Final Epidemic (25 page)

He had seen people die before from a single blow to the head, their bruised brain seeping blood inside until all function stopped; he had even killed once or twice this way himself.

But her pupils still respond to light, so we will see. And if she does not—well, I still have the other.

He knelt beside the motionless woman. With the efficiency of an expert, he collected her weapon, field gear and personal effects. With a careless flip of his wrist, he opened her badge carrier.

She is FBI,
he thought, unimpressed.
Their training leaves much to be desired, I believe.

A few feet away, the idiot he had brought with him to bring back this Trippett—
American hoodlums have too much muscle,
the dark man thought with scorn,
and not enough brains
—lay in his own blood, moaning and muttering in a low voice. His right hand was locked over the wound, and had stoppered the pulsating arterial bleeding into a slower trickle that seeped through his fingers. With irritation, the dark man remembered how his companion’s single wild shot had hissed close past his ear. He stepped over April and bent over the man.

Even in the near-darkness, he could see the black stain that was spreading from under the man.

I have no time for fools,
the dark man thought, mentally
addressing the moaning figure.
If by some miracle you do not die, that will teach you to sleep when you should be working.
He reached into the wounded man’s jacket and removed a set of car keys.
Thank you. I will drive myself now.

Again stepping over the motionless FBI agent, he moved through the hole where the door had been. Sprawled on the ground outside, one foot still on the concrete block step and the other folded under at the knee, Beck Casey lay where he had fallen.

Almost nonchalantly, the man grabbed Beck’s shoulder and rolled him roughly onto his stomach. The flashlight reflected wetly from the blood matting the hair just above the nape of Beck’s neck. The dark man repeated the test he had made on April, jabbing one forefinger hard against a cheek of Beck’s posterior.

A person can feign unconsciousness in a number of ways. But long ago, in a dirty little room in Chechnya, he had learned from a battle-hardened sergeant that no truly conscious person—even one trying to gain a momentary respite from the interrogator’s harshest methods—can refrain from involuntary tensing the gluteus muscle against such a jab.

As Beck did, though sluggishly. And when the Russian thumbed up an eyelid to test pupil response, Beck groaned and weakly pulled his head away.

Satisfied, the Russian squatted and searched Beck, methodically pulling each pocket inside out. He made a small pile of the contents, examining each in the flashlight’s beam. There was surprisingly little, though what there was told the dark man the most important fact.

Ah,
he said to himself,
am I to believe most Americans carry two—no, make that three—different sets of identity papers?
He studied the photos on each of the driver’s licenses and compared them to Beck’s features.
So. Without doubt, he is a government operative. I would guess CIA, and—
he fingered the two twenties and a single five-dollar bill in Beck’s wallet—
certainly an underpaid one.
He
smiled at his own joke and stuffed the money in his own pocket.

And now, my heavy-footed little friend, it seems that the idiot who drove me here is feeling unwell. Perhaps you could provide me with directions? Never mind—I have a good map.
He dropped the wallet carelessly to the ground and picked up one of the other items April had carried.
Well—let us begin, eh? You have things to tell me before I go.

Beck Casey was aware that he was being pulled by his arms over what felt, and tasted, like mud and weeds. His head ached agonizingly, limply lolling facedown and occasionally bouncing against the uneven ground. Once, when he mustered enough strength to lift his head a few irritated inches, he found himself looking at the slightly scuffed, pointed toes of what appeared to be black leather shoes. He noted, with a remote curiosity, that they had no laces.

His head fell forward again, and all he could see was the damp grass over which he was sliding, sliding, sliding, his hands held high in some powerful grip. His eyelids drooped, and Beck drifted away.

And then they stopped, and he felt himself being lifted like a large, inert sack, held on his own unsteady legs by pressure against his chest while something cold tightened around first one wrist, then the other. Beck’s eyelids fluttered open, and he looked into eyes as empty as death.

He was not quite hanging from, not quite leaning against, a metal framework. Despite all the rust he could feel powdery against his bare arms, the frame was unmoving and solid. Beck tilted his head back, wincing from the sharp pain as his wound pressed against the slightly inclined I-beam support. Above him, handcuffs that could have been FBI issue were locked around his wrists, threaded over and around a short, horizontal length of angle iron. Whatever they used this for, Beck realized, it had been built to last.

His mind was beginning to clear slightly, and he realized
his legs had also been secured to the steel frame. The dark man who had dragged him here straightened and stepped back. Then the stranger reached around to the small of his back and pulled out an object that glinted even in the light of the thin moon.

“I’m a police officer,” Beck said, pushing each word past a tongue that felt thick and only partially under his command.

“No,” said his captor, in a voice that, despite the accent, sounded almost cheerful to Beck. “I do not believe you are.”

He moved closer and bent in a casual manner. Beck felt a tugging at his waist and the coolness of the predawn air on suddenly bared flesh.

The dark man again stepped back and held the knife close to Beck’s face so that it filled his vision. The blade, Beck could see, was honed razor sharp, scalloped with serrations almost to its needle-tipped point.

“You must tell me about yourself. And about other things as well.”

April O’Connor felt a terrible urgency, though she could not remember why. It did not matter. She had vomited, and the acid of it still burned her throat; it did not matter, either. Almost nothing mattered, except for the voice inside her head, urging her to stand, to kneel, to crawl if she must—but to
go,
to get out of this dark and evil-smelling place now.

Her fingers scrabbled for a hold, and she pushed with first one leg, then the other. In front of her was only more darkness, punctuated with an occasional pained sound that she had thought was hers until now. Something made noises, moved fitfully over there; April did not want to go in that direction.

She rolled her head, feeling the starburst of more pain as she did, until she was facing her other side. A rectangular patch—actually, two of them, though April had begun to understand she was seeing double—was slightly less dark than
its surrounding blackness. It was, the voice inside told her, a way out; the thought spurred her to increase her efforts.

By inches at first, she crawled. By the time she got to the doorway, an infinity later, she had mustered enough strength to push herself to her hands and knees. She almost decided to rest there awhile, head hanging and mouth open, until a surprisingly vivid picture came unbidden to her mind. It was of an olive-skinned man, his shirt torn open and two ragged rents weeping blood, lying open-eyed on a cold concrete floor. She saw hands that may have been her own frantically pushing hard against the unmoving chest.

It was, for some forgotten but very important reason, an image that shamed her and mocked her desire to rest. She pushed herself through the doorway.

There was a drop of perhaps two feet, and she was barely able to break her fall with her hands. A concrete block lying on its side scraped her palms, dripping another measure of pain into the already full bucket of her agony.

The sky was still alive with stars, though on the far horizon a thinning of the darkness implied rather than indicated where the sun would ultimately emerge. Still, it gave April an objective, a direction away from the blackness she was fleeing.

Her mind was gradually clearing, April realized, at least to a certain degree. She remembered in snatches of clarity, like seeing individual scenes from a movie. She recalled approaching the trailer in the night, kicking through the door. She could picture a man lifting a gun toward her, and the bright flash seen past her gunsights illuminating everything for a frozen moment. She remembered calling back to Dr. Casey to check—

Casey. She stopped short, suddenly frantic. Ignoring the renewed pain it caused, she swiveled her head in every direction, trying to probe the darkness surrounding her. The historian had been with her, and now he was not. That realization, more than any other factor, cut through the patches
of fog that still clouded her mind. It fired April, fueled her to push herself upright on her knees and then, haltingly, to her feet. She stood, swaying, and strained her ears to hear around her.

There was something, a sound that did not fit with the other sounds of the night. It came from her right, somewhere past the slapping noise of water against rock. April lurched in that direction, unsteady on her feet.

She had gone only a few yards when she heard it again, much louder this time and with an undercurrent of agony that raised goose bumps on her arms. And, separate from it, a low droning voice that sounded almost conversational. Dimly, she thought she could see the outline of a man standing in front of what looked like a framework scaffold. A shape she could not see clearly twisted against the uprights, arms high, hanging.

She took another step, stumbled and then fell again to her hands.
Help him!
her mind screamed, and she scrabbled forward again crabwise in the grass.

Her hands touched metal, a pipe of some sort, and she seized it, intending to rush forward swinging with all her strength. And then she felt the grooved foregrip beneath the barrel, and the smooth wood of the shotgun’s stock lying in the grass where she had left it. She snatched it up in both hands.

Still on her knees, April O’Connor racked the pump action, back and forward. Using the butt stock to support her, she pushed to her feet. From her throat burst a wordless scream of fury and challenge and perhaps terror defied. She staggered toward the figures to her front.

Except now there was only one, hung by the arms from a framework pylon at the edge of a flooded quarry. April stopped next to it, shotgun at her shoulder. She saw Beck Casey’s eyes look at her wildly, and then blink in disbelieving recognition. The sound of something heavy, moving fast, crashed through the underbrush thirty feet away.

April fired into the sound, worked the action of her shotgun and fired again. The sounds of flight continued, fading with distance. Then she heard a car motor start up, out of shotgun range, and she fired once more. She was answered by the sounds of wheels spinning on a gravel road, speeding away.

She turned to the hanging figure. He was naked from the waist down, and a trail of blood flowed steadily to the ground down his right thigh.

Before she could speak, he did.

“Get me down from here,” Beck said, his words clear through clenched teeth.

“He’s in treatment now,” Andi Wheelwright said, the strain in her voice evident despite the professional tone she affected. “They’re stitching up the knife wound.”

She paused, taking a deep breath.

“I guess we’re lucky the guy was such a sick son of a bitch,” Andi said. “It’s a puncture wound—moderately deep, but not a long slash. Beck said he stuck the knife into his thigh and just left it there. He’d ask a question, and give the blade a twist. Patient guy. He expected to have a long time alone with our boy. I don’t want to think what would have happened if O’Connor hadn’t gotten there.”

“How’s she doing?” Larry Krewell asked. He had not intended to limit the question to the FBI agent’s physical injuries, but he found that he was relieved when Andi chose to interpret it that way.

“She has a concussion, the doctors say,” Andi replied. “The X ray didn’t find any skull fracture, but they’re doing an MRI right now. She’ll be in the hospital for a while, but it doesn’t look like anything permanent. Thank God.” There was a pause. “The two of them dragged each other back to their car—a quarter mile over a gravel road. It took an hour, and Beck says then she argued over who’d make the radio call.”

In her tone was grudging admiration.

“So what now, Andi?”

“The second man in the trailer—a local thug, the cops say; probably just beef hired for the occasion—bled to death before the ambulance arrived. That leaves Casey as the only one who even knows what Knife Man looks like. I’ll check with the Bureau to see who they can assign to Casey. With her head injury, I’d guess that O’Connor’s out of the game.”

“I see.”

“Look—suddenly, we’re not the only ones who want Trippett, Larry. Who’s the psychopath with the knife? He’s the wild card in all this. He’s looking for Trippett, who is out there somewhere carrying around a bottle full of virus. And I’m sitting here, wasting oxygen. We need to find that filth.”

“And we need Casey, specifically, to look for it. Does that sum it up?”

“Casey will be in pain, but the doctors say he’s ambulatory.” Wheelwright frowned at Krewell’s expression. “There is no time to shed tears, Larry. Casey has to do what he has to do.”

Krewell nodded.

A slow flush colored Andi Wheelwright’s face. “I’ve read his files, Larry. Of course I have—look, they brought him out to the Farm to lecture a class of trainees. He obviously doesn’t remember it, but I was one of them. He was
good,
Larry. Even after what happened in Russia, he still is. He knows biological weaponry; he understands terrorists. We need his mind on this.
All
of his mind.”

“It’s a fine plan,” Krewell said, watching her closely. “But what about his daughter? Are you going to tell him?”