He removed the first aerosol can, looked over his shoulder as nonchalantly as he could fake, and, satisfied he was alone and unobserved, set the can on the floor near the doorway leading into the facility’s main hallway. He removed the plastic cover from the top of the can. There was a spray nozzle, just like on a can of spray paint, but al Wahdi knew it was just for show. Instead of pressing down on the nozzle, he twisted it.
A hissing sound rewarded his efforts. He adjusted the volume of the music to cover the noise, hoping he had set it loud enough to hide the hissing death that escaped the can, but not so loud as to draw unwanted attention.
Ten minutes. That’s how long it took for the can to expel its pressurized contents. Al Wahdi occupied the time by twisting, adjusting, and banging on various furnace components whose function he had no clue about. The infidel whore stopped by once during the span to check on him. He declined her offer of something to drink, and made sure he stayed busy during her visit. He didn’t trust himself not to chastise her for her egregious disrespect.
The time eventually passed. Al Wahdi policed his tools and the empty canister and walked unmolested out the front door of the Smiley Tot Day Care Center.
He got into the driver’s seat of the rented sedan. The keys were tucked into the visor flap. Jim Firth was nowhere to be found, which was precisely as planned.
Al Wahdi turned the ignition, and noticed as he did so that his hands were shaking with adrenaline. He felt a little giddy. He was no longer relegated to railing against a distant evil. He was doing something. Making a difference.
He smiled a small, satisfied smile, then turned to look at the green numbers on the car’s digital clock: just a little bit after one in the afternoon. There was plenty of time, and things were going very smoothly.
Al Wahdi’s mind returned to the hissing sound etched into his memory, and patted the medication in his front pocket again for reassurance. He was nervous about having ingested the contents of the can, but he had faith that the antidote would keep him from physical harm, would spare him until the day that, Allah willing, his earthly struggle would end in a triumphant martyr’s fire.
He put the car in gear. One down, and two to go.
47
A hard February sleet pounded Viktor Kohlhaas. He stood on the cargo ramp at Charles de Gaulle International Airport in Paris, watching as a winch pulled a palletized load of cardboard boxes up the angled ramp of a DC-10 cargo plane. The jet had no windows aft of the cockpit, and its markings were nondescript. Kohlhaas had hired both company and crew very carefully, and had sifted through reams of paper on all of the individuals who would be involved in the operation. The future of Synergique, and Kohlhaas’ legacy, rested on their shoulders, so he had Franklin Barnes prepare a painstakingly thorough background check on each of them before approving the operation.
Three thousand doses, each individually packed. Kohlhaas hoped it would be enough. He had busied his staff making more, of course, at as furious a pace as the stringent pharmaceutical standards would permit. He was certain the outbreak wouldn’t be contained by the first three thousand doses, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to demonstrate the efficacy of the “samples,” which had been serendipitously assembled and pre-shipped to the United States to be handed out to the attendees at a scientific conference convened to discuss, among other things, gram negative pandrug resistant bacteriological infections.
LeBeque was already on his way to DC to join Firth. It was a risk, because the production process was so new, but Kohlhaas judged it to be a necessary one. LeBeque was the world’s foremost authority on the efficacy of this particular biostatic treatment for one of the world’s deadliest known infections, and Kohlhaas wanted him at ground zero, ready to jump on any problems that might arise. It was imperative that the medication be perceived as miraculous, life-saving, and just-in-time.
The first orders would be large ones. Kohlhaas was sure of it.
It was a gigantic risk, the whole thing, Kohlhaas knew. But money still made things work, and Kohlhaas was confident the skids were sufficiently greased in Washington. Generous bribes notwithstanding, he was still uneasy. He was, after all, smuggling unapproved medications into the United States of America, one of the world’s most paranoid police states.
But he knew there was no choice. If he waited until after the outbreak started, it would be virtually impossible to navigate the bureaucratic red tape, both in France and in the States. They had to preposition the drugs. It was the only way to ensure that a useful little outbreak didn’t turn into an apocalypse.
The crew strapped down the pallet full of antibiotics, a worker drove the mobile cargo ramp away from the belly of the jet, and Kohlhaas retreated toward his limousine.
His eye caught Franklin Barnes, his chief of security, talking on a cell phone. It struck him as odd. What could Barnes possibly be doing that was more important than overseeing the loading of their precious cargo onto the airplane? It was just shy of ten p.m. Who was he talking to?
Kohlhaas’ hard, questioning gaze settled on Barnes. For a fleeting moment, he thought he detected an unmistakable but unreadable hardness in Barnes’ eyes. Then it was gone, replaced by a more subservient affect, a look more fitting an employee responding to his master’s unspoken query. Barnes moved the phone from his face and covered the mouthpiece. “Last-minute details on the other end,” he said.
Kohlhaas nodded. Plausible. But he still wondered what he had just seen.
He shook his head, dismissing his unease. I’ve been awake too long. Under too much stress. He climbed into the waiting limousine. “Home, please,” he instructed the driver. He had to get some sleep before he started suspecting himself of skullduggery.
48
Khalil Ahmed al Wahdi parked his rental car and checked into his hotel. He was booked at the American Inn and Suites, just off of Crystal Drive in Crystal City, Virginia, less than ten minutes away from the last day care center on his list.
The hotel was a proper shit hole. It looked like it was built half a century ago, which it was, and looked like it was kept around only as homage to how far American society in general and construction techniques in particular had come in the intervening years, which had been unkind to the American Inn. It looked like it was held together by the twenty coats of paint that had adorned it over its lifetime. The owners couldn’t very well let the patriotic red, white, and blue paint scheme turn faint in the capital city of the Greatest Nation on Earth, so they had bought paint instead of fixing the rafters, bought paint instead of fixing potholes in the parking lot, and bought paint instead of fixing the ridiculously out-of-kilter door jambs, which now admitted light, a dank DC draft, and small rodents into each room via the inordinately large gap at the bottom of the door.
Across the parking lot from the American Inn stood the Embassy Suites, a sleek, modern hotel, which charged two hundred and fifty dollars a night. Al Wahdi would have preferred the relative luxury, but it wasn’t in keeping with the modesty and piety he had come to revere. Plus, it was also much harder at a hotel like the Suites to pay cash with no questions asked.
Al Wahdi prostrated himself for prayers, taking his best guess at where Mecca of the Middle East might lie in relation to the infidel’s own mecca of Zionist aspirations. Allah, in His mercy, would undoubtedly forgive a few degrees of compass error on such an auspicious day as this one, al Wahdi mused. There had been only the most minor of glitches, a confused employee at the last day care center who needed guidance from her supervisor before admitting him to the furnace room, but otherwise the day had gone perfectly according to plan.
His mind had wandered from his prayers, he discovered. Feeling shamed annoyance at his inattention, a sentiment familiar to the devoutly prayerful of all creeds, he rededicated himself to the words that rolled automatically off of his lips, getting into the delivery as well as the message, prostrating himself with deeper earnestness to atone for his sinful lack of attention. He felt better afterwards.
>
When he rose, he felt suddenly unwell. His heart beat fast, and he felt faint. Sweat beaded alarmingly on his brow. Was he beginning to show symptoms? He walked slowly and unsteadily into the bathroom to draw a glass of water, noticing how much energy the effort seemed to consume.
He returned to the bedroom. He sat the water atop the nightstand and reached his left hand into the front pocket of his trousers.
For a brief, panicked moment, al Wahdi couldn’t find the pill. Fear slammed his psyche, palpitating his heart and making his stomach hurt with adrenaline. I am going to die. He was surprised at how much he didn’t want to die, how unprepared he was on this day, of all days, to meet his maker, how… scared he felt at the prospect.
It became an academic mental exercise a nanosecond later, however, when his fingers closed around the small plastic bag that enclosed his medication, the magical formulation that would rid him of the symptoms caused by the disease which he imagined even now was setting upon the little Satans he had spent the afternoon infecting.
Al Wahdi removed the pill from the plastic bag, popped it in his mouth, and slammed it down with a long drink of water. Then he flopped onto the bed, curling a pillow beneath an arm and angling his legs just so, eager for sleep to overtake him.
Instead, a searing, unbelievable pain overtook him. It started in his gut and radiated outward, growing fast, encompassing his chest and his thighs, then his throat, constricting his thoughts and his muscles. Merciful Allah I can’t breathe! It was as if every cell cried out in agony, starved of oxygen.
Panic overtook him. He thrashed, doubled over, then arched his back, feeling the muscles along his spine cramp but unable to release them, unable to control his body, unable to stop his heart from beating faster and faster, unable to stop the maniacal spasms of his diaphragm, unable despite all the focus and intensity of his entire being to draw a breath. His hands and arms were bright red in front of his face, flushed with the oxygen that his body’s cells no longer ingested, infatuated as they now were with the new molecule that had come into their lives.
Cyanide.
Prepared or not, eager or not, Khalil Ahmed al Wahdi shed his mortal coil, his body coming to rest in a tortured, twisted heap.
49
This is extremely stupid. It repeated like a mantra inside Kittredge’s head, a running commentary that applied to each of the tactical decisions Kittredge made in the midnight Cologne darkness, and also to the whole thing, the idea in general, sneaking back into his own apartment to pick up an item that, if discovered in his possession by even the most dim-witted cop on the beat, would land him instantly in hot water.
And it would get uglier from there. Because he lacked the savvy and the brass balls required to lie his way out of the gigantic mess he was in.
All of this to retrieve a gun I’ve never even shot. It had seemed like such a good idea at the time.
He shook his head. The stubble of a three-day beard scraped against the collars of the three shirts he wore in order to make himself look less like himself. He pulled the ridiculous Tyrolean hat lower over his eyes as he approached the apartment building’s only viable entrance at two in the morning, the extremely well-lit main entrance.
It was a minor miracle in the age of all things computerized that the building still had a metal key instead of a magnetic key card. There would be no computer log of his entry into the building or of his entry into the apartment itself. It was something he had considered as he tried to weigh the risks against the benefit.
The upside to all of this cloak-and-dagger, of course, was that he would subsequently be in possession of an illegal firearm, which he would then carry with him wherever he went next. Wherever that happened to be. He hadn’t worked that part out yet.
He caught a glimpse of himself in the glass of the door as he inserted the key and twisted. He looked utterly ridiculous, like a cross between a flasher and a cat burglar. Sunglasses at two in the morning weren’t fooling anyone, he was sure. But the glasses ensured that his eyes, and, more importantly, the precise distance between them, and the relationship between his irises and the bridge of his nose, and the distance and angle to the apex of his cheek bones, which together identified him just as precisely as a fingerprint would, didn’t become a quasi-permanent part of the video surveillance record of the building where Peter Kittredge, Fugitive from Justice, once called home. He looked stupid and obvious to the casual observer, but to the computers running the facial recognition algorithms, he was quite enigmatic.
He took the stairs to his floor. Nobody was industrious at this time of night, so taking the stairs was a good bet to avoid other people. Kittredge had no desire to run into anyone on the elevator he might recognize, or who might recognize him.
He slogged upward, quickly losing his breath. Was he really this out of shape? Since when? He had read that alcohol abuse caused accelerated respiratory system atrophy. Maybe that had something to do with it. Plus, he had sat on his ass for half a year. It wasn’t the kind of adaptive stimulus that came in handy for athletics, if climbing up a few flights of stairs could be considered an athletic endeavor.
A door slammed. Its echo reverberated up and down the stairwell. It came from several floors below him. He froze, heart pounding, chest heaving, wondering whether his out-of-shape gasping was as audible as it seemed to him.
Footsteps. He counted each of them, marked by a loud clack on the hard cement stairs and an accompanying reverberation throughout the under-decorated and overly-utilitarian stairwell.
When the number got to twelve, a full flight of stairs, Kittredge became officially scared. He had no idea who might be climbing the stairs, and it made no sense that they would be after him personally, because he’d been exceptionally careful about checking for anyone following him, but both his recent criminality and his recent victimhood made fear the predominant emotion in his psyche. He held his breath, heart still pounding and sweat dripping down his back, and considered breaking into a run.
Then he heard a door open and slam shut again, followed only by the door’s echoes whizzing past his position several flights up. The person had disappeared into the depths of the apartment building a few floors down, and after recomposing himself for a few moments, Kittredge climbed the last two flights — twenty-four steps in all — to his floor.
It was annoyingly well lit. There would be no sneaking around. He would have to walk up to the door as if he belonged there, in case anyone were to pop their head out of their apartment. If he looked like a cat burglar, and walked like a cat burglar, and was caught snooping around a murder scene, it would take no time at all for any reasonable citizen — particularly a German citizen — to phone the authorities.
Kittredge took a deep breath and let it out, then strode toward his door, wondering whether his intentional nonchalance was remotely convincing. He doubted it. If it was anything like his poker face, his walk probably screamed I’m doing something very wrong.
He readied his key several paces before he reached his door, then looked up to ensure he stopped at the right number. The crime scene tape had been removed, which Kittredge took as a good sign, but the cops hadn’t bothered to police up the sticky residue that the tape left on the glossy finish of the doorjamb or wall. It still very much looked like something bad had happened inside.
His hand shook as he inserted the key into the lock. It took three attempts before the lock cooperated. Kittredge cursed his lack of fortitude, and also his laziness. He’d been meaning to oil the lock for months, because it often stymied his attempts at reentry after a long night (or day) of absorbing local culture and liquids.
Clear your mind, he chided as he opened the door. He was blundering around, lost in his own little world, and while his eyes were looking at things, his mind was too busy with its own solipsistic narrative to truly process much.
Light from the hallway spilled into his apartment. The place smelled like vodka, coffee, stale laundry, and stale take-out Chinese, which was to s
ay it smelled like home. But there was something else, too. Something… metallic. And lemony. Blood and cleaning solution.
He shut the door tightly behind him and set the deadbolt, then the chain. He felt his shoulders un-hunch themselves, and he drew a long, cleansing breath. It was little more than a crash- and sex-pad, and it had been the scene of something grisly and horrible, but Kittredge still felt relieved to be back in familiar surroundings.
He found himself squinting against the darkness, and remembered he was still wearing his outrageously large sunglasses. He removed them and stuffed them inside his jacket pocket, meticulously fastening the button to keep them from falling out.
Get the gun and get the hell out of here. He padded to the kitchen, reluctant to turn on the entryway light for fear of betraying his occupancy, listening for anything that didn’t sound like an apartment building at rest in the middle of the night.
Click. Clack. Metal on metal.
Kittredge froze. It sure the hell didn’t sound like nothing.
A light turned on, seemingly of its own accord. Kittredge snapped his head toward the living room.
A man.
A gun.
Pointed at him. Through the disorienting fog of pants-pissing fear, Kittredge could see the gun’s hammer. Cocked and ready to fire.
“Guten Morgen, Herr Kittredge,” the man growled, a satisfied smile forming on his face.
50
Jackie Thieson liked to say that she had been an emergency room nurse since Hippocrates was an intern. She’d seen it all, twice. Her bedside manner left a little to be desired, she knew, but she also knew that she had the guts to hold her own in any number of life-or-death situations. And at DC General, there was no shortage of those. Gangs and drugs and desperation born of grinding poverty combined to turn the midnight shift in the heart of America’s capital city into a life-altering experience, weekly.
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 106