Final Epidemic (9 page)

I should have guessed,
she seethed, for the first time since the divorce wishing that she still smoked.
A sleepover, for God’s sake. Teenage girls don’t have sleepovers anymore.

The problem was, of course, that she had wanted to believe Katie.

Increasingly, their relationship had foundered in shoal waters over the past year or so—probably, she did not doubt, a combination of the aftereffects of her divorce from Beck and the natural antipathy between mothers and daughters of a certain age. Any kind of interaction between the two of them risked turning into a conflagration of mysterious origin, and the result had been that both of them avoided any but the most mundane discussions.

No big surprise there,
she thought.
Kids learn from watching how their parents act, don’t they?

But when Katie had raised the subject of spending an
extended weekend with J. L. and Carly at the cabin—foolishly Deborah had ignored all the warning signals that had begun blinking deep inside her head.

It had seemed so . . . so damned
touching,
at the time. Over the years, she and Katie and—well, Katie’s father—had spent no small amount of time together in the rural Virginia setting. Deborah had told herself that Katie was craving the simple nostalgia of it, and convinced herself that this was a good sign.

And so the trio of girls had left, driving off in the scarlet LeMans that Carly’s mother had bought the girl the year before, and which always seemed to Deborah to be its own sort of warning flag. Uneasy thoughts had nagged at her all morning, even distracting her during a meeting with an Egyptian industrialist who had run afoul of U.S. import regulations.

Finally, she had excused herself and gone to her private office. Then Deborah had punched in the number she had been given, the cell phone Carly swore would always be with her.

No luck, that time or during the three subsequent calls she had made to it. Each call elicited only a vaguely female, automated cyber-voice advising the caller that—here, Carly’s own voice supplied her name—was unavailable but would accept a recorded message.

Exactly when she had
known
—known completely, without doubt or equivocation—not even Deborah could have said. There had been no growing suspicion, no litany of the other possible circumstances in which Katie might have chosen to become involved. Deborah had simply
known
for an incontrovertible fact that her daughter had not gone where she had said she was going, and that it was time for a mother to act.

She had immediately telephoned J. L.’s parents, whom she once considered close friends; since the divorce from Beck, she had watched all parties reassign the relationship to a far more casual level. They too were concerned—no, they
had not had word from J. L., and yes, they too had left a message with the cyber-femme—but they had not Deborah’s capacity for the gestalt leap to what was truly going on.

A call to Carly’s mother was, as Deborah suspected, a complete waste of time; Joyce Holmes was not even in town, let alone working the telephone to get word of her absent daughter. Deborah had no doubt she could track the woman down, if it proved necessary; but for the moment, there were other options and priorities.

Deborah Stepanovich was not without resources, nor without resourcefulness when the situation required it.

First things first: a very businesslike call to the office of the Van Dale County sheriff, where she took pains to assure that official that she was not merely a suburban hausfrau fretting over a tardy child. In her legal practice, Deborah Stepanovich dealt with corporate leaders and the international power elite; she could, when she wanted to, command respect not unlike that accorded to the heads of minor governments.

Within the hour, the deputy dispatched to the cabin was back on the phone with Deborah: there was no sign the cabin was occupied or had been visited in the previous month.

That her next reaction had been to call her former husband was, to Deborah, somewhat unnerving; that she had actually gone ahead and done it, extremely disturbing; that her automatic first words to him—rather, to his answering machine—had been harsh and accusatory, almost a relief. She had gone through too much, made too many hard decisions, to get to where it proved she now was. And to where Katie still adamantly refused to go.

Deborah had no doubt that the three girls, with Katie as their ringleader, had plotted this . . . this
outrageous
expedition. And whether Beck was privy to the plan or not—
probably not,
Deborah decided;
not even Beck would be that irresponsible
—the fact is that once more they had somehow succeeded in making her the outsider.

She almost got away with it, too,
Deborah told herself, and as it had so many times before, the anger rose anew.

Secrets. She had lived most of her adult life on the wrong side of that wall, trying to accept that there were things she should not know, that she and her daughter needed to turn a blind eye toward.

And so she had tried.

Ultimately, it had all come crashing down on her anyway, and the price had been far too high to ever pay again. And now her daughter—
her only child!
—had chosen to follow the same hateful path.

And that made it hurt all the—

Oh, hell,
Deborah thought, feeling the hot sting of tears she had not known she still possessed.
Damn him, anyway.

She froze, suddenly aware of the pronoun she had used.

In Washington, Andi Wheelwright replayed Deborah Stepanovich’s call again and again.

One missing fifteen-year-old,
she told herself.
Not a major priority, when the whole damn country’s about to go up for grabs.

Andi was still surprised at herself when she found herself punching in the numbers and giving the order.

“There’s three of them,” she said, hearing herself add the professional toughness to her voice. “I imagine at least one of them is using a credit card on the parental account. I want to know where they are and what they’re doing.”

She listened for a moment to the voice at the other end.

“Do it anyway. This is no time for a damn road trip. God knows what kind of trouble they can get themselves into.”

Columbia Falls, Montana
July 21

An instant before the staccato chatter of the assault rifle cut through the sounds of the night, FBI special agent April O’Connor realized that everything had gone terribly wrong. She saw it in the face of Orin Trippett, the shipping clerk—in the sudden way his eyes narrowed, his expression hardened.

The metamorphosis had been swift and unexpected. A moment before, Trippett had shown the kind of behavior most people did when law enforcement credentials are held before their faces: startled, then ingratiatingly submissive.

Trippett had been standing on the shipping docks when they arrived, his breath making wispy clouds in the high mountain night air. Hadley and Morrisee, the other pair on the FBI-ATF tactical team, had elected to wait in the relative shelter of the car. That left April and Jesús Robles, a burly, dark-eyed agent from ATF.

And that’s just dandy with me,
she thought.
For an ATF cowboy, Robles isn’t all that bad.

She had been working with Hadley and Morrisee for almost a week, tracking a shipment of M-16s stolen ten days earlier from a National Guard armory in Missoula, Montana. In that time, she had learned much.

She had, for example, learned that she did not want to work with Hadley and Morrisee ever again.

She was no stranger to crude jokes, and even in the “new” FBI, suggestive language was not uncommon. During her four years in the field, April had learned to deal with it; in most cases, she could establish a working relationship with even the most recalcitrant chauvinist. Robles, at least, had waited almost two days before propositioning April. Unlike the two FBI men, he had accepted her refusal with a good-natured grace and gotten on with the job.

When Robles held up the search warrant for his inspection, Trippett had waved it away with a thin, polite smile. After Robles had disappeared down one of the long passages between the storage racks, Trippett nodded in the direction of the warehouse office.

“Cold night out here,” he said in a mild country twang. “Lowlander’d never guess it was July. Cuppa coffee, ma’am?”

In any other circumstance, she would have smiled. But not tonight, not while serving a search warrant and not while feeling, after the week she had spent, a million years old.

Ma’am?
April thought, and had been inwardly amused at the honorific.
Is that cowboy charm, or do I look as old as I feel?

She declined the offer.

They stood for a moment in awkward silence.

“Whacha’ll looking for, anyway?” he asked.

“It’s on the warrant,” she said in her best official tone, then relented slightly. “It’s just routine, Mr. Trippett. Agent Robles will be back in a moment.”

Trippett shrugged, smiling as if to apologize for some slight. Another long moment passed between them.

“That y’all’s car?” he said finally. “Reason I ask, see, it’s blocking the loading dock. Maybe you could ask them two fellows to move it.”

“Agent Robles will be back soon,” April repeated.

“Well, truck there’s wanting in,” Trippett said, looking past her shoulder. April turned to look.

In that instant, as her eyes slid past his face, she saw his features change from prey to predator. She stepped backward, automatically, trying to put some distance between the two of them.

The instinctive reaction probably saved her life.

Trippett grabbed at her, missing as April twisted sideways and smashed the heel of her left hand hard against his cheekbone. She backed away farther, her hand dropping to her waist, clawing to reach the weapon underneath her light leather jacket. Then she had it, the butt of the automatic hard in her hand as it cleared the holster and leveled on target.

“You move, you
die
!” April screamed, and she could hear the rage and fear in her own voice. Trippett froze, the muzzle of the Glock two feet from his head. Slowly, his hands rose.

The shots came from outside, a burst of three. Another. Then, much louder, a heavier automatic weapon firing in a sustained burst.

From the street, fifteen yards away, a pickup truck squealed to a stop. Whoever was driving had immediately recognized the car parked at the curb as a government vehicle. Before the first of the attackers even jumped to the ground, at least one automatic weapon had opened up at full tilt. Palm-sized blotches of fresh metal, each centered on its own bullet hole, stitched crookedly the length of the sedan. Where a bullet hit glass, the window spiderwebbed into a creamy opacity.

Other weapons began to fire in staccato bursts. One of them sighted on the streetlight outside, which shattered and flared before going dark. April heard someone shout commands, followed by the clatter of armed men moving quickly.

Gunfire walked its way across the loading dock, geysering chips of concrete along its path. April threw herself flat. Bullets, the sound of angry hornets, passed inches over her head.

When she looked up, Orin Trippett was no longer in sight.
Through the cacophony of shots all around her, she could barely make out the sound of running footsteps deep in the warehouse. She raised her head, looking in the direction Trippett had fled, then at the car where she had left Hadley and Morrisee. A fresh fusillade pockmarked the concrete near where she lay, making the decision for her. April rolled hard to the lip of the ramp and slid down into its relative cover.

In a crouching run, April sprinted up the sloping concrete ramp. She reached the head of it just as one of the dark figures outside wrenched open the passenger door of the ruined car. Somehow, the dome light had survived the hail of bullets. It still worked, illuminating the carnage inside.

Ten feet away, FBI special agent Michael F. Hadley slumped crookedly against the steering wheel, staring with unseeing eyes at the red-spattered windshield. Special Agent Thomas A. Morrisee lay crosswise on the seat. His face was out of sight, snugged intimately into the lap of the dead man beside him. What had been the back of his head was now a shattered exit wound; already, a thin wisp of steam rose from the gore into the cold night air.

The man at the door poked at Hadley’s body with the muzzle of the M-16 he held. It was Vietnam-era issue, the old A1 model with the Buck Rogers forestock, and April immediately realized it had to be from the National Guard inventory. She centered her sights on the man and opened her mouth to announce herself and order him to drop the weapon.

At that instant, another figure stepped around the car.

Had he shot from the hip, April would have had no chance. Instead, the second gunman had raised his weapon to aim. It was a costly mistake. April’s first shot struck just below his Adam’s apple, passing upward through his brain stem. The second shot of her double-tap lodged in his upper chest just left of midline, though it was doubtful he felt its impact.

By then it was also too late for the first shooter, whose weapon was partially blocked by the open door of the ruined car. He sealed his own doom when he spun toward April and
tried to fire the M-16 one-handed. The twin blasts of her second double-tap were swallowed in the long chattering burst from the assault rifle as his finger locked in a death spasm on the trigger.

Then the rifle’s magazine ran dry, and in the sudden silence April heard the scream of tires. An instant later, too quickly for her to have reacted, a late-model pickup truck flashed past the bloody tableau and sped into the night.

Rapidly, she checked both of the shooters.

These guys are down for good,
she thought, neither boasting nor apologizing.
I need backup, fast.

She leaned into the ruined car, feeling the blood and broken glass that littered the dashboard. No good: the radio in the dash was shredded. Robles had the handheld with him.