by Steve Hadden
CHAPTER 76
Kayla didn’t feel the blast or the searing pain she’d expected. She opened her eyes and saw the crumbled match head on the floor. Artemis lunged, but her bad leg made the hulking woman look feeble, and she wildly flailed her knife as she hit the wet floor face-down in front of Kayla. Then another idea burst into Kayla’s mind.
Kayla jumped up and sprinted toward the small storage room in the center of the warehouse. She was much faster than Artemis and quickly built the distance between them. She stepped over the dead woman’s body and ducked into the office. She found the bottle she remembered on the third shelf to her right. Glycerin. Then she rushed back out the door.
Artemis was so close she expected to feel her vise grip on her throat any second. Instead she felt the wind as Artemis’s knife sliced through the air past her ear and missed her shoulder. She pivoted and jammed her foot into Artemis’s knee. Artemis went down and Kayla raced back down the center of the warehouse to the small pallet of boxes she’d seen at the end of the aisle just before the refrigerator room door. She struggled to catch her breath. Her thoughts were rapid-fire now, making her movements appear as if they were in slow motion. She ripped open a box, pulled out a jar of the black crystals and ran to the door, stopping at the edge of the liquid. She slammed the jar of potassium permanganate onto the floor covered with the hexane.
She looked back toward the office and saw Artemis back on her feet and coming faster than before. She opened the glycerin and poured some over the potassium permanganate. She estimated she had less than ten seconds until the combination ignited. She dropped the glycerin and sprinted between the back wall and the last row of shelving until she hit the corner. She turned left, toward the office complex door. Her lungs and legs burned but focused on all she wouldn’t miss if she made it. Halfway down the warehouse wall, she spotted the door to the offices. She begged her body to give more speed, and to her surprise it did. The timer in her mind went off as she reached the open door. She grabbed the doorknob and lunged inside, hoping to pull the steel door shut in time. She didn’t make it. The blast crushed the door against her body as the concussion and searing heat brought immense pain. Then everything went black.
CHAPTER 77
At first, Kayla was immersed in darkness and felt like she wasn’t breathing. Then she realized she was holding her breath. Her lungs and eyes burned and the smell of burning plastic and gasoline filled her nose. Alarms screamed from somewhere above her and several small explosions vibrated through her body. The right side of her face was cold, and she realized she was facedown on a concrete floor. She opened her eyes, raised her head and looked down a blue cinder-block hallway. Offices lined the corridor on either side until it reached what looked like a display case in an open lobby. She looked back at the deformed steel door. It had been blown shut by the explosion. Cold fresh air rushed in from the lobby and she could hear the air being sucked into the inferno through the broken doorjamb. Slowly it all came back to her. Artemis. RGR. The explosion. The fire—a chemical fire.
She pressed into a push-up and tried to move her legs under her to stand, but excruciating pain ripped through her legs and into her back and she dropped back to the floor. She raised her head again and looked toward the lobby. If fresh cold air was rushing in, there was a chance. If she reached it, she’d survive.
Smaller explosions rumbled behind her, and despite her pain, a feeling of satisfaction warmed her. RGR was destroyed. So were Artemis and her clients. They’d never be able to turn her treatment against the people she was trying to save.
Along with that satisfaction came the realization that she’d also destroyed the treatment that could have saved her life. Sadness dampened her fleeting victory and caught in her throat. Her fate was sealed and she’d survived only to prolong the inevitable for less than a day.
But rising from the ashes of that disappointment came a rock-hard determination. Maybe she did only have hours left, but in that moment she decided she’d spend them with the two people she loved more than anything. She raised herself up and began to pull herself toward the lobby, her arms dragging the rest of her body behind her. Her shoulders and elbows ached with each grab of the cold floor as she inched toward the lobby.
Behind her, the sound of the steel door coming unhinged was followed by the roar from the fire in the warehouse. The airflow rushing down the hallway turned to a hurricane-force wind and she twisted her head to look behind her. The door was gone, and a wall of flame and smoke crawled in along the ceiling. Then something moved into the doorway and stepped into the emergency lighting in the hallway.
Kayla’s mind rejected what her eyes told her. Artemis, or what was left of her, dragged herself inside. Her hair had been mostly burned away and the bloody skin on her head smoldered. Her right arm hung limp, partially covered by burning remnants of clothing. One eye was welded shut and the other swept the hallway, then locked on Kayla like a falcon on its prey. In her left hand she still held the knife, the blade flashing in the light. The hand that held it was burned black, and there were no fingers—they’d been welded into one mass. Artemis limped toward Kayla.
“No!” Kayla yelled. She turned and tried to stand again, but the pain sent her back to the floor. She pressed herself up on her elbows and frantically used her forearms, one after the other, to get to the lobby. Each breath felt like a knife driven into her chest. She was running out of air and began gasping. She looked back and saw Artemis had closed half the distance between them. She turned back and doubled her pace, but her elbows were bleeding now and slipping on the concrete floor.
Then she saw it. It turned the corner from the lobby to the hall. It looked like an alien, with an elongated snout and large round eyes, carrying some sort of assault rifle. Just like the men who had killed her people in the lab. Kayla was devastated when she realized one of Artemis’s men had survived.
Suddenly she felt Artemis standing over her. She stopped and rolled onto her back to face her killer. She wanted to see it coming. Artemis stood over her and raised the knife. Kayla thought of her father, of Emily and Harrison, then of God. She leaned up, looking Artemis in her deformed eye and said, “Go to hell, bitch!”
Two shots rang out from behind her. The wide-eyed shock in Artemis’s mutilated face said she’d been hit and she stumbled back, wildly swinging her knife before collapsing on the floor. Before Kayla could turn, Artemis’s man grabbed her under her arms and dragged her down the hallway and through the lobby, then outside into the cold snow.
Kayla sucked in the chilled air and was immediately surrounded by a rush of people and activity. She recognized the uniform of the King County EMTs as they quickly checked her, lifted her onto a stretcher and began to roll her away. But just behind the EMT on her right, she saw the man with the gas mask reach for his mask and remove it.
She recognized him immediately. Special Agent Reed smiled. “You’re a hell of a lot tougher than you look.”
CHAPTER 78
Kayla never thought her life would end this way. This morning, the University of Washington Medical Center team had set her broken leg and removed the metal shards from her other thigh. The damage had occurred when the blast slammed the door into her body and launched her into the hallway. The way she saw it, the impact that caused those injuries saved her life. She inclined her hospital bed and surveyed the group of physicians and researchers lingering outside her room. Her security seemed to be a top priority. FBI agents, uniformed police officers and even a UW security guard formed a skirmish line that separated the menagerie from the entrance to her room. Kayla was sure her nurses were keeping everyone in line.
They’d been taking samples and running tests all afternoon. After all, she was the only human to undergo treatment with RGR. She felt and looked like she was in her mid-thirties. Just five days ago, she’d been a decent forty-eight. She felt great now, but she wasn’t sure how much the meds going into her arm had to do with that. She’d also spent time giving a statement to a
couple of FBI agents she hadn’t seen before.
The security detail parted, and she saw Special Agent in Charge Reed walk into her room. He’d changed into a white shirt, blue tie and black sport coat. His brown eyes glowed with admiration. But even with his sagging shoulders and a pace that looked like he was fighting a strong headwind, she detected an apologetic undercurrent.
He walked to her bedside and smiled. “Dr. Covington. So nice to see you looking so well.”
Kayla knew Reed understood that she was in this modified ICU because she could die anytime. Still, she appreciated his cheerful veneer.
“Agent Reed, I want to thank you for saving me this morning.”
Reed sat on the edge of her bed. The smile disappeared. “You have that all wrong. I should be thanking you. I know what you did in there. You gave up your chance at life to stop those bastards. And it’s all my fault. If I had looked at all the evidence, I might not have been fooled for so long.”
She reached over and covered his hand. “You did follow the evidence. You did your job. I’m here because of Artemis and Neville Lewis.”
Reed looked toward the door. He stayed quiet for a moment, then gathered himself. “My five-year-old son says you’re a hero. I agree with him.”
Kayla stayed uncomfortably silent. She never knew how to handle a compliment. She looked past Reed to the group outside. “Your guys?”
“They’re from the Seattle office. But you need not worry. The threat no longer exists.”
“How so?”
“Well, after you blew up the warehouse and we took care of Artemis, we found Charlotte Lewis and a Chinese Ministry of State Security operative lying on the pavement in the parking lot.”
“Charlotte Lewis was behind this? And working with the Chinese?”
Reed nodded. “She had a phone on her with an app for payment instructions. She’d crossed back over the border using fake documents. We’re still sorting it all out, but it looks like she manipulated her husband and encouraged him to act. He and this Max Wagner—Neville Lewis’s head of security—hired Artemis. But apparently Charlotte and the Chinese had a much higher bid. Artemis double-crossed Neville. We’ve got him on domestic terrorism and he’ll never see the light of day. With the help of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, we found his children with Charlotte Lewis’s parents in Banff with a Charlotte lookalike. We also found the body of Max Wagner, along with Remy ‘Forrest’ Stone and two other mercenaries at the warehouse. So there are no bad guys left.”
“What will happen to the children?”
“The Canadians will sort that out with our people.”
Kayla saw the concern on Reed’s face. She assumed that as a father of a young boy, he had an idea what those kids might be facing with both their parents in prison. An awkward silence settled over the room as Reed searched for his next words.
“I’m sure you know RGR was destroyed in the fire. But we were able to recover the drives with the data. They were transporting them in aluminum cases that survived the fire. The team at NIH is confident your lab will be able to resume its work.”
“Emily’s lab.”
“What?”
“We both know I’ll be gone soon. The lab and all my intellectual property goes to Emily.”
Reed dropped his head. “I’m so sorry we couldn’t recover the treatment.”
Kayla did her best to laugh. “There you go again.”
Reed nodded and patted Kayla’s hand, then stood. “A couple of people are waiting to see you.” He waved to the agents outside.
When she saw Harrison, the purest form of joy swept over her. The last time she’d felt that was when she and a seven-year-old Emily were bodysurfing waves together in Maui. Sienna walked behind him. Reaching her bedside, Harrison bent down and kissed her forehead. She wrapped her bandaged arms around his neck and held him close. He gently cradled her. This was the closest they’d ever get again. She finally had the only man she’d ever really loved. She’d leave him in hours but love him forever.
She released him, but he held her a few seconds longer before pulling back. Tears welled in her eyes. “I’ll never have the chance to repay you for what you did for me even though I didn’t deserve it.”
Harrison knelt next to her bed and whispered in her ear. “You’re a very special woman, Kayla Covington. I’ll love you for the rest of my life.” He kissed her cheek. She could see in his eyes he knew their time was fleeting. She kept her gaze on him and embraced the warmth that filled her heart.
Over his shoulder, Kayla saw Sienna trying to look invisible. “And you, young lady,” Kayla said wiping her eyes, “I’ll bet you’ve been busy today.” Harrison stood and Sienna walked up beside him.
“How are you feeling?” Sienna asked.
“Feeling no pain.”
Reed stepped to the foot of Kayla’s bed. “Miss Fuller published her latest story this morning. I heard the guys on CNN talking Pulitzer Prize.”
“I’m not sure about that,” Sienna said, dipping her head as her cheeks flushed pink.
“She deserves more than that. Without you, we never could have stopped them. You saved millions of lives, prevented the suffering of millions more, and you may have saved the future of gene editing in humans.”
Sienna looked at Reed. “You didn’t tell her?”
Reed smiled. “No, I didn’t. I thought I’d let you two do it.”
Kayla saw Harrison smile, too.
Sienna pulled out her phone and looked at Harrison. “FaceTime me.” She showed Harrison the number, and he connected and handed the phone to Kayla. Sienna walked to the window and pointed her phone outside.
In Harrison’s phone, Kayla saw a surging throng of people outside covering every square foot available to them. Sienna tilted her phone. The crowd stretched as far as Kayla could see, overflowing onto the University of Washington campus.
“They’ve been gathering since Sienna’s article came out this morning,” Harrison said.
“What do they all want?” Kayla asked.
Sienna turned to Kayla. “They want to let the woman that developed the most beneficial treatment in the history of medicine know they care.”
Kayla covered her eyes and allowed herself to cry for a moment. Her work would continue. Emily could carry it on. But then she realized Emily hadn’t shown up. She hadn’t seen her since the exchange. An unsettling concern rattled her. Wiping her eyes, she looked at Sienna and asked the question they’d all been avoiding.
“Where is Emily?”
Sienna and Harrison shared a frown. “She left after she was cleared by the medic at the falls,” Sienna said. “She said she had to go.”
Kayla’s energy evaporated, replaced by a leaden sadness and a crushing, empty pain she’d felt only one other time in her life. Suddenly everything meant nothing: her discovery, her career, her life. One thought—the nagging thought she’d had since she lost her son—pulled her deeper into the dark quagmire in which she now found herself.
Not again.
CHAPTER 79
Kayla did her best to hide her crushing disappointment. After everything she’d done, she’d never realize the redemption she’d desperately sought from Emily. As if in a stranger’s body, her attention moved to Special Agent Reed, silently asking for an explanation.
Reed glacially shook his head as if not wanting to give up his words. “I’m sorry, Kayla. Our agents took her home at her request. She asked that we respect her privacy, so once we knew the threats were neutralized, we pulled our surveillance.”
There it was. Laid out before her in plain English. Reed’s eyes said he knew she would die in a few hours without her daughter. That was what he was most sorry about. Kayla drew in a deep breath and settled into her bed with her exhale.
She’d learned long ago that she could only control what she could control. The opinions, emotions and resulting actions of others weren’t her responsibility. That philosophy had kept her going for the last ten years. Now it would have to
get her to the end. Not wanting to spend her last hours in despair, she decided she’d accept things as they were.
She was proud of all that she’d accomplished in her short life. RGR would bring great joy to husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, and sons and daughters. But it would be a joy she’d never have the chance to experience herself. It felt as if she were comforting an old friend who had suffered the terrible loss of a loved one. She raised her chin and warmed with glowing pride, then sadness mixed in and sank like concrete into her heart. She looked at Harrison, then Sienna and Reed.
“I need you all to promise me something,” she said. Everyone locked their eyes on hers. As the next words formed in her mind, she felt herself letting go, as she accepted her own death. Aware of every breath she took, a surreal peacefulness swept over her.
“I’ve learned in a very painful way that I couldn’t keep RGR on the side of the angels by myself. Despite everything I did, there was always a dark side to this work. And in my case, it nearly destroyed everything I worked so hard for. Without your help and sacrifice, it could have killed many innocent people.”
Kayla pushed herself up in the bed.
“Soon, I’ll be gone. So I’m asking the three of you to help carry on my work. Conduct the trial, tell my story, and keep it safe and secure. I can see now it will take the vigilance of everyone in the world to keep RGR, and every future endeavor into human gene editing, on the side of the angels for all humankind.”
“I’ll see that your work is carried on.” Harrison said as he took her hand. “You can count on it.”