Some Gave All (29 page)

“Hello?” said the voice. “Answer the question.”

Vincent mouthed
Lena.

“I thought you knew,” Farris said. “Lena Mueller took her out of here earlier tonight.”

“
What?
How would we know that?”

“The other operative in the facility,” he replied, and Vincent frowned at him in surprise. This was news. But Farris gave his head a shake.

“We don’t
have
another operative in the building.” Vincent was surprised the voice would be so forthcoming. “So you’re saying Aliyah Patel has been abducted?”

“Or rescued.” At a sign from Vincent, Farris hung up.

“That was almost fun,” he said.

I will not kill him
, Vincent thought.
At least, not now.

* * *

Vincent returned to J.T.’s with Farris in tow and told Cat, Tess, and J.T. everything that had happened. Cat and Tess traded somber looks. Their best theory continued to be that Mazursky had abducted Aliyah and murdered Lena Mueller, but for what specific purpose, they didn’t know. Leaving Farris in J.T.’s custody, they divided up and began the search of the five crime scenes they had not already examined for components of the antidote. Cat and Tess took the two near each other in Greenwich Village: one on Houston Street, and one near the Mulberry Street branch of the New York Public Library.

To their dismay, they discovered hiding places at each domicile, one in the wall and one in the floor. And no vials, jump drives or other items that could have been used in the formulation of an antidote.

“Someone’s beat us to it,” Cat said into the phone to Vincent.

“I was luckier in crime scene number four,” Vincent announced. “That’s Attenborough on the list. I’ll send you a—”

And then he was cut off.

“Vincent?” Cat half-shouted into the phone. “Are you there?” But she was speaking to dead air.

“Not good,” Tess said. “Keep trying, and let’s go to the scene.”

The squad car’s lights and sirens fully engaged, Tess wove through traffic while Cat hit redial a dozen times, two dozen. Her stomach was clenched in knots. She had a terrible feeling that Vincent was in real trouble and she couldn’t shake it no matter how hard Tess tried to talk her out of it. Tess ran down possible scenarios: Cell phones in New York were notorious for dropped signals. Someone may have arrived on scene and Vincent cut the call so as to remain concealed. All those things had happened to them on cases. There was no reason to expect the worst.

“I can’t shake it,” Cat said, and they looked at each other with sudden realization.

“Fear pheromone flashback,” Tess suggested, and Cat nodded.

“I guess I need that antidote too,” she replied.

“Number four” was where a man named Nils Attenborough had been found shredded to pieces. It had not been his home, only where his homicide had occurred. They drove through the city into blocks of abandoned, burned-out buildings mixed with occupied structures. The ones that were being used were in no better condition than the ones that weren’t. Brick and sooty snow, trash, rust and neglect greeted them at every turn. Deeper they went, past chain-link fences guarding empty lots and a huge, snowy pit that might have been the start of a massive construction project, long abandoned. There the traffic thinned and Tess took off the lights and siren, opting for the element of surprise in case they needed some kind of advantage. They didn’t know. Vincent hadn’t returned any of Cat’s calls.

Cat verified the address as they pulled off the street and trundled into a grid of disintegrating factories and storage facilities. As she opened her door, it began to snow. She looked up at the angry gray sky and crossed her fingers for a quick, light snowfall. She and Tess drew their weapons and kept to the shadows as they approached the front door of their destination. The body had been discovered on the ground floor about thirty feet to the east of the foyer.

They went inside with flashlights on. The floor had once been covered with small, white octagonal tiles. Hundreds of them had come loose and the wind must have bunched them into ominous little piles like arcane hex signs. Their feet crunched over broken glass. The walls were weeping with decay and mold.

They moved past a stairway toward the crime scene. Then in the darkness, Cat heard a sound that thrilled her heart then froze her blood: the fierce roar of a beast.

A beast who was not Vincent.

Answered by a gunshot.

Followed by a howl of agony.

* * *

Gasping, the monster lay in a pool of blood, and Aliyah shrieked and clung to the man in the coat, the one who had taken her from Nurse Mueller. The monster had handed the man a little metal bottle and then it had tried to attack him.

Now it was changing. Now it was becoming the man Aunt Indira had taken her to see in the jail.

Her daddy.

She screamed and shrank back against the man in the coat. Then her daddy looked up at her and tried to stretch out his hand.

“Ali, I didn’t kill your mama,” he groaned. “They made it look like I did it. But I didn’t. I loved her. And I love you.”

“Daddy?” she whimpered. Now she tried to push against the man in the coat but he held her fast.

“Stay here. He’ll kill you,” the man whispered.

“Let her go to him,” another man said as he stepped from the shadows. Aliyah recognized him. He had come to see her in the hospital.

The man in the coat let go of Aliyah. She stood uncertainly, staring down at all the blood and the man who had been a monster, who had killed Aunt Indira. She knew that in her heart. And yet, somehow, she also knew that he had done it for her.

The nice man stepped forward and took the gun away from the man in the coat. He had shot her daddy with that gun.

Aliyah was bewildered, and she began to cry.

And then the nice lady from the hospital ran into the room with another lady, whose skin was close to the color of Aliyah’s. And their arms were around her and the nice man was kneeling on the floor beside her daddy, trying to help him, and the man in the coat was on the floor, too, and they were tying him up, or something.

Her daddy said to the nice man, “You don’t know what’s coming. You don’t know.” The nice man looked very unhappy and the darker-skinned lady walked Aliyah out of the room. Then the nice man came out and the other lady walked with the man in the coat.

And her daddy never did come out of that building again.

* * *

As Catherine kept her gun pointed squarely at Agent Mazursky’s back, Vincent examined the two vials they had just taken from him: he’d beaten Cat and Tess to two of them, but Vincent had gotten to Attenborough’s first. That made four they had retrieved from the first six homicide victims, plus Howison’s. Two were still missing, as was whatever had been concealed in the case with Lafferty’s flag.

As they walked out of the building, Tess, who was carrying a weeping Aliyah, said, “Where to now?”

“My brownstone?” Sky Wilson said from across the walkway.

“What the hell?” Catherine blurted.

He was straddling a motorcycle parked beside Tess and Catherine’s squad car. He shook his head at their looks of surprise and said, “You
do
remember that I’m a police detective, right? And that I know how to follow a trail of clues?”

Vincent’s default wariness kicked in, but Wilson raised a hand and said, “I haven’t figured out all of it but I know you’re more than my Yoda-partner’s boyfriend in every sense of the word
more
and it’s cool. Your secret is safe with me. Whatever it is, exactly.”

Not at all convinced of that, Vincent knew they didn’t have time to argue the finer points of secret-keeping, and J.T.’s was out of the question while Farris was held there.

“We should take Wilson up on his offer. J.T. has company and we need to figure out what’s going on asap.”

Catherine and Tess concurred. With Aliyah in Tess’s arms, they drove Mazursky to the brownstone in their squad car. Wilson rode his motorcycle and Vincent took Mazursky’s vehicle, a white panel van. The inside was tricked out with beast-strength restraints, a cattle prod, and a tranq gun. Shyam Badal’s mobile prison. He remembered how unhinged he had become when the fear beast—Badal—had lurked nearby. Badal must have somehow repressed the release of the pheromone just now because Aliyah had been there. Nor had it triggered as he lay dying.

They alerted J.T. that more pieces of the antidote had been found, then convened at the brownstone for a debriefing before Tess took the vials to J.T. It was still snowing, flakes heavy and gray, and Vincent’s sense of urgency kicked in. Tess would have to leave soon.

“So Badal was the fear beast,” Vincent said to Mazursky as the group placed their prisoner in a chair and Catherine kept a weapon trained on him. “And he killed Indira Patel and Julia Hogan in revenge?”

“He was only supposed to look for the antidote. He promised to do so if I let him loose. But he went after them immediately.”

“Aliyah was your leverage. You got him to resume looking by bringing her to him.”

“Yes.”

Wilson had taken Aliyah to a bedroom and was offering her snacks from the stash of organic vegan offerings in his fridge. She had apologized a dozen times for raking his face.

Mazursky blew air out of his cheeks. “You have no idea what’s going on. There’s another world out there, one that blows past your notions of beasts. What we’re dealing with has gone way, way beyond the scope of your understanding.”

“Then make us understand,” Cat said coldly.

“We’ve been working day and night to get fully informed, but we know we don’t have all of it. Badal was in jail for murder and we used that leverage to get his consent for experimentation. We attempted to duplicate what we knew of this new beast’s genetic makeup using Badal. We had some success, as you have all experienced. But it is
nothing
compared to what’s out there. Trust me when I tell you that.” He looked straight at Vincent. “It will make Afghanistan look like a picnic.”

“Which is why you murdered people to collect all the pieces of the antidote,” Tess said.

“Same old FBI,” Catherine drawled, and Mazursky shrugged, unapologetic.

“As I said before, extraordinary times require extraordinary measures. This thing was imprisoned here in New York City by its makers, but it escaped. We had three operatives on the inside but they never got close enough to actually observe it. And they died when it broke out. We don’t know where it is, but we do know we have to get rid of it.”

“Why should we believe you?” Catherine asked.

He pulled out his smartphone. “Here. This is why you should believe me.”

The screen revealed a close-up of a soldier’s face. Vincent had seen fear before, but nothing like this. The man’s face was distorted, jaw distended, eyes about to pop from their sockets. Fear was turning this human being into another entity, something never human again. Agonizing to see, unbearable to imagine. Sweat poured down the man’s face, and then blood, as a shimmering arm stretched forward and with talons instead of fingers, gouged into his forehead and pulled his face down like a sheet of wrapping paper. What was beneath…

The person holding the camera was crying. Then there was shrieking as the camera pointed to a ceiling, whirled, revealing a room of immobilized soldiers dropping one by one into gouting pools of their own blood and organs.

“This is the escape. I have more footage.”

Vincent nodded. “We should watch it all.”

“Agreed,” Catherine said thickly, and he loved her for her courage and her commitment to what clearly was their mission. It was coming time for Team Beast to step up.

“We need to destroy this thing,” Mazursky said.

“How can you, even if J.T. can recreate the antidote?” Tess cut in. “If no one can get near it to inject the serum…”

“Pheromones,” Mazursky said. “Once the antidote is created, we’ll release it in its air space.”

“But you just said that you don’t know where it is,” Tess argued, and then Vincent saw the light dawn on her face. “Vincent…”

“Can track it,” Mazursky finished.

And will
, Vincent thought. He saw the tension in Catherine’s face and heard her accelerating heartbeat; he knew how afraid she was for him… for them… and he also knew that she would never ask him not to do it. It was what they were, who they were, and it was what they did. Catherine would throw her lot in with him, do everything she could to back him up and keep him safe, his partner in every sense of the word.

“We’ll back you up,” Tess said, and his heart was warmed.

“And me too, of course,” Mazursky added.

It was settled then, and all parties in the room took a moment to process the nature of the threshold they were about to step across. It was one they might not come back across. But it meant the world to Vincent that they would do it together. For so many years, he had been utterly cut off from the world, and everything that he had been had been put in stasis: a man who cared, who wanted to make a difference, to find meaning in service to others. Like his brothers, who had died saving lives.

Vincent gazed at Catherine, and she raised her chin slightly and nodded at him. It was the most intimate gesture they had ever shared.

She is the best of me.
Something moved inside him and he thought,
Whatever happens next, it was worth it. Even if I die.

The moment passed, their pact sealed. It was time to get down to business.

“How many parts of the antidote have you collected?” Mazursky asked them.

Catherine told him that they had two, Howison’s and Tiptree’s. He looked mildly disappointed. “I had Badal seek out the vials that you now have in your possession.” He turned to Vincent. “His drug protocol enhanced his sense of smell to a degree possessed not even by you. He literally sniffed them out like a bloodhound.

“The flag has been a problem for us. We suspect Muirfield got wind of an attempt to smuggle out evidence of the beast experiments in Afghanistan and intercepted it en route to the Riley home. From what we have gleaned, it’s a catalyst that sets the transformative process in motion, common to many of the formulae used on the subjects. We think it’s needed to trigger the antidote. That without it, the serum won’t work. And we need it. Desperately.”