Infected (21 page)

“That she’s dead?”

“No. That she faked her own death. She’s known all along, Tanner. She said I’m my mother’s daughter.”

“That doesn’t mean anything, necessarily,” Tanner said as he took the phone back from Carina, who was gripping it so tightly he had to gently pry her fingers off. “Maybe she just found out. If her people somehow tracked us to your mom—”

“But how? We lost the security guys in the BART station. If one of us does have a tracker somehow, it’s the Albanians who are following the signal, not Sheila.”

“Sheila could have more guys after us. The entire security team, for all we know. But I guess it doesn’t matter now.”

Sheila had told Carina to sit tight, that she’d be there as fast as she could, fifteen minutes tops.

“And she’s bringing the antidote?”

“Yes, she promised.”

“Okay, well, we still need to worry about the tracker. We could be sending out a signal. And even if they’ve run out of drones, or drone cannons or whatever those things were, they could already be on their way to kill us the old-fashioned way.”

The fact that she and Tanner had put down two of their guys wasn’t going to deter them for long, Carina guessed. She shuddered to think that more armed, ruthless operatives could be on their way to the mall right now.

“It has to be me,” Tanner said. “The drone came after me.”

“So it had to be the guy with the beard who put it on you, right? Tanner, think about what happened back at the Dumpster—did he get close enough to you to attach something?”

“I—after he went down. I went over to … to make sure.” Tanner swallowed. “He wasn’t quite dead. He lunged at me. I mean, kind of threw himself at me—I got out of the way fast. I banged into the wall, hit my knee on the ground, just trying to get away from him. It felt like he just wanted to pound me, and I’m not sure I would have noticed him putting something on me.”

“But he could have—”

“Yeah.” Tanner pulled his shirt up and over his head, then began stripping off his shorts.

Carina checked every inch of the blood- and dirt-crusted
cotton, finding nothing other than a few bits of twigs that had snagged on the fabric. She checked the shorts Tanner handed her too; it took longer because she had to go through every pocket, along every seam. When she was finished, Tanner got dressed again in the filthy clothes.

“Damn!” he exclaimed as he pulled the shirt back on. He was feeling along his back, a few inches behind his left armpit. “I can’t see, Car, but there’s something here.”

Carina bent close, her face only inches from his skin. There was something.… At first she thought it was a mole, but soon saw it was a metal bead, buried in his flesh.

“When he attacked me,” Tanner said. “I can’t believe I forgot that. It must have been a backup—like, if they lost their weapon they were still instructed to get the tracker on us. Wow, can you imagine the discipline it would take? If you knew you were finished, you were basically dead, but you still kept your wits about you enough to help the next guy finish the job?”

Carina didn’t want to think about it. “The tracker was supposed to be for me,” she said. “You were just in the way.”

“You were over in the van with the other guy. I guess he figured it was better than nothing. Can you get it out?”

“Yeah, I’ll just pull …”

She closed her thumbnail and fingernail around the small bead and tugged. To her surprise, it didn’t move.

“Ow!” Tanner exclaimed. “I mean, sorry, don’t mind me, just keep pulling. But shit, that hurt.”

Carina squinted and looked closer. She’d thought the device was attached with a simple needle, like the dart containing
the poison, but when she tugged at it, the skin didn’t give way. It must have exploded on impact, embedding itself with multiple barbs, much like a fishhook.

“You sure you want me to do this?” Carina asked doubtfully. Given the technology that the Albanians had proved capable of, she was afraid to find out what would happen.

“You have to,” Tanner said, gritting his teeth.

So Carina anchored her fingers around the bit of metal, took a deep breath, and pulled with all her might.

The sound Tanner made was like that of a wounded bear, half growl and half cry. What came out in Carina’s hand was unbelievable: the bead was connected to half a dozen long, narrow blades jutting outward from the center; these had lanced under the skin and through Tanner’s tissues on impact, anchoring the device firmly; but when they were torn free they left behind pulped, bloody flesh.

Carina sat frozen, staring at the spiderlike assemblage of metal and plastic with an electronic chip at its core. It was easily four inches across, and it had left a wound at least that large on Tanner’s back.

“God, I hope I don’t faint,” Tanner said weakly, clamping his hand over the mess, blood streaming through his fingers. “Get that thing out of here, please, or I will have given up the left side of my body for no good reason.”

Carina snapped out of her shock. “Be right back,” she promised. Then she was out of the truck and running, fast, around the side of the mall. She passed a few employees heading toward the entrance, deliverymen and maintenance workers.

She didn’t know how much time she had. How long had it been since she’d called Sheila—five minutes? Ten? She ran through the parking lot, threading her way between cars, the thing in her hand still warm from Tanner’s body.

Up ahead, an area of the parking lot was roped off where they were repairing the median. The earthmoving equipment sat idle and unoccupied; the crew probably wouldn’t return until Monday. Perfect. When she got within several car lengths from the edge, she threw the tracker as hard as she could, watching it bounce off the edge of the bulldozer’s giant tire before coming to rest in a mound of dirt.

Thoughts of Tanner alone and bleeding made Carina turn and run back. She rounded the corner of the mall again, mindful of people staring at her, hoping they wouldn’t report her to mall security.

There—the truck was where she had left it. She ran for the door and jerked it open, pulling herself up into the driver’s seat and slamming the door behind her.

Tanner was gone.

The backpack was abandoned on the floor. The empty passenger seat was smeared with blood. On the door handle, a bloody handprint.

“Oh God, Tanner, oh no!” Carina wailed.

Behind her, the driver’s-side door was flung open. Carina twisted around in her seat, staring down at Sheila.

The woman gave her a smile that made up in irritation and impatience what it lacked in warmth.

“Looking for your boyfriend?”

“What have you done with him?”

Sheila stepped nimbly out of the way as Carina lunged. Behind her, Baxter waited, leaning back against his long, sleek sedan. It was idling in the shadow of the building, which was how Carina had missed it as she’d run from the truck.

“Baxter …,” she breathed in disbelief. Had he turned them in? Or was he only here because Sheila had summoned him? His face was unreadable behind the mirrored sunglasses.

“Your boyfriend’s fine, other than that hole in his back that he refuses to explain,” Sheila said wearily. “Also, he insists that you went out to get a bagel, but you don’t seem to have one.… Did they run out?”

Carina took a deep breath to keep herself from punching Sheila in the face. “I have to warn you, Sheila, I do not have a lot of impulse control at the moment,” she snarled. “See, there’s this virus that is doing all kinds of crap to me, and I don’t think I can be held responsible for what I do to you.”

Sheila rolled her eyes. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Carina, calm down. I am getting a little tired of your whole teenage angst thing. In these brief few days, you’ve made me wish I’d never agreed to be your guardian.”

“Not as much as Walter, I bet.”

A look passed through Sheila’s eyes that surprised Carina: hurt. Deep, genuine hurt. But she didn’t let her smile slip. “No, I suppose not. Here’s what’s funny, though. You’ve been running around all night looking for the antidote, I take it? Is that right?”

“More or less,” Carina said begrudgingly.

“Well, what on earth do you think was in that dart gun you took off the guard in the BART station?”

Carina’s mouth dropped open. “What are you talking about?”

“The darts that my men were trying to shoot you with. What did you think they were doing?”

“Uh … trying to knock me out, obviously, so they could bring me back to you.”

“Half right. The plan was to bring you in safely while the virus was eradicated from your system. I did want you back here, but only so I could keep you safe. Which, obviously, you can’t even begin to handle on your own.”

“If it really wasn’t you who infected me—or at least ordered it done—how would you even know it had happened?”

“I received an anonymous tip,” Sheila said. “Or more precisely, a threat. The morning of the funeral. I’ve had people trying to trace it around the clock.”

“I don’t believe you,” Carina snapped. “I shot a guy with whatever was in that gun. He … he …” The image of his face, swollen and grotesque, came back to her.

Sheila rolled her eyes. “The antidote is an incredibly powerful drug, and it’s a shock to the system if a person isn’t infected. Don’t worry, he’ll recover fully.”

Other than the two ruined arms
, Carina thought. Her confusion was growing; the earth seemed to be shifting under her. Was it possible that Sheila was telling the truth?

“Look, Carina, I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life,” Sheila said. “I admit there were a lot of things I didn’t handle
well. Believe me—I’d change things if I could. But please, just take a look at this. I’m going to move slow here.…”

She backed up to the car while Baxter watched impassively.

Sheila opened the door and there, inside, was Tanner, looking a lot better than he had a few minutes ago. Meacham was sitting next to him, taping a bandage over the wound in his back. Tanner looked up at Carina, an apology in his eyes.

“Show her,” Sheila said, and Meacham held up a black dart gun identical to the one Carina had left on the floor of the van after shooting the Albanian with it. Horrified, Carina remembered the foam that had spewed from his mouth when she shot him—but Tanner showed no signs of an adverse reaction. “Your boyfriend’s well on his way to recovery now,” Sheila added, as if reading her mind. “Give that antidote another hour and he’ll be feeling a lot more like himself.”

“How do I know you didn’t poison him?” she demanded.

“Oh, please. Look at him. You’re going to have to trust me here, Carina. I’m trying to help you. Yes, it’s true that someone inside the organization is working with the Albanians. Your mother was the first one to figure out that there was a leak, and I’ll admit, when she disappeared I got scared. When Walter started talking about the antidote a few months ago I begged him to stay quiet, but he wanted to get the Army Criminal Investigation Command involved. I …” To Carina’s astonishment, Sheila’s voice broke. “I was afraid something terrible would happen. And I was right. I kept telling Walter to keep things quiet, to stop stirring
things up. We fought about it. The whole time I just … I’ve never been good at … Well, it doesn’t matter now.”

Her face was a twisted mask of anguish and fury, and Carina slowly realized that she had had Sheila all wrong.

Sheila wanted something desperately, enough to compromise her job. But it wasn’t money.

It was Walter.

Sheila had been in love with Walter, but she’d never been able to express it, and he’d mistaken her attempts to dissuade him from his work for evasiveness. He’d suspected her of being the leak, the one who’d reached out to the foreign buyers, when all along she’d been trying to keep him safe.

“Then who is it?” Carina demanded. “Who’s really working with the Albanians?”

“Look, let’s get you the antidote and then we’ll talk,” Sheila said.

“Not until you tell me.”

More eye rolling. “Carina, honey, if you and I are going to live together, you are going to
have
to work on this trust thing. I just fixed up your boyfriend. I spent my Friday evening racing around town trying to find you. Don’t you think you could cut me a little slack? The short answer is that we don’t know. I’ve been in touch with Major Wynnside and I’m meeting with him next week. There’s going to be a covert investigation, to try to flush out the guilty parties without tipping them off that we’re looking. There’s more to it, but—”

“Not a whole lot more, really,” Baxter said.

Sheila looked at him in surprise. Carina did too.

“What are you talking about?” Sheila demanded.

“I said there’s not much more to it. Someone on the inside got tired of working for peanuts, figured there was a lot of money to be made here, and did a little simple cold-calling, trying to drum up business.”

He reached inside his coat, and when his hand came out it was holding a gun, pointed at Sheila.

“You never asked me what I did before I came to Calaveras,” he said mildly.

“What are you …” Sheila looked aghast. Behind her, Tanner got out of the car, his expression wary, and started circling around toward Carina. Meacham clambered out after him and stood looking from one person to the next, clearly confused.

“If you’d ever bothered to ask, I would have told you that I was a business major in college. I was going to take over the family business. Little chain of banks in Wisconsin. My grandfather started it.” He laughed bitterly. “Of course, you may have heard that the banking industry ran into a little trouble back a few years ago. Whoops. Dad narrowly missed going to jail, and we lost the banks. I had to take the first job I could get.”

“But that’s not—”

“And then once I’d been on the job awhile, I figured out that I could make easier money selling classified research than low-interest checking accounts. Besides, you can’t think I
like
working for you,” he demanded, anger edging his words. “You’re a real pain in the ass, Sheila.”

“I’ll have your job for this,” Sheila said angrily. “You’re never going to—”

He shot her.

A neat little hole appeared in the center of her forehead and she stumbled backward, her eyes wide, staring in surprise. Before Carina could scream, Baxter pivoted slightly and shot Meacham, who fell in a heap like a bag of rags.