“Holy shit.”
The stricken man finally just ran out of air. All motion stopped. He was bent over backward, almost double, his head within a few inches of his heels.
Careful not to step on the broken glass, Chance bent over the man. He carefully took off the gas mask.
Eyes rolled back in his head, every muscle taut in a fierce rigor, the man seemed almost frozen.
“He must have torn his suit,” Chance muttered to himself. The Cubans must have vaccinated everyone with access. Why didn’t the vaccination protect him?
“Let’s get our asses through the air lock and get the fuck outta here,” Carmellini said loudly.
They stood in the vacuum room for the longest time, neither man willing to be the first to leave.
“We must go,” Carmellini said at last, after almost ten minutes of suction, after using a high-pressure jet of air from a hose to blast every nook and fold of the coverall.
They hung the coveralls on the nails. Stood in the next air lock, were vacuumed again, then they were out, still wearing their gas masks.
“We might kill everyone in Havana,” Chance said.
“We’ll never know it,” Carmellini shot back. “We’ll be in hell before they are.”
“Can’t figure out why the vaccination didn’t protect him.”
“Later. How the hell are we going to get out of here?”
“The easiest way is to just walk out the front door, shoot both the guards, and walk around the corner to the van.”
“They’ll see us going up the stairs.”
“The elevator. We’ll use the elevator. Keep the pistols where they can’t see them.”
“You are fucking-A crazy, man. One crazy motherfucker.”
The elevator was right there with the door open. Chance walked in. When Carmellini was aboard, he pushed the button to take it up.
With their pistols down by their legs, they walked out of the elevator, straight for the guard shack at the front door.
Only one man was there, reading something. He looked up as they approached. Now he stood.
“Qué pasa—?” he began, and Chance shot him in the forehead from six feet away.
The guard toppled over backward.
Chance and Carmellini kept going, out the door at a walking pace, down the sidewalk under the streetlights looking like two refugees from a flying saucer, and around the corner. They jerked open the rear door of the van and jumped in.
Chance ripped off the mask.
“Let’s get the hell outta here,” he roared at the driver, who was as surprised at their sudden appearance as the guard had been. “Drive, damn it, drive!”
As the van jostled and swayed through the city streets, they sat in the back staring at each other, waiting for the disease to hammer them.
Waited, and waited, and waited …
CHAPTER TWELVE
Six hours after William Henry Chance and Tommy Carmellini walked out of the University of Havana science building, Dr. Bouchard was on his way to Washington via Mexico City with two of the culture samples in his diplomatic pouch. Three hours later one of the lowest-ranking mission employees with diplomatic status left on a plane to Freeport, there to transfer to a flight to Miami, and then on to Washington. This employee carried the other two samples in her diplomatic pouch.
Chance and Carmellini were dropped at their hotel after changing clothes in the van. “Burn those clothes immediately, and don’t touch them with your bare hands,” Chance told the driver.
At the hotel both men went straight to their rooms, stripped, and stood in the shower for as long as they could stand it.
Standing under the shower head Chance waited for the first symptom to announce its arrival. Every now and then he shuddered, despite the hot water, as cold chills ran up and down his spine. He had a raging headache. When he got out of the shower he toweled himself dry, got in bed and arranged a wet, cool washcloth across his forehead.
The lab worker writhing on the floor, the startled face of the guard the instant before he died — these scenes played over and over in his mind. The death throes of the lab worker were bad enough, but the face of the guard, when he saw the pistol rising, saw the silencer, knew Chance was going to shoot: that face Chance would carry to his grave.
He shouldn’t have had to kill the guard. The truth of the matter was that he panicked when the lab worker died horribly; he stood in the air locks thinking he or Carmellini would be next, any second. He had wanted out of that building so badly he had thrown caution to the wind and bolted blindly for the front door. It was a miracle that there weren’t two or three guards standing by the main entrance, that they didn’t have guns out as the two figures from biological hell stepped out of the elevator.
Ah, the stink of Lady Luck.
Lying there in the darkness he thought about microorganisms, wondered what was in the sample vials, wondered why the lab worker, who must have been immunized, died such a painful, horrible death.
One thing was certain: The Cubans were well on their way to having biological weapons. And the only conceivable target was the United States.
With his head pounding, unable to sleep, he turned on his small computer and typed an E-mail reporting the intrusion and his findings. After he encrypted the message, he used the telephone on the desk to get on the Web and fire the message into cyberspace.
Then he went back to bed, and finally to sleep.
The American stood amid the shards of glass looking at the body of the lab worker. He wore a protective garment that covered him head to toe and a mask that filtered the air he breathed. He looked at everything, taking his time, then exited the laboratory through the air lock.
Alejo Vargas was waiting for him. He said nothing, merely waited for the American to talk.
“The virus has apparently mutated,” the American said finally. “I thought the strain was stable, but …” He gave the tiniest shrug.
“Mutated?”
“Possibly.”
“Come now, Professor. I have not asked for scientific proof. Tell me what you think.”
“A mutation. A few days with the electron microscope would give us some clues. We need to do more cultures to be sure. It would help if I could dissect the dead man, see how the disease affected him.”
“Like you did the others?”
“You told me they were killers, condemned men. We had to know!”
“What if the disease gets away from you at the morgue? What if it spreads to the general population?”
“With the proper precautions the danger is minuscule. Man, the advancement of human knowledge requires—”
“No,” Vargas said. He gestured to the lab. “If that gets away from us, for whatever reason, there won’t be a human left alive on this island.”
“Then don’t ask me for opinions,” the professor snapped. “You can guess as well as I.”
Alejo Vargas’s eyes narrowed to slits. His voice was cold with fury. “I wanted to use an anthrax agent, but no, you insisted on poliomyelitis. Now you tell me it mutated, as I feared it might.”
The damned fool, the American thought. Of course he had insisted on a virus — for Christ’s sake, his life work was studying viruses, not bacteria.
Vargas continued, pronouncing the sentence: “We spent all this money, built the warheads, installed them, and we took huge risks to do it. Don’t talk to me of acceptable risks.”
The professor was not the type to calmly submit to lectures from his intellectual inferiors. “Don’t get wrathy with me, Vargas. You’re a stupid, ignorant thug. I didn’t design the universe and I can’t take responsibility for it. I merely try to understand, to learn, to increase the store of man’s knowledge.”
The American lost his temper at that point and spluttered, “Biology isn’t engineering, goddammit! Sometimes two plus two equals five.”