Protect Kyra! She had to protect Kyra.
But how?
She risked a glance over her shoulder and counted four darkly clad figures darting through the mist in pursuit.
She put her head down, summoning more speed.
She must not lead them to Kyra.
Get to one of the few houses with a light on and scream for help?
She peered through the gloom. All the dwellings here were dark.
“Help! I’m being attacked! Call 911!” she yelled, praying that there’d be some other jogger hidden in the fog. Wey Chen’s people might back off at the threat of a call to the police. “Help me!” she repeated, throwing off her hood to better hear any answering cry.
None.
Just the clatter of Cantonese.
“Back off!” she screamed. “I’m heading for the FBI!”
She meant it. Better them than the gang behind her. Plus now she really had something to bargain with. Wey Chen. A walking, talking, smoking gun to confirm a China connection.
Her breathing steadied as her plans firmed. In top shape, her legs and wind were better than most. Plus she knew this terrain. Get far enough ahead, she could lose them in this mist. Then sprint to her own house, and, with the FBI, turn the tables--make Wey Chen the hunted.
Having a clear objective energized her, and she hit full stride. Her arms and legs began to burn, but she drew on a lifetime of physical discipline to ignore the pain.
Looking down, she noticed with satisfaction that her running shoes left telltale tracks in the wet sand. The better to follow me with, she thought. Right past and away from Kyra.
She again stole a glance behind her.
No one. She’d pulled beyond where they could see her.
A tiny burst of exhilaration upped her speed a few notches more. This just might work, she thought.
Unless the FBI refuses to believe you, countered her troubleshooting voice.
She ignored it, and strained to hear any sounds of pursuit above the noise of her own breathing.
Surf thudded ashore, its hiss drowning out everything else.
She again checked over her shoulder, unable to shake the fear that they’d pound out of the fog on her heels.
The glance cost her energy.
Slowed her down.
Yet she couldn’t help looking.
How did they know I was here?
Her stride lengthened, and the flush as muscles released to their maximum stretch swept through her like a flash flood. Her body seemed to go on automatic pilot, leaving her mind free to pummel itself for answers. But whether they’d found her through some sort of hidden GPS chip, the Internet, Yuri’s phone call, an e-mail reply to Ryder, or some other sophisticated level of eavesdropping, Wey Chen’s people tracked me down when the FBI couldn’t. Yuri had been wrong. He can’t fix this. Their hunters possess a reach that neither he nor I can escape.
She shut down her thoughts, refusing to spook herself.
The burn in her arms and legs trebled.
Ignore, she commanded her body, and refocused her strength to steady breath and stride.
Surf nipped at her shoes.
Another glance over her shoulder confirmed that she still couldn’t see her trackers.
So far, so good, she told herself. Just maintain this lead. Don’t give up hope. Despite their power, she would outsmart them. You won’t take my daughter.
The pain became excruciating.
She couldn’t see the beach houses now, the shoreline angling ever farther from cottage row and the stretch of dunes growing wider. Without the buildings as landmarks, it became impossible to estimate how far she’d come.
Cut in too soon, she might lead them right to Kyra. Wait too long, and she’d wind up trapped against the harbor channel, a deep strait bounded by massive stone walls that allowed the local yacht club passage to the ocean. Once there, even in the fog, they’d have her.
She strained to catch sight of something familiar, never slacking off her pace, and spotted a stretch of sand where the ocean hadn’t quite erased the tracks she’d left going the other way.
At first she felt relief, knowing that she hadn’t come too far and could safely pour on the speed.
Then the realization struck.
Farther up, those same tracks would show where she’d emerged from the dunes. That would give them a bead on the house with Kyra.
Panic detonated anew in her chest, and her heart, already pounding from exertion, accelerated into a pumping frenzy. Immediately she began to run on top of the footprints that pointed the other way. Please, follow the set leading north. Pay the others no heed.
Her other voice, the trouble shooter, rammed home the alternative. If they find Kyra, they’ll use her as bait, then . . . Anna’s stomach clenched, surging its contents to the back of her throat. She spit out a mouthful of vomit, but half-digested particles still burned in her pharynx. Managing not to choke, she gasped for extra breath and never broke stride.
New plan.
Angling more toward the ocean’s edge, she left a stretch of fresh footprints in the wet sand. She also kept an eye on her former tracks. Entire sixty-foot lengths had been obliterated by the waves. She abruptly cut inland again, crossing a faded section of her old trail, and, driving hard off the toes of her shoes, sprinted through the dunes toward cottage row, leaving obvious marks on the softer terrain.
Let them think I came to roost here.
She found the mouth of a path midst the dune grass and raced the rest of the way to the dwellings. Slipping between a pair of deserted houses, she ended up on the asphalt road that ran the length of the spit. A quick glance behind her confirmed that she still remained far enough ahead of her pursuers to be out of sight. Cutting right, she made for the hideout and Kyra, running so lightly that her rubber soles caused barely a squeak on the pavement.
Minutes later, she pulled up at the house. Again she turned and stared back through the gloom.
No movement.
No scuffing of shoes on asphalt.
No shouts in Cantonese.
Nothing at all.
Until an ever so faint tinkle of breaking glass drifted through the mist.
Her ruse had worked. They were occupied elsewhere, for now.
She let herself in the front door. “Kyra! Grab your coat, Somebody’s recognized me!”
Kyra looked up from where she was sitting on the floor watching a rerun of Star Trek. “Who--”
“Move! We have to get out of here.” Anna rushed over to where they’d stashed the cash that she’d withdrawn from her bank before leaving New York. “Here, take half, and keep it in a deep pocket.” She handed Kyra a wad of bills and stuffed the rest inside the pouch of her jogging outfit. “If we’re separated, catch a bus back to New York and stay with one of your friends.”
Having grasped that Mom wasn’t kidding, Kyra jumped to her feet, the money clasped in two fists, and ran to get her coat.
Anna scurried through the rooms, turned off all the lights, and locked the front door behind them. Making this place look as deserted as the other homes might fool Wey Chen’s little band into giving it a pass. After all, they couldn’t break into every house on the spit. And Anna was having serious second thoughts about running to the FBI. They very well might not listen and simply arrest her. Better to get away from here for now, in case her followers found her original tracks, hide where those followers would never look, then sneak back in here, with Kyra, once Wey Chen had given up the search. Then Anna could lie low between the two camps, figure out a strategy that would convince the FBI to heed what she told them, and not blow her chance to nab the team of Chinese assassins. Because without parading that bunch before Terry Ryder, her credibility would remain at zero.
She added the key to her pouch.
Seconds later they were out on the road.
Clowns to the left of me,
Jokers to the right,
And here I am,
Stuck in the middle with you.
> The golden oldie popped into her head out of nowhere. For a glorious second it reduced their foes to fools, and gave her courage a much needed boost.
“This way,” she whispered, and started to run toward their own place, intending to cut around front and hide in the dunes, out of the FBI’s sight, but close enough that a shout would bring them running. Wey Chen wouldn’t dare follow.
Behind her, in the distance, a car motor roared to life.
She whirled. Though the vehicle proper couldn’t be seen, its headlights cut through the mist as the driver rocketed toward them.
They’d never make it to the Feds now. Back to the beach?
Her original pursuers might be waiting there.
She stood frozen, and looked toward the row of houses on the opposite side of the road behind which lay the tidal flats.
Assassins to the left of you,
Feds to the right,
And here you are, stuck in the middle with a child, mocked the voice that refused to give her a break.
Kyra, sensing her mother’s fear, started to whimper.
“It’s okay, love,” Anna said, grabbing her hand.
They ran across the road, passed between a pair of Cape Cod cottages, then scurried down a sloping back lawn. A few strides more carried them to where a tangle of tall reeds rimmed a pan of black muck so wide that it disappeared into the fog.
Hide Kyra in the bulrushes? She wasn’t exactly a baby Moses.
Anna led the way, and they waded into the thick of the growth, leaving an all too obvious trail of broken stalks. Knee-deep mud sucked at their legs, and she stumbled forward, her hands flying out to grab for support. Plopping face first in the icy slime, she came up clutching a handful of straw. Fitting, she thought, and, dripping with mud, struggled to her feet.
Kyra giggled despite the fear in her eyes. “Mom, you’re a tar baby.” she whispered, and immediately scooped up a handful of the liquid goo, smearing it across her own forehead and cheeks like facial cream. “It’s great camouflage.”
They ducked down as the car, traveling more cautiously now, drew closer, its progress marked by a luminous glow in the fog and the hushed throb of a finely tuned engine.
Chapter 24
That same hour, Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Holographic Analysis Area 395, Level Four Biohazard Laboratory, San Antonio Texas
Terry Ryder stood in the dimly-lit chamber and stared upward at the object of his search.
The rogue protein towered over him. In height, length, and intricacy, it resembled what might have been the mainframe for a Mars mission. Three-dimensional projections of a molecule had definitely come a long way in the seven years since he’d first encountered it at Seneca Pharmaceuticals.
But it was the complexity of the structure itself that awed him. Where long arms twisted around each other like coiled tentacles, single tendrils reached out into the darkness like feelers, and other segments gathered into huge, irregular-shaped blobs as amorphous as oil rising in a lava lamp.
All that geometry gave him the willies. Each shape afforded this intruder a way to entwine itself into structures of the human brain and would make it all he harder to root out.
His team of scientists had worked ninety-six hours non-stop. They’d fiddled with protein washes, electrophoretic gels, tissue slices, electron micrographs, and computers, tweaking them all to go where no protocols or programs had taken them before, just to get this far. Act by act, head down, blind to the impossible odds--definitely his kind of people.
After Terry’s night in the football stadium, the lab work had become personal. Every bit of damaged brain tissue, rogue protein, and ravaged neuron became a taunt. It had been as if they all belonged to Samantha and the hundreds of others whose names he learned while bringing them a few hours of relief.
Or to Carla.
When she could talk on the phone at all, he’d been treated to an icy resentment over anything he said that implied she still had a chance. That’s not what I need from you, Ryder. Face it with me, had become an insistence that he join her resignation to death and harbor no false hopes, at least for her, in his work.
Well, he’d “faced it” with her. Accepted she had what she had.
And he’d kept his promise not to let his inner eye rove over clinical ordeals to come, at least not in her presence, even on video phone.
But he didn’t do hopeless.
He hadn’t promised not to keep hacking at the cause.
And he certainly wouldn’t quit trying for a cure.
Couldn’t.
It wasn’t in his genes.
So she’d just have to put up with his trying to save her as well.
“How detailed an image can this machine reproduce?” he asked, turning toward a dark corner of the room where a young, freckle-faced woman wearing a green lab coat looked up at him from behind a wall of dials. Her name tag read, DR. VIOLA LARSON.
She’d been playing a twelfth-level version of Spider Woman, the latest addition to a long line-up of super heroes who fed the hologram-game craze. “What do you have in mind, Sir?” the joy-stick-warrior asked, sending her arachnoid heroine to dispose of a controlling husband, two violent pimps, and other male low-lifes who prowled a three-dimensional maze of mean streets projected in front of her. Obviously the business of operating an electron-microscope holograph put no dent in her need to be constantly multi-tasking.
“How about an intact piece of brain tissue?” he said.
She grinned. “No can do, Sir. But I hear the company who makes this baby has a demonstrator model on their premises that’s really rad in what it can whip up.”
The mother ship, Terry thought. “They’re based in Alberta, Canada, aren’t they?”
Spider Woman disposed of another creep. “I think so, Sir. I’d be more than willing to get the details for you, even accompany you there as a technical assistant, should you want to visit it. Just name the day.” Her pupils had widened until she looked like a kid anticipating a trip to Disneyland, but her focus never strayed from Miss Spidey’s crusade against evil.
He turned back to his own mission, wandering around the three-dimensional image, marveling at its mystery and so lost in thought that he barely paid any attention to the thumping rotors of a helicopter as it landed outside the building. Nor did he hear the visitor who crept up behind him a few minutes later.
“Hi, Ryder,” said the familiar gravelly voice.
Terry stiffened. The General had left him alone for the last few days, and he didn’t need his interference now. “Well, howdy, General,” he said, turning, and trying not to sound overtly hostile. “Welcome to Alamo country, home of the last stand. Fitting, since I’ll fight to the death if you’re here to shut me down.”
“Relax, cowboy. If I’d wanted that, you’d already be grounded. Just don’t use my name too freely.” He sounded gentle, almost kind.
Terry grew more wary. “In case I smudge your precious legacy?”
“In case you need me, reputation intact, to save your ass if you get in trouble. Not everyone thinks you’re a hero.” He handed Terry a rolled up copy of Stars and Stripes.
Government Guru Battles SHAKES With Sugar! Are We Really Safe? the headline blared.
“Nice,” Terry said.
“Don’t take it personally, Ryder. Some of my enemies in DOD consider you to be my boy, and will try to get at me by discrediting your work. Now fill me in.” He eyed the protein molecule, surveying it up and down the way he might an attractive woman. “Is this what you got out of all those purloined brain samples you took off with?”
“No, this is what I got from the spinal fluid of consenting crew members on the USS Clinton. However . . .” He gestured toward the control panel “Could I have those other electron micrographs please, Dr. Larson?”
“Yes, Sir,” she said, sliding over to a different set of controls.
The monstrous image faded, to be replaced by a series of fragments, primarily tentacles, stingers, an
d globs. “These we isolated from the brain tissue.”
The man gave an appreciative whistle, then added, “They look like giant boogers to me.”
Terry walked around the partial structures, taking a few steps back to get a better perspective on which particular shapes would be best suited to entangle themselves in a host’s brain cells. A truly effective vaccine might have to attack all three.
“What’s your take on the bird-flu connection?” the general asked.
“I don’t know yet. CDC has already pulled their samples of H5N1 virus from the deep freeze to grow new cultures of it. Then they’ll be running a gazillion studies, checking for any previously undiscovered after-effects that might leave victims vulnerable to whatever organism causes SHAKES, but that will take time. Even if they find something, we’re no further ahead in how to stop SHAKES once it’s taken hold. But never fear, I’ve got one or two ideas of my own about how to go after the answer to that riddle. Why are you here, Robert?” He’d spoken rapid-fire, his tone making it clear that he had no time for interruptions.
Daikens grinned. “Hey, cheer up. There’s good news. You’ve been requested to give a lady an update on your work, Booger Man, and I volunteered to fetch you. It gives me a chance to bring you up to speed, so you can pass on what I’ve been doing these last few days.”
“Tell her yourself. I don’t do dog and pony shows for VIPs.”
“Well, you’re going to do this one. She writes your checks.”
Wells Beach, Maine
The conical glow of headlights and purr of the motor drew closer.
Anna reached into her pocket, fishing beneath a wad of soggy money for the cell phone. If the FBI had done anything right, they’d have bugged her answering machine. She’d call her own house and simply say that men with guns were approaching. Whether Wey Chen’s bunch were armed or not, those two sides could occupy each other for awhile. The fracas might allow her and Kyra to slip away, maybe even get back to the mainland.
She flipped open the dial pad, but its buttons squished under her fingers as the circuits shorted in a fizzle of static.
Mama deer was out of plans.
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