Like spending the moment in a snow globe, she thought with a small smile. Where everything was beautiful and clean.
At least for a little while.
They picked up coffee and bagels on the hotel’s continental breakfast table and took them to the hospital, where they were supposed to meet the rest of the team at eight. Bull was pacing, his cell phone to his ear when they walked into the old treatment room the ICU staff had cleared for the Rangers to use. Kat and Del sat at desks, hunched over laptop computers.
“Any news?” Clint asked his partner.
“Not much. Kat is checking with customs to see what foreign nationals—especially Middle Eastern and African—have come into Texas through the Houston and Dallas airports in the last five days, but I don’t expect to get a hit there. We don’t know how long these guys have been in the country, and they could have made their entry in some other city, and then taken a domestic flight here.”
“So Del is checking rental-car agencies,” Kat said brightly. “Trying to find out if anyone rented a car with a foreign driver’s license.”
“What about the farmhouse? Did the cleanup team find anything?”
Del hesitated, then said, “Nothing that would tell us who they are or where they went.” He glanced at Clint, then at Macy. She had the feeling some unspoken communication had just occurred between them. Cop communication.
“What?” she asked.
“She may as well hear it all,” Clint said. “She’s in this as deep as us.”
Del nodded once. “The bodies of the homeowners were in the basement.”
Macy sucked in a breath. “My God. ARFIS?”
“No. They’d been shot with small-caliber weapons.”
Macy felt like someone had stuck a fist in her diaphragm. The rocking chairs. She knew she should feel sad about the deaths of two innocent people, but for some reason what stood out in her mind was the incomprehensible loneliness of the image of those two rocking chairs on the porch that would now sit forever empty, only the wind to rock them.
“It looks like our bad guys picked the place at random. Somewhere out of the way, but that Jeffries could get to without too much trouble. His text pager was in the bedroom where we found him with that address on it. They must have contacted him, ordered him in.” Del glanced back at his screen and tapped a few keys. “We’ve got BOLOs out on our unknown subjects, but without more of a description than two Middle Easterners and two Africans, there isn’t going to be much anyone can do. We don’t even know if the four of them are still together. They could have split up.”
Clint grunted. “Taken the virus to two cities, or four. Nice thought, Del. Thanks for that.”
“Aim to please,” Del said, his lips set in a grim line.
Captain Matheson snapped his flip phone shut. “Dr. Attois, I need you to check on our patient. Talk to his doctors. See if there’s any way we can get him to answer a few more questions. Anything we can give him to bring him around.”
“I’ll check,” she promised, “but it’s doubtful. He should be nearly comatose by now, and it won’t be long before the seizures begin.”
She didn’t have to say that death would soon follow. Excusing herself, she left them to their detective work and went to suit up for the iso bay. Outside the door, she double-and triple-checked the seals around the tops of both pairs of the gloves she wore, a heavier pair not unlike dishwashing gloves on top and a thinner latex set next to her skin, then fortified herself with a deep breath against the despair she was sure to encounter inside and pushed the button to unseal the airlock.
A nurse in full gear stood by Ty’s bedside administering a blood coagulant. When she was done, Macy asked. “Could I see his chart, please?”
The woman set down the used hypodermic and handed her the clipboard with a pen attached on a string, then excused herself from the room.
A glance at the patient record told Macy that Ty’s condition was as bad as she’d expected. His fever had been over 104 degrees for nearly ten hours, and was climbing steadily. His pulse was too fast, his blood pressure too low.
She lifted one of his eyelids. The fine blood vessels of the sclera had ruptured, turning the whites of his eyes deep red and brown like a monster in a picture show. Only this man was only a monster by his deeds, not his genetics. It disturbed Macy to see the human body so abused. To see a human being suffering.
To her surprise, his other eye fluttered open. He choked on the tube in his throat. Trying to speak?
“Ty? Can you hear me?” He gagged again. “You can’t talk because we have a tube in your throat to keep your airway open. If you can hear me, if you understand, move your right hand.”
The fingers on his right hand wiggled.
Behind her in the observation room, Clint stepped to the window and laid his palm against the glass.
Encouragement? Or a warning?
No time to find out. Ty’s lucidity wouldn’t last long. She was amazed he was coherent at all at this stage of the disease’s progression, but elated nonetheless. She’d take every second she could get to try to pull information from him. Millions of lives were at stake.
“Who did this to you, Ty?” She leaned over him, but realized he couldn’t see her. The pressure in his eyes had blinded him. His hand moved, but she didn’t have any way to interpret the meaning of his gestures. She realized she’d have to simplify the questions to get any meaningful information out of him. “Did they just come into the country, or have they been here a long time? Move your hand if they’ve been here a long time.”
His fingers quit twitching.
“Good. They came into the country recently.” She searched her mind for anything else that might help the Rangers prevent a biological attack in the U.S. “Do you know how they’re going to release the virus? Move your hand if it’s in the air, stay still if they’re planning to contaminate the water.”
Again, his fingers were still.
“Water.” She threw a frightened look at Clint. “My God, they’re going after the water.” She didn’t know why that shocked her so much. Seeding ARFIS into the water was no worse than releasing it into the air in a populated area. She guessed knowing the plan of attack just made the possibility seem all that more real.
Ty squirmed, becoming agitated. She needed to hurry. Get more information before he drifted away from her. But what else could she ask?
“When?” the next question popped into her mind and out of her mouth at the same instant. “Do you know when they’re going to release the virus? Move your hand if it’s more than a week away.”
Oh, no. His fingers didn’t move. She wanted his fingers to move. She willed his fingers to move. They needed more time. More than a week!
“What day, Ty? Move your fingers on the day.” Today was Thursday, she thought. “Friday?” Nothing. “Saturday?” Nothing. “Sunday?”
His index finger tapped once on the blanket.
“Sunday.” Her heart hammered so hard she thought it might burst right through her suit. Just three days.
Her breath hitched. A lump clogged her throat.
Ty’s squirming became thrashing. His chest spasmed. His head bowed back and the chords of his neck stood out.
“Where?” She shouted at him, hoping he would hear her over his pain. “Move your hand if the target is east of the Mississippi.”
Both his hands moved. They swung wildly, but she didn’t think it meant anything. He was delirious, fighting demons she couldn’t see. Fighting death.
“Please, Ty. Try to concentrate a minute longer. Don’t let the men who did this to you get away with it. Don’t let them kill thousands more! Move your hand if the target city is west of the Mississippi.”
He made a strangled sound, full of animal rage. His eyes bulged, bloody and blind. He raised up—God knew where he found the strength—and flailed at the air as if he were being attacked by invisible birds. His IV stand clanged to the floor. Tubes tangled around his neck. His arm crashed against th
e table next to the bed, sending a tray sailing into the wall.
Macy knew she was in trouble when Ty got hold of her arm, just above the wrist. His grip was surprisingly strong, fueled by insanity and pain. She didn’t dare wrench herself away by force for fear he would tear her suit. She clawed at his fingers, trying to pry them away. All the while she could feel Clint’s gaze on her. She heard him, muffled through the glass.
“Macy!” His fists thumped on the window.
Ty’s free hand continued to flap and wave. He hit the table again, this time closed his hand over something. At first Macy thought it was a pen—dangerous enough for someone whose life depends on not allowing so much as a microscopic puncture to her rubber suit, much less a gaping tear—then he swung his arm up, and she got a better look at what he held a second before it plunged toward the back of her hand.
The hypodermic the nurse had left behind. A needle which had, just minutes before, been inserted directly into the bloodstream of a man dying of the most lethal pathogen to surface on the face of the earth in fifty years.
Chapter 17
Christ. Oh, Christ.
Clint threw himself at the window between the observation area and Ty’s room, but the half-inch Plexiglas barrier held. He watched in horror as Macy yanked her arm away from Jeffries, but not before it was too late. At least he thought it was too late.
Please, God, don’t let him have punctured her glove.
He ran. Skidded around the corner and hit the button to open the airlock door that led into the decontamination area, but the door remained closed. A warning light blinked overhead: Occupied.
“Damn.” Through the peephole, he could see her in the first chamber, still in her suit, her arms held out to the side as the Lysol shower sprayed her down. Then she hooked the hanger to the loop on the suit at the back of her neck, unzipped the bodice and stepped out, leaving the rubberized coveralls, attached boots and outer gloves and all to drip dry. The glove of the left hand bore an obvious tear.
She was already stripping off her inner layer of gloves, the latex pair, carrying one with her as she stepped behind the curtain where he knew she would strip out of her surgical scrubs and rinse her body the same way she’d rinsed the suit.
He braced his hands on the doorframe and hung his head. His heart ricocheted off the walls of his chest with startling ferocity.
A minute passed like an eon. Two. Then he heard the airlock door on the other side of the decontamination area click open and the warning light over his head winked off.
He caught up to her in the dressing room. She’d put on a clean pair of scrubs and stood at a sink pouring bleach on her hands directly from the bottle and rubbing it in.
“Did it puncture the inner glove? Break the skin?”
“I don’t know.” She looked over her shoulder at him. Her face was white as bone. She nodded toward the rumpled piece of latex on the counter. “Check the glove for holes. Pour some more bleach on it first.”
He doused the latex while she scrubbed some more, then pinched the skin on the back of her hand. “No blood. I don’t see a wound,” she sounded calm.
“That’s good. That’s good, right?” He could hardly talk. Adrenaline had his chest heaving for air.
“Good, but not a guarantee. The bleach is stinging me, as if it got in a wound. The needle may have pierced the epithelial layer, the skin, just not gone deep enough to hit a capillary and draw blood. The virus would still transfer.”
“Dammit, what was a needle doing lying around in there, anyway?”
“I interrupted the nurse and she forgot it. It was—” Tight-lipped, she shook her head. “Just check the glove.”
He opened the scrap of latex at the wrist and held it under a slow-running faucet, the way he’d seen Susan do once at the camp. When the glove was full, he held the end closed and squeezed it gently, watching closely to see if any water leaked out. If it leaked, there was a hole.
He forgot to breathe as he squeezed, and then the world tipped crazily beneath his feet as a tiny bead of water appeared on the surface of the glove and plopped into the sink below.
“Are you sure you’re ready for this?”
Clint sat facing Macy in a plastic chair identical to the one she was seated in. He reached out and took her hands in his.
She swallowed and nodded, her head bowed. Her hair hung over her eyes like a curtain, shielding her from his probing gray gaze. He swept back the heavy mass and lifted her chin.
“You don’t have to do it. I can tell them.”
“I can do it,” she dragged in a heavy breath and straightened up, more for his benefit than because she felt like it. “It’s okay. It’s part of the risk I accepted when I signed on at the CDC. I’ve always known this could happen.”
“It’s not okay. Not even close.”
“Let’s go. I’d like to get it over with.”
“Macy, we need to talk about this.”
A spurt of anger flashed through her. She lurched out of her chair. “I don’t want to talk about it! I just want to— Want to…”
“Pretend it isn’t happening? That it didn’t happen? You can only put off facing the truth for so long. Believe me, I’ve had a lot of experience trying, lately.”
Her gaze automatically landed on his shoulder, the spot where his shirt hid the scar from a bullet wound. She felt for him, knew that he felt crippled because he didn’t have full control of his body. But he could hardly understand how she felt at this moment, facing the almost certainty of contracting a lethal disease.
“I don’t think you can compare your situation and mine.”
“I wouldn’t begin to. If nothing else, the last few days have taught me that there are a lot more important things in life than having a steady gun hand.”
He moved in close to her, eased her into his arms.
Some part of her told her to resist. If she didn’t have the strength to let him go now, she never would. But she couldn’t. He just felt too good. Too strong, and she needed strength right now. She needed all the strength she could get.
“I just don’t want you to push me away,” he said against her neck, rocking her. “I want to be there for you.”
“You can’t be there. No one can. I’m not contagious now, but in a few hours, the virus will have spread to my lungs. I’ll have to be isolated.”
His arms tightened. His voice hardened. “You’re not going to do this alone. I’ll suit up. I’ll be there with you every minute.”
The thought of him sitting beside her while she thrashed on the bed, wild-eyed and delirious like Ty Jeffries turned her stomach. Vanity? She didn’t think so.
She didn’t want him to have to watch her die the way they’d watched Ty Jeffries die just minutes ago through the observation window. She didn’t want him to remember her that way.
“You have terrorists to catch, Clint. There are a lot more lives at stake than just mine.”
Clint set her back from him and framed her face with his hands. “Yours is the only one I care about. Don’t you get that?”
The admission brought a new stream of tears to her cheeks. Her steely-eyed Ranger, the man who never let on he had feelings, much less displayed them, was looking at her with such tough tenderness, such ferocious love, than the sight of him made her heart swell and ache.
“First thing you’re going to do after we talk to the team is give the doctors here a crash course on this bug. You’ve got to teach them everything they need to know in order to treat you. You’re the expert.”
“There isn’t much they can do other than standard supportive therapy.”
His hands moved from her face to her shoulders. He shook her lightly. “There must be something else. You weren’t just sitting back and watching people suffer in Malaysia. I know you. What were you trying? What did you think might make a difference that you didn’t have a chance to try before you left?”
She shuffled uneasily. “We tried the standard antiviral treatments. None of them
showed any substantial results.”
“Brinker thought he could create a cure using the monkey’s antibodies. What about that?”
“He might have been able to create a cure. In eight or ten months. But not eight or ten hours. I’m not the only one who needs to face the truth, here, Clint. You’re going to have to accept this, too.”
His hands tightened on her shoulders. Myriad emotions played across his face in the span of a heartbeat—fear, anger…grief. Then he pulled her into a bear hug that felt like it could last all winter, except it was interrupted by a noise from the open doorway.
Del cleared his throat again. The captain and Kat stood behind him, open curiosity in their stares.
“You said you needed to talk to us,” Del said to Clint.
Macy let go of Clint reluctantly and turned to his friends. She might be pretending there was nothing wrong to herself, but she wanted them to know the truth.
Clint was going to need them for the next forty-eight hours.
She pulled her shoulders back. “Actually I need to talk to you.”
Clint linked his hand in hers in silent support. She squeezed gratefully.
“I wanted to let you know that I won’t be able to help with the investigation the way I’d hoped.” Her voice cracked on the last word. She bit her lip to steady herself and looked up at Clint for the strength to go on.
“I had a little accident in the iso room.”
For twelve agonizing hours, all Clint could do was watch the clock and will the hands to move faster. Then when the incubation period was up, and Macy’s blood test came back positive for ARFIS, all he wanted to do was turn them back.
It wasn’t as if the results were a surprise. He should have been prepared. But how does one prepare for news like that?
Her Last Defense Page 16