Her Last Defense

by Vickie Taylor

  Macy accepted the findings with a courage that both made him proud and tore his heart in two. He’d suited up and waited in an isolation unit with her as he’d promised, but eventually she’d wanted to know what was happening with the investigation, so he’d returned to his teammates to check.

  And to get a little counseling.

  Bull was on his cell phone with someone from Homeland Security, insisting they increase security at water-treatment plants across the country. Kat pretended to be absorbed in whatever she had up on her computer screen, but in reality, every time he looked up he caught her staring at him with eyes full of pity. Del provided the counseling.

  “You really fell for her, didn’t you?” he asked.

  “If you consider a headfirst dive out of a 777 at thirty-five thousand feet a fall, yeah, I guess I did.”

  “That pretty well describes how I felt when I met Elisa.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t have a parachute, man. A damn bug stole it. There’s no soft landing in a nice, comfortable marriage at the end of this ride.”

  “Hmm.” Del sat back, put his feet on the desk and twiddled a pencil between his fingers.

  “What?”

  “I’ve never even heard you say the M-word, much less use it in the same sentence as nice, and comfortable.”

  “You know my mom dumped my dad before my first birthday. Left me with him.”

  “No, I didn’t. I don’t think I’ve ever heard you talk about your mom.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t remember her. But my dad, he was a tough son of a bitch. I honestly believe he thought by slapping me around and making me work a full day in the oil fields at eight years old, he was preparing me for life. Making me strong. I guess he did make me strong, in a way. I learned to rely on myself, and no one else. We moved around so much, I never really let anyone else into my world. If I made friends, it just made it that much harder to leave the next time we had to pack up.”

  “You’re not a kid anymore.”

  “No, but old habits are hard to break.” He’d been letting those old defense mechanisms rule his life just a few days ago, when he’d decided to resign from the Rangers and leave Dallas. Instead of turning to his teammates for support, he’d closed himself off from them. “I just never learned to…connect with people. Never let anyone close enough to connect.”

  “I take it Macy has you rethinking this strategy?”

  “Yeah. And now that I finally figured out that I need her, I’m going to lose her.” He let his face fall into his hands and rubbed.

  “We all know what the odds are,” Del said quietly. “But no one knows for sure what’s going to happen tomorrow, or the next day. No one but the big chief upstairs, and I don’t mean the governor.”

  Clint steepled his hands in front of him and shook his head. “It’s like she’s given up already, Del. She’s not telling her doctors what they need to do, or trying to figure out how to beat this thing. She’s not trying to help herself.”

  Bull motioned to Del from across the room. Del stood, but rested his hand on Clint’s shoulder a moment before he walked away. “Then find someone else to help her, partner.”

  A half hour later, Clint stood in a hallway staring—glaring, really—at a public phone booth. His partner was a genius, no doubt about it. But that didn’t mean following through with his suggestion would be easy.

  Macy needed someone who knew ARFIS as well as she did. Who knew Macy. She needed someone with field experience treating the disease, not just looking at it under a microscope. Only one person Clint knew fit that bill.

  And yet for all that, picking up the phone and inviting David Brinker back into her life was the toughest thing Clint had ever done.

  Chapter 18

  The cramped room the Rangers had commandeered to work in was quiet as a morgue at midnight. None of them had left it for more than forty hours…not since Macy had learned that the terrorists planned to strike on Sunday, which was now just a sunrise away.

  And not since she’d been infected with ARFIS.

  Grim-faced and looking more bedraggled than Clint had seen any of them in a long while, they had regressed from touch-typing on their laptops to stabbing at the keyboards as if they could poke information out of them.

  Kat set the handset of the desk phone in front of her back in its cradle and chewed on the inside of her cheek.

  Del raised his head. His fingers hung suspended in midair over his computer. “What’s going on in that blond head of yours, Kitty?”

  She hated to be called Kitty, and Del only did it when he wanted to get a reaction out of her. The fact that she didn’t seem to notice this time had Clint out of his seat and walking over to better hear what she had to say. Even Bull stopped typing and cocked his head toward them.

  “I think we just got a break,” Kat told them.

  A ripple of…something hummed through the room.

  “Elaborate,” Bull ordered.

  “I just got off the phone with Jackie Tucker from Josephine, Texas, outside Houston. Nice lady, by the way. Didn’t even complain that I woke her up at midnight.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite,” Del said. “Who is Jackie Tucker? Besides a nice lady.”

  “She’s a clerk with Enterprise Car Rental.”

  Del leaned back. His chair creaked. “I thought we didn’t get any hits on our computer check of cars rented with foreign ID.”

  “We didn’t. But I asked if they’d seen anyone that matched our descriptions—vague as they are.”

  “And?”

  “Jackie recognized them. She said they tried to rent a car with foreign ID, but they didn’t have a credit card. Tried to put a deposit down on the car with cash, but the company doesn’t allow that. No plastic, no car.”

  “Jeez, how did we miss that?”

  “Since they didn’t actually get the rental, it wasn’t in the database.”

  Bull started pacing, his long legs eating up the width of the small room in three strides. “Okay, so we know they were at—which airport in Houston?”

  “Intercontinental.”

  “We know they were at Houston Intercontinental. Del, get on the phone and get me security video from all terminals and the rental-car counter around that time period. We might actually get our first look at these animals’ faces.” He scrubbed his palm over two days’ worth of whiskers. “They tried to get a car and couldn’t.”

  “We need to check the stolens.” He shrugged when his three teammates all turned his way. “It’s what I’d do if I needed a car and couldn’t get one the regular way.”

  “Kat, you get on the stolen-vehicle reports. See what’s missing in and around the airport that day. Clint, you can help with that.”

  He knew the captain was just throwing him a bone, trying to keep him busy, keep him from thinking too much. Kat was perfectly capable of running a stolen vehicle search.

  “I need to go see Macy.” He wanted to tell her they were making progress. Tell her to hold on.

  Brinker was in with her when Clint suited up and pressed the airlock release that would admit him to her room. On seeing Clint, he got up from the chair by her bed and shuffled to the door, still looking bent and frail from his own illness. Behind him, Macy lay pale and still on the bed. A fine sheen of sweat glistened on her forehead.

  “She’s getting worse,” Clint said.

  “Her fever’s up and her blood pressure’s down,” David whispered, as much as anyone could whisper through a respirator. “I’m starting to see some capillaries bursting under her nail beds, and hear a little fluid in her lungs.”

  David had arrived just six hours after Clint had called him at the Virginia VA hospital yesterday. He’d said he would have been here sooner, but he’d had to make a stop in Atlanta to pick up some interferon, a drug he thought might help Macy. Turns out he’d brought the entire CDC supply of the antiviral agent.

  He’d also liberated José from the holding facility and brought him to the hospital. Something about ha
rvesting antibodies from the monkey’s plasma and mixing them with Macy’s blood.

  “She said none of this would work. It didn’t work in Malaysia.” Maybe Clint should have believed her. Maybe he should have accepted her fate with the same courage and dignity she had.

  Bullshit. He wasn’t accepting anything. Not until she was cold and buried. Maybe not even then.

  “The effect is minimal when patients are already showing symptoms before treatment begins. But we got Macy early. And the conditions in Malaysia were deplorable. None of the patients there received the kind of supportive care she’s getting.”

  “But it still isn’t going to be enough.”

  David’s reddened eyes filled. “Probably not, no.”

  “How much longer has she got?” Clint hated the way his voice croaked.

  “Hard to tell. The interferon and the immune plasma are helping. They’re not going to cure her, but they’re slowing the progression of the disease. We’re buying her time.”

  “How much time?” he pressed.

  “Twelve, maybe eighteen hours.”

  Clint’s gloved hand clenched. His fingers trembled, and he ignored it. His bum arm couldn’t have mattered less to him at the moment.

  “What about the back door that Ty mentioned? He said they had a way to kill the virus.”

  “My team—Macy’s team—in Atlanta, and every other virologist at the CDC, are working that angle. It’s theoretically possible. Just about anything is possible when you start altering an organism’s genome. Much the same way a computer programmer leaves a back-door into a program, they could have programmed in an inherent vulnerability that only they would know about. It wouldn’t be any harder than programming in ARFIS’s lethal qualities. I supposed I’d want that safeguard if I were a terrorist. To know that I had a way to stop it when I was ready.”

  Clint grunted. “Or when you’d been paid enough money. They could hold the whole world hostage with a cure to ARFIS. Can you find this back door?”

  “The genetics involved are very complex. In months, or a year, maybe we could figure out what they did. But twelve hours?” He shook his head and sighed. “Everyone is trying.”

  “Keep trying. Buy her every second you can.”

  David nodded, looked from Clint to Macy. “I’ll give you some privacy.”

  “I’d appreciate that.”

  He didn’t know how David knew about him and Macy, but he did seem to know. Probably it was obvious just from looking at them. Watching the way they looked at each other. The doctor hadn’t made an issue of it.

  Lucky for him. If he had, Clint doubted he could have resisted busting the man’s jaw.

  Macy was drifting. Floating. But not on air or water. She felt as though she was living in a vat of clear gelatin too thick to pull into her lungs. It hurt to breathe.

  She opened her eyes and saw Clint hunched over her bedside with his gloved hands holding tight to her clammy fingers. He looked like a statue. How long had he been there?

  She’d been sleeping, she thought. Had she slept her life away?

  He sensed her awakening. His own eyelids fluttered and those gray eyes that could see right through her swept over her face, evaluating.

  “Hey, beautiful.”

  She coughed. “Don’t make me laugh.” She knew what she looked like. She’d treated a lot of women in her condition in Malaysia.

  “Good news.” He used tongs to gather a few ice chips from a bucket next to the bed and placed a few on her tongue. It was the closest thing to heaven she expected to experience until she arrived there in a few hours. “Brinker says you’re holding your own against this thing.”

  “Is that another joke?”

  “Totally serious.”

  At least he hadn’t said dead serious.

  “You’ve got to hold on, okay?” He squeezed her hand. “You heard Ty. The terrorists programmed in a way to kill ARFIS. Everyone at the CDC is looking for it. All your friends are trying to help you, Macy. You have to let them, by holding on.”

  “No. Time.” Her head was going muzzy again. It was hard to concentrate.

  “Then we’ll get the cure from the terrorists, dammit! Wherever they are, they’re bound to have some with them, just in case. We’re making progress on finding them. It won’t be much longer. You’ve just got to hold on!”

  “Clint.” Her throat was raw. On fire. “You have to accept—”

  “I have accepted, Macy. I’ve accepted that I can’t undo what’s happened, as much as I want to. I’ve accepted that I can’t take your place, as much as I want to. I’ve even accepted that I can’t help you, at least not alone. I need Brinker, and my teammates and your teammates at the CDC to do that.”

  “Clint—”

  “No. Listen to me. There is a difference between accepting and giving up. I have accepted. But no way am I giving up. If I’m going down, I’m going down fighting, Macy. And I want you to promise me you’ll do the same.”

  None of the pain she was suffering because of the virus savaging her internal systems compared, at that moment, to the pain the look on his face put in her heart. The love was there, plain to see. And the sorrow. The grief.

  She’d do anything to take that look away. Anything.

  She took a breath and heard the fluid mixing with the air in her lungs. “It’s hard.”

  “I know it is.” He leaned over so that his face shield was just inches from her nose. “But people survive ARFIS, just like they survive other viruses like HIV and Lassa Fever and Ebola.”

  She wanted to laugh, but didn’t have enough air. “What do you know about Ebola?”

  “I’ve been surfing the Net.”

  She saw a flicker of light across the wall, and realized someone had entered the observation room. Managing to turn her head a fraction of an inch, she saw Clint’s captain behind the glass.

  He switched on the intercom between the rooms. “Clint, we have to go.”

  She tightened her grip on his hand. No. Not yet.

  “See?” Clint said, and produced another fake smile. “We’re closing in on the terrorists. He wouldn’t pull me out of here for any other reason.”

  “Stay,” she croaked.

  He lifted her hand to his face shield as if he could bring it all the way to his lips and kiss her knuckles. “I want to. You know I do. But I have to go. I have to keep fighting, for both of us.”

  And she knew he was right. He would keep fighting long after she was able.

  He was her last defense.

  He pulled something out of the pouch at the waist of his suit and put it in her hand. It was cool and smooth. Metallic, like his eyes.

  “What is it?” she asked. She couldn’t lift her head to look.

  He lifted her hand, with whatever it was still in it, so she could see.

  “Your badge?”

  He curved her fingers over the silver circle and star so that it pressed into her palm. “I want you to hold on to it for me. Don’t lose it. I’m going to need it back soon.”

  “But—” Involuntarily, her bleary gaze landed on his bad shoulder.

  “I told you, I’m not giving up. On anything. I’m going to find a way to keep doing what I do whether I can hold a gun or not. But I need you to help me. I need you there with me. I love you, Macy. I love you.”

  Then he backed away from the bed and was gone before Macy could gather the strength to tell him she loved him, too. Yet even when he was gone, Macy couldn’t help feeling as if he were still there. He’d left her more than his badge.

  He’d left her his heart.

  She closed her hand over it and held on tight.

  “What’ve you got?” Clint strode down the hall from the decon room with Bull at his side, though every cell in his body screamed for him to go back. To stay with her.

  He was very much afraid he might never see her again.

  “Three stolen cars around Houston Intercontinental Airport around the time our boys were there. A red Corvette.”<
br />
  Clint jerked his head to the side. “Too flashy. Our guys would want to keep a low profile. And there are four of them. They wouldn’t fit in a ’Vette.”

  “Second car is a beat-up old truck with the tailpipe wired on. I’m thinking they’d want something more reliable. Wouldn’t want to chance breaking down.”

  “I’m with you.” Though at least half of him was still in the room down the hall, with Macy.

  “Third vehicle is a white Chevy van. Late model. No windows, like a business van.”

  Clint stopped just outside the door to the Ranger’s room. “That’s it. Now all we have to do is find it.”

  “We already have. A Dallas PD beat cop saw it parked outside Texas Stadium an hour ago and ran the plates. They were just getting ready to send out a tow when I put a hold on it and told them to back off.

  “Texas Stadium? Do the Cowboys have a home game tomorrow?”

  Bull nodded tightly.

  “Was there any sign of our suspects?”

  “The officer said the place looked secure, but he didn’t go inside. He figured the van had been abandoned.”

  Clint chewed on that. “Maybe he scared them off.”

  “Or maybe they’d already gone.”

  “Or maybe they were still inside, working, and had no idea there was a cop on their doorstep. How long ago was this?”

  “An hour.”

  “We can be there in a less than two, better if we fly.”

  “Chopper’s already on the way.”

  Bull held the door while Del and Kat poured through, carrying their gear. Clint turned to follow his teammates, but Bull held him back with a hand on his arm. “By the way, what was all that about you finding a way to do what you do, even if you can’t hold a gun?”

  Clint’s chest constricted. He could lie, or he could dodge the question. But if Macy could tackle ARFIS without complaint, he could face up to a little nerve damage. He just didn’t want to delay getting to the terrorists—and a possible cure for Macy—a second longer.

  He pulled out of Bull’s grasp. “Come on. I’ll explain on the way.”