“Now what?” Peter asked, doing his best to wring the water out of his clothes and trying not to look at the body.
“We should go back to the room,” Julia said. “Get some dry clothes and safely dispose of any bio-hazardous material left behind by these idiots.”
The sodden trudge back up to room 803 was silent and uncomfortable. Peter had to lean on Julia’s arm, limping heavily on his twisted ankle, but they didn’t speak.
They’d stopped a dangerous plague from being unleashed on the city, and he knew that he had done the right thing, but he still felt strange, even hollow inside. He also felt wary of Julia. Killing seemed way too easy for her. He also wasn’t sure if he should be impressed by or suspicious of her new tough, take-charge attitude. She’d certainly come a long way from the cowering, fearful girl he’d rescued from the hotel.
As Julia had predicted, the blond woman had in fact succumbed to her injuries and lay dead, just where they’d left her. The whole room stank of ammonia, making it slightly difficult to breathe.
“Here,” Julia said, tossing the dead man’s tuxedo onto the bed. “Put this on. It may not be a perfect fit, but people will just assume it’s rented.”
Without further comment, she began to strip out of her wet chef’s clothes. Peter should have felt something at the sight of her damp, goose-bumped flesh, but he didn’t. Certainly not arousal—there was a grotesque corpse in the room, and it wasn’t exactly an aphrodisiac.
He pulled the cover off the bed, and used it to cover the dead body.
“Great,” Julia said, and he glanced in her direction. She was struggling to fit her surgically enhanced breasts into a shimmery silver gown that had clearly been made for a much more modest bust. “Of all the terrorists in the world, why do I have to end up with a member of the Itty-Bitty-Titty Committee? I’m going be falling out of this dress like a porn star.” She slipped her bare feet into a pair of strappy metallic sandals. “At least we wear roughly the same size shoes.”
She smiled and looked up at him, then arched a brow when she noticed that he wasn’t smiling, too. But she didn’t say anything. She just pulled a pair of bright purple disposable gloves out of her purse, and put them on.
“That’s a good look for you,” Peter said, hoping a bit of wisecracking would help him relax, and reignite what he’d felt before. “Nothing like a nice pop of color for evening.”
Julia smiled and made quick jazz-hands in the air before collecting the two used syringes and placing them carefully into a red plastic bag marked “biohazard.” Then she found the empty vial where it had fallen near the covered corpse, and held it up to the light.
“Looks like the Englishman only gave them enough virus for this one attack,” she said. “He has much more than this in his possession.”
“What do you think that means?” Peter asked. “That he’s breaking it up into dime bags, and selling it all over town?”
“If so,” she said, slipping the empty vial into the bag, “we’d better find him and stop him.”
Peter stripped off his sopping wet clothes, wondering how many more times he was going to have to get into a pool fully dressed. He considered the tuxedo, but knew it was going to be a tight fit and figured he should dry off a little more before trying to squeeze into those pants. So he limped into the bathroom and reached for a towel.
Then he stopped dead.
“Julia?” he called over his shoulder.
“What?”
“How many syringes did you find?”
“Both of them,” she said, stepping into the doorway with the biohazard bag in one gloved hand. “Why?”
Peter cocked his chin.
Sitting there on the edge of the sink, left as casually as a toothbrush or a razor, was a third syringe.
“Three?” Julia said, stepping up to the sink and picking up the syringe. “There’s three of them? So…”
She turned to Peter with wide, disbelieving eyes as he finished the sentence for her.
“Where’s the third terrorist?” he asked.
“This isn’t good,” she said, stashing the extra syringe in the bag with the other two. “This isn’t good at all.”
“We have to find him,” Peter said.
“Or her.” Julia took out a container of anti-viral wipes and started wiping down every hard surface in the room. “We need to get down to that banquet right away. That’s got to be where whoever used this syringe will be headed.”
“But if that person shot up and left before we got here,” Peter asked, “aren’t we already too late?”
“We might be,” Julia said. “Or we might not be. I told you, the speed with which the virus takes hold varies from subject to subject. Considering the fact that the hotel doesn’t appear to have descended into apocalyptic mayhem,”—she gestured at the open window, inviting Peter to look outside—“I think it’s safe to say that we’re in luck.
“For now, anyway,” she added.
Peter peered out the window. Everything looked normal. Normal flow of traffic, yellow with taxis. Normal flow of pedestrians, busy, bustling people on their way to important places. No one seemed sick, mutated, or overtly homicidal.
“Still,” Julia said, casting an eye up and down Peter’s wet body, and then turning away. “We can’t waste time.”
She pulled off her gloves, turning them inside out so that one was wrapped inside the other, before tucking them both into the bag with the syringes. Then she put on a pair of earrings she’d found on the nightstand.
Peter pulled down the towel he’d come into the bathroom to grab in the first place, dried himself off, and then went to put on the tux. It wasn’t as bad as he’d thought it might be—just a little tight across the shoulders, and of course, too short in the sleeves and legs. Still, not so much so that it wasn’t halfway presentable. If he squinted, the two of them almost looked like they belonged at a presidential fundraising gala.
The only thing that didn’t quite fit the image was Julia’s frumpy canvas purse, but she refused to leave the used syringes and dirty gloves behind in the room. The tiny clutch that went with the sparkly dress wasn’t even big enough for a tube of lipstick.
“Grab the invitation,” she said, pointing to the gilded envelope on the desk.
Peter picked it up and slipped it halfway out, enough to read the fancy cursive lettering and confirm that it was, in fact, the invitation that they would need to get them into the banquet.
“Ready?” Julia asked.
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” he replied—faced with the prospect of a wildly mutating, potentially violent monster, a room full of rich, influential New Yorkers, and swarms of heavily armed federal agents. Not exactly his idea of a good time.
But he had no choice.
As Peter and Julia made their way down to the grand ballroom, he leaned heavily on her arm, favoring his good leg and keeping his eyes open for the slightest hint of an anomaly. Any rifts or shimmers, or anything that would indicate that they were on the right track. There was nothing.
Everything was frustratingly normal.
“What if the guy bailed?” Peter asked, leaning close to Julia’s jeweled ear. “I mean, if he’s loose on the streets of the city, we’ll never find him.”
“Let’s just hope,” Julia replied, “that his devotion to whatever crazy cause these people are into will keep him from straying too far from the original mission.”
“Honestly,” Peter said, “I don’t even know why they’re bothering. This country is way too backward to elect a black president, anyway. Maybe twenty years from now…”
“I guess even the remote possibility is enough to drive some people to extreme measures.” Julia shrugged. “I never understood the point of fanaticism. Causes. Religion. All that. It’s so arbitrary, so juvenile—like cliques in high school.”
“I don’t get it either,” Peter said. “I certainly never fit in with any cliques.”
There was a sudden burst of noise from the ballroom.
Peter and Julia exchanged a concerned look, but relaxed when they realized it was cheering. They started hurrying toward the door.
There were bookend feds on either side as they approached. Two men, both white and middle-aged, and as similar as action figures. Standard issue spooks with steely gazes and clear spiral cords curling behind their ears.
“I hope we haven’t missed the speech,” Julia said in a breathy, girlish voice that sounded like someone else.
“No, ma’am,” the fed on the right said, accepting the invitation Peter handed him and scanning it with a small, handheld device. His voice was so bland and without any regional affectations, that it might as well have been computer generated. “You’re in time. It just started.”
“Oh, my gosh, thank you,” Julia said with a dazzling smile that was wasted on the dour fed who opened the door to let them in.
Inside, the opulent ballroom was older and much more baroque in design than the art deco pool area, all wedding cake molding and gilded cherubs and rococo chandeliers dripping with crystal. The guests who gathered around the tables were equally old and gilded, the men providing the age and the women the gilt. As they made their way to their numbered table, Peter realized that they were the youngest couple in the room by twenty years, easy. Excluding the staff, of course, and the muscle.
There were two other couples already seated at the table. To Peter’s right was some kind of vaguely familiar power couple, Hollywood people but not actors. They were both in their fifties and both utterly absorbed in the screens of their respective phones.
To Peter’s left sat a doddering oldster who looked asleep or possibly dead, and his formerly hot trophy wife, now sixty to his ninety. She smiled at Peter, her face a frozen rictus of botulinum injections and silicone filler, and then blatantly looked him up and down as if he were a fattening dessert and she was considering cheating on her diet.
He turned away, trying not to shudder visibly, and took Julia’s hand, pressing it to his lips like a devout Catholic kissing a rosary to ward off evil.
Meanwhile, the presidential candidate was standing at a bunting-laden podium at the far end of the room, set up on a raised platform. He was well into his speech, and seemed relaxed and in good spirits. He clearly had no idea what was going on.
But he was also the one guy in the room who wouldn’t suddenly mutate into a contagious monster, so Peter ignored him and started focusing on the crowd, searching the faces for anyone who looked out of place or nervous. Anyone who looked like they didn’t feel so good.
He included the massive security in his sweep. It would be a real stretch for their terrorist to impersonate a fed, but given all of the other patently impossible things he’d seen today, he wasn’t going to rule it out.
Everything seemed normal, the way it should be, until Julia gripped his arm and tipped her chin in the direction of a portly, red-haired waiter who was standing at the edge of the room, holding a pitcher of ice water and looking pale and sweaty.
“Think that might be our guy?” Peter whispered.
“We’ll know soon,” Julia said.
She drank down all of her water in a few quick gulps. Then, turning back and making sure that her overflowing cleavage was clearly visible, she caught the sweaty man’s eye and raised her now-empty water glass.
He started toward her, weaving between the other tables.
“What are you going to do?” Peter hissed. “Stick him in the arm while he’s pouring you a drink?”
Another man stopped the waiter en route, asking for a refill.
“I just want to get a closer look,” Julia whispered through smiling teeth. “If he’s infected, a distinctive ammonia-like odor should be detectable at close range.”
The waiter ended up refilling glasses for the whole nearby table as Peter clenched his fists in his lap with anxious frustration.
“Then what?” he asked.
“Then I stick him in the arm while he’s pouring the water,” she replied.
Julia raised her glass again, to make sure the waiter hadn’t forgotten her. He looked up, noticed her and nodded, trudging toward her like a child resigned to some punishment.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Peter asked. “Feds’ll be all over you in a heartbeat if you try to pull a stunt like that.”
She turned back toward Peter and opened her mouth to deliver a snappy retort, when the sound of breaking glass and splashing water whipped her head around.
The waiter had gone down beside the neighboring table, his body wracked with a violent seizure. In the time it took Peter to get to his feet, a ring of feds surrounded the convulsing man. Up on the stage, the presidential candidate trailed off, his brow furrowed by a practiced look of concern.
There was no time to think. Peter had to act and fast. He grabbed Julia’s arm, pulled her to her feet, and shouldered his way through the concerned crowd.
“My wife is a doctor!” he called out in a clear, steady voice that sounded way more confident than he felt. “Please, let her through.”
The two closest feds turned toward his voice, their broad shoulders parting like a gate.
“Who’s a doctor?” the older of the two feds asked. He was a burly, sunburned man with thinning white hair. He turned to Julia. “You?”
“Yes, that’s right,” she said, seamlessly running with Peter’s ruse as she got down one knee and opened her purse. “There’s no reason to be alarmed. This man is clearly epileptic, and he’s experiencing a severe grand mal seizure.” She pulled out the antidote and syringe, raising it up and drawing out a dose. “An injection of a mild sedative will stop the muscle contractions and prevent accidental injury. It will also allow you to remove the patient safely to another location, so that the banquet can continue as planned.
“Hold him, please.”
The two feds exchanged a look like they weren’t entirely sold on Julia’s suggestion. In the meanwhile, Peter could see strange, erratic movement underneath the man’s uniform, as if his clothing was infested with some sort of vermin. The telltale lumps under his chin were starting to swell. Any minute now it would become horribly obvious—even to someone with no medical background—that this wasn’t an ordinary epileptic seizure.
Julia paused, waiting for the feds to decide whether or not they would allow her to go ahead with the injection. It was like watching someone try to defuse a time bomb. His fists were clenched so hard, his fingers ached.
Blood began to ooze between the waiter’s chattering teeth as he banged his head repeatedly against the glossy tile floor, eyes rolled up and unseeing.
“You,” Julia said, indicated the younger of the two agents standing directly beside her. Her tone was clipped, authoritative. “Get something between his teeth before he bites his tongue off. You.” She turned to the older fed. “Hold his head as still as you can, chin turned away. In his current state, the carotid artery will be our safest target.”
The younger agent reacted unquestioningly to her barked instruction, grabbing a silver butter knife off a nearby table and wedging it between the waiter’s bloody teeth.
But the older man hesitated.
“Now,” Julia added, her tone calm and matter-of-fact, as if following her exact instructions was the only possible option.
Peter was about ready to shove the older agent aside and grab the waiter’s head himself, but to his surprise, he didn’t have to. The older guy gave a curt nod and did what Julia asked. If he noticed the swelling nodes under the waiter’s chin, he chose not to mention them.
Julia deftly injected the waiter, depressing the plunger and emptying the syringe into his bloodstream. The twitching and spasming of his limbs began to slow immediately. The nodes in his neck pulsed erratically, like miniature dying hearts, then began to shrink. He let out a long, slow, shaky breath that whistled past the silver knife in his teeth.
Peter let out a matching breath, his own fists and tightly strung muscles starting to relax.
We did it. It was ov
er.
That’s when Peter noticed the female FBI agent who had checked them into the kitchen.
She was standing alone by an emergency exit near the far end of the raised platform, scanning the room.
Peter ducked down, feigning concern for the fallen waiter and tucking his own head into his shoulders like a turtle. If her sharp, searchlight gaze came to rest on either of them, he was certain she would recognize them as the two line cooks she’d allowed to pass earlier.
They would be screwed, and royally.
He reached down and gripped Julia’s arm, probably harder than he intended.
“You’re amazing, honey!” he said, leaning in to kiss her cheek and whispering in her ear. “But remember the kids. We need to go, now.”
Julia nodded.
“Gentlemen,” she said to the feds. “I’m sure you can handle things from here.”
“No problem,” the older agent replied, his attention focused on the waiter. “Thank you, doctor.”
Julia stood, and Peter swiftly steered her around so that the two of them were facing away from the raised platform and the female agent. The presidential candidate had taken the mishap in stride, and was encouraging the guests to return to their seats so that he could continue talking about whatever people who want to run the country talked about.
Peter couldn’t have cared less.
All he cared about was getting the two of them out of the hall before everyone else sat back down. While they were part of a milling crowd, they had a chance of escaping unnoticed. But once they were the only ones left standing, they might as well have had giant neon arrows floating around their heads.
Rabbit season…
Peter slung his arm around Julia’s shoulders, leaning on her as he limped along and pressing his cheek close to hers as if whispering sweet nothings. Really he was just trying to hide his face.
The smell of her was just a bonus.
* * *
Peter dried his hair on a threadbare towel. The hotel they’d chosen, one of a generic chain designed for weekenders and people stuck overnight in the city, was a far cry from the opulence of the Ambassador. But what it lacked in amenities, it made up for in anonymity.
Fringe 03 - Sins of the Father Page 20