and lifted her chin.
“So nice to meet you, Dr. Bower. I didn’t think I would be coming out here so quickly. We expected a couple of weeks of research at least.”
She brushed his hand away. “You’re Hank Kraski?”
“Ilari Kuzma. But I like Hank. So American, don’t you think?” He sat down across from her in a chair.
“Who are you?”
“I was born in St. Petersburg and emigrated to the United States when I was twenty-three.” He rubbed the side of his nose a moment. “It’s amazing, the questioning the intelligence services in the US had at the time. The Cold War was in full swing, and they were worried about KGB operatives infiltrating their ranks. That was the holy grail of intelligence, to infiltrate an enemy country’s intelligence service. When I was hired, after they already knew I was KGB, I remember the CIA’s polygrapher asking more questions about American culture than anything else. That’s what got everybody else caught. If they weren’t American enough, they’d be cut from the program. But I loved American culture. I was actually born in Miami. My favorite show was this one called Greatest American Hero. Did you ever see it?”
“No.”
“Fantastic show, that, and the Incredible Hulk and The A-Team. No one has ever topped the US for entertainment.”
She glanced at Jason, who was standing behind Hank like a bodyguard. The other young man, out of nowhere, shoved him and bellowed, “My arm is infected.”
Now Samantha recognized him. He was one of the men who’d attacked her in the garage, one of the men that Jason supposedly had stopped.
“Part of the game, brother,” Jason said. “I had to make it look real.”
“What game?” Sam said.
Hank grinned. “The game we put on for you, Dr. Bower. We figured you had the best chance of developing a vaccine, and we were not wrong. But force can only get you so far. That’s what every tyrant in history has misunderstood. They think with force, you can get a person to do anything you want them to. But that’s not true. You cannot force their mind to work. They’ll go through the motions, but the true breakthroughs won’t be there. For the mind to work properly, there has to be internal incentive. And your mind worked perfectly.” He looked at Jason. “He told me about camel pox. Isn’t that amazing? A vaccine, a natural vaccine, has been right in front of us the entire time, and no one except Tristan could figure it out. I’m sorry about her, Jason. I know she was special to you.”
“Not anymore,” Jason said.
Sam shook her head, going from one man to the other. “Why would you do this?”
Hank took in a deep breath. “Everyone was under the impression that the Soviet Union fell. Do you really think that a wall tumbling down ended one of the largest empires the world has ever seen? Do you know the one thing people can’t sacrifice? They can sacrifice almost anything—people they love, possessions, their own lives—but they can’t sacrifice power. Abraham Lincoln said anyone can overcome adversity, but if you truly want to test a man’s character, give him a little bit of power. He was right. The KGB was the most advanced and powerful intelligence service in the world. We did not care that a wall came tumbling down.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I began as a KGB operative, the only one ever to infiltrate as high as I did in American intelligence. We knew our moment would come one day. It’s a shatterpoint. That’s what nations are like. Diamonds have a specific spot, a shatterpoint, where if you apply even a little bit of pressure, it will crack the entire diamond. I knew America’s shatterpoint would come, and I was right.” He leaned back in the chair and crossed his legs. “The WHO tried to abolish smallpox. It was the first time in the history of the world that one species tried to eradicate another. Think how odd that is, how unnatural.”
Sam looked at Jason again. The other young man was standing to the side of him, tending to the wounds on his arm. His arm appeared swollen and leaking puss. The wounds were infected, badly from the looks of it.
“I don’t understand what you want,” she said.
His face briefly contorted in anger. “I wanted the United States to choke on its own arrogance. I wanted my empire back.” A smile parted his lips, the anger dissipating as quickly as it had come. “But there are always unintended consequences, aren’t there?” He paused. “The violent aspects were something we bred. Did you catch on?”
Sam hesitated and said, “Bovine spongiform encephalopathy. I recognized it under the microscope.”
He grinned. “Just simple mad cow disease. The beef industry actually named it. It sounds almost cute, doesn’t it? In humans, it causes violent insanity. It wasn’t difficult to cross with Variola.”
Sam swallowed. “Mad cow with a shorter incubation period.”
“Yes, though the bred virus didn’t trigger in a lot of people, like you and Jessica. I don’t know why. Just one of those mysteries of nature, I suppose.”
When he said the name Jessica, Sam’s stomach tightened. If he knew about her, he also knew where she was.
“The virus became too virulent,” Hank said. “We tried to destroy its entire species and, for lack of a better word, it fought harder. The mutations you’ve seen were not engineered, they were spontaneous. Somehow this damned thing knew it was fighting for its existence.” He leaned forward, interlacing his fingers. “And now it’s come home to roost. Come back to my home country and her allies. It’s… unstoppable. We needed a vaccine, and this, I thought, was the best way to get one. You’re quite a brilliant pathologist, Dr. Bower. If only you had worked for us… the things we could’ve achieved.”
Hank checked his watch.
“We should celebrate,” he said.
“Celebrate what?”
He smiled. “The drones will detonate soon.”
Samantha’s heart dropped. She must’ve had a physical reaction to the words, because Hank laughed.
“The drones weren’t filled with smallpox, not all of them. One was shot down that was, and that one, I thought, might be tested for the virus. But the rest aren’t,” he said. “They’re filled with anthrax, not transferable from one human to the next. I had no intention of a widespread release of Agent X on the world again without having a vaccine for my people. The anthrax will kill a few hundred people, but that’s it.” He held up his finger. “But now, we’re ready to release Agent X in a way no one could’ve imagined, forty tons of it. We’re going to reshape the world, Dr. Bower. If you join us, I’m happy to allow you to live in it.”
“The anthrax is a spore. If the drones detonate, you won’t kill hundreds, you’ll kill thousands, maybe tens of thousands.”
“And why should I care?”
“Stop the detonation… and I’ll work for you.”
“You’ll work for us?”
“I’m dead anyway, right?” Sam said. “I’ll work for you.”
Sam tried to keep her face as steady and calm as possible.
He nodded. “If you betray me, I’
ll kill you and everyone you’ve ever known. Play me right, and I’ll even allow your sister and her family to live. Maybe even that brother of yours who’s a beach bum.”
Sam swallowed. “You’ll stop the detonations?”
He took out a cell phone from his pocket and sent a text message. His phone beeped a moment later. “They’re stopped.”
Slowly, she rose. “Let me gather a few things.”
47
Sam walked back into the BS4 lab. Hank looked at Jason and said, “Go with her.”
Hank’s phone rang, and he answered, walking away so no one could hear. Samantha continued into the lab. She swallowed, forcing herself not to look at Jason. She got down a spacesuit and began putting it on.
“What’re you doing?” he said.
“I need to gather the samples. I might be able to synthesize a pure vaccine rather than infecting us with camel pox. I can purify it, turn it into a spray mist, get it to work quicker.”
He eyed her. “And you’re just doing this out of a sudden change of heart, huh? I don’t buy it. You’re going to try to betray Hank. I know. And I’ll be there to snap your neck when you do.”
“Like your wife’s?”
“She made her choice,” he said. “She abandoned us and scurried off to hide in the jungle like a rat.”
“She discovered a vaccine.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t her. She had microbiologists, too, some of the best in Eastern Europe. They probably did the work and then she had them killed. She didn’t want any connections to her former life.”
Sam pulled the suit over herself. In the BS4 labs at the CDC, all a person could wear underneath the blue suit was scrubs, socks and gloves. Underwear wasn’t permitted. She pulled the suit over her jeans. She had no intention of following procedure right now.
Snapping her helmet into place, she began a slow check over the suit, pretending to search for any tears. Suddenly, she heard Hank shouting into the phone. Jason’s head snapped in that direction. Something was wrong; Hank was ranting and cursing, saying something about a fire. Jason headed that way.
Sam quickly entered the lab. Bolted to the counters were a series of Meker burners, an advanced type of Bunsen burner that was soundless and reached temperatures of two thousand degrees. The burners typically ran on methane or liquefied petroleum gas. Some of the more antiquated ones used natural gas. She checked the cupboards underneath the counters and found large white cylinders marked as LPG, liquefied petroleum gas, a volatile mixture of propane, butane, and other flammable gases. She looked back at the three men. Hank was still on the phone shouting, while the other two stood around, waiting for orders like lemmings.
Sam grabbed the needle valve that adjusted the level of gas and opened it fully on all three burners. The gas had a smell that not entirely noticeable until higher levels were reached. When the gas was pouring out, filling the lab and the house, she walked over to the microscope and began slowly gathering supplies from the experiments she’d conducted.
The three men were discussing something, and then the young man ran out. Jason and Hank remained. Sam searched the lab for anything to ignite a flame and found a thin lighter in one of the cupboards near the burners. The Kevlar gloves made moving less than easy. She took them off and just wore latex gloves.
It took a good five minutes to gather everything, and then she exited the lab, bypassing the showers and leaving her spacesuit on. She got out to the room where Jason and Hank stood and took out the lighter. Neither of the men spoke for a moment, and then Hank chuckled.
“Well, would you look at that,” he said. “I thought I smelled gas. Interesting. I was going to kill you at some point soon. I knew there was no way you’d ever work for me. But I have to say, I didn’t think you’d betray me this quickly.”
“This ends now,” she said, her voice echoing in her ears inside the suit.
Hank shrugged. “So do it. We’re both here. No one’s stopping you. Kill us both.”
Sam lifted the lighter.
“But you die, too,” Hank said.
She looked at Jason. “Your daughter. Was that true?”
He shook his head. “No. I thought you’d be more sympathetic because you lost your mother.”
She looked down at the lighter. It was actually lovely, appearing to be made of smooth steel, without blemishes.
“You won’t kill us,” Hank said. “You can’t kill. You’re a doctor. You’ve devoted your entire life to healing people. So cut this nonsense out and get what you need so we can go.”
The movement was almost imperceptible, but Samantha saw it. His left hand had fallen and reached behind him.
She struck the lighter just as the knife came out, and Jason rushed forward, his hands wrapping around her wrist.
Hank came at her with the blade, but the lighter had already ignited. A loud hissing followed, and then Sam saw a flash.
The flash was beautiful, white and then red. Pain echoed in her body, but it was distant, happening to someone else. She felt heat and the sting of the suit melting to her body as the house burst into flames, the fires raging across the ceiling and floors, beams of wood collapsing around them.
She was still conscious, and she was on her back. The explosion had flung her into the wall and she’d broken ribs. The agony was nearly unbearable, so much pain that she wanted to lie there and not get up, to let the flames consume her, but something inside kept pushing, an image of her mother.
She saw her mother in her last days, confused and in anguish yet not willing to give up. Her mother had fought until her last breath. Life had been precious to her, even a life of pain. Sam turned toward the stairs and crawled. The suit, with its air pressure inflating like a bubble, had saved her life.
As she made each painful movement, fully aware that the burns covering her body would be deadly if not treated soon, she kept thinking of her mother, the sweet smile on her face even in the face of imminent death, and of Jessica growing up, getting married, and having children of her own, and Sam would pull herself up one more step. Her hands were burned so severely she couldn’t use them and had to use elbows and forearms to climb.
When she reached the top of the stairs, she saw the building eaten alive by the fire. She glanced back and saw two charred bodies. Hank’s face had been burned nearly completely off. Jason lay in a mangled heap, his legs and arms shattered and going in different directions.
Sam turned back to the door and crawled through.
48
Samantha lay in the hospital bed, staring at the ceiling. She had placed a call to the director of the CDC and informed him of the anthrax in the drones. Many of the drones were falling out of the sky. Ciprofloxacin, if taken soon after exposure, could prevent the onset of anthrax. The CDC was developing huge quantities of the drug and shipping what they already had out to those cities that were affected. The public was told to stay away from any drones or debris from drones that plummeted to the ground.
She had also informed him of the vaccine, and Ngo Chon was busy at work synthesizing a mist spray. The people already infected wouldn’t survive, not in huge numbers, but billions would be vaccinated and live. Humanity, ultimately, would go on.
The burns were primarily first degree, but on portions of her back and thighs, where the plastic from the suit had melted to her skin, she had suffered second- and third-degree burns. She was in an isolation unit now, the burn unit of Saint Joseph’s in Johannesburg, a transparent plastic sheet covering her bed. Every three hours, a nurse would come check on her, and immediately afterward they would sedate her, but she would live.
She had heard from the CDC that the Russian government had completely disavowed the work of Hank Kraski and proclaimed him a terrorist working without approval. Whether it was true or not, at this point, didn’t seem to matter. What mattered is that his connections, his money, and his men were gone. Once the disease ran its course and everyone was vaccinated, the world could begin to heal and rebuild.
Right now, she was in that dreamy state where she’d been given the sedative but wasn’t unconscious. In fact, over the past seventy-two hours or so she’d been there, she felt she already required more narcotics for the same effect.
The pain, initially, had been itching and discomfort. Now, even with morphine and Vicodin, it still felt like her skin was being pulled apart. Between the analgesics, the anti-inflammatory steroids, the antibiotics, and the cleanings and dressing changes, she felt as though she would never leave, as if her life was now as a trauma patient in the hospital and no other options were open to her.
A moment of panic overtook her, and it required a sedative to calm her. Now she lay there, waiting for the inevitable sleep that would have to come. Then something happened. A nurse walked in and said, “We have a phone call for you, Dr. Bower.”
The nurse held the phone close to the plastic that shielded Sam. “Hello?” Sam said, her eyes nearly shutting from the narcotics.
“Sam? It’s you! Are you okay?”
“Jessica…” she said with a weak smile.
“Don’t ever leave, okay? I don’t want… I don’t want you to leave again. Just hurry up and come back.”
“Jessica, I’ll be home soon. And I promise, I’m never going to leave you again.”
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Scourge - A Medical Thriller (The Plague Trilogy Book 3) Page 23