“I was at the restaurant,” Nate panted, his cheeks wet. “I came over as soon as I heard. We always do the control group here in the afternoons, so I hoped…”
On the screen her building was burning, and she couldn’t quite make herself believe it. Their computer. Their data. When was the last time she’d made a backup? Their research subjects, which she was hoping to postmortem—gone.
“Jill…” There was something on his face, a high color at the tops of his olive cheeks, a weird shininess in his eyes. He took one of her hands.
“At this time we know that there was a lab down in the basement of the building, run by Dr. Jill Talcott. Officials think this was the source of the explosion but have not revealed the nature of the experiments.”
It was like a slap in the face, hard, stinging. This wasn’t just any explosion. This wasn’t going to work and finding something had happened to her building, her lab, something terrible and inconvenient as hell but not her fault. This was her explosion.
She sucked in air. She was still floating, still remote, still held at arm’s length from life by the fever’s grip. But this thing came through all that like a speeding bullet.
Dead. My fault.
She heard sirens from the distance, growing louder.
“Jill?” Nate’s face, streaming with tears, floated in front of her eyes. She pushed off it, like a swimmer pushing off a raft, and willed herself back into unconsciousness.
11
You thought in your own mind, I will scale the heavens; I will set my throne high above the stars of God, I will sit on the mountain where the gods meet in the far recesses of the north. I will rise above the cloud banks and make myself like the Most High. Yet shall you be brought down to Sheol, to the depths of the abyss.
11.1. Calder Farris
The first thing Calder did after the explosion was find a bathroom and clean the blood off his face. Flying debris and glass had assaulted his exposed skin like shrapnel. Little dark spots showed where particles had embedded themselves. He left them; he didn’t have time to dick with that now.
The second thing he did was call Dr. Rickman, his superior at the DoD. This was no longer a solo mission, Calder said; this was a possible XL3.
The XLs were codewords they used in the field when there was something definite to report. An XL1 was the discovery of a new weapon, typically something on the order of a bomb. An XL2 was a really big bomb. An XL3 was an unknown weapon of mass destruction.
In retrospect, it might have been overdoing it. But there were two ways to play it safe here. The first way to play it safe was by assuming the worst in order to get the situation under control as hard and fast as possible. The second was to be leery of calling an XL3 until he had proof positive that’s what it was. It all came down to his faith in the powers of devastation of the thing he was chasing.
By dawn, Calder had everything the DoD could give him.
7:00 A.M.
Lieutenant Farris, Lieutenant Hinkle, and six other men in long black trench coats and dark glasses walked into Swedish Hospital in Seattle. They had a hardened, regimental look and the gait of a death squad. They knew where she was being kept: the second floor. According to their information, the detective in charge of the investigation was up there now. Calder didn’t bother with anyone less than that. When they emerged from the elevator and were questioned by a young officer, Calder flipped his ID and kept walking.
By the time they reached Seattle Police Department’s Detective Mathers, they were expected. Mathers stood in the hall, hands on his hips, his officers around him. Calder’s eye flickered to Mathers’s badge, verifying the name.
“Detective Mathers? Calder Farris, FBI. We’re authorized to take over here, as I think you’ll find if you contact your—”
“He already called.” Mathers looked wary and excited. He jerked his head down the hall, signaling Calder to a private conversation. Calder followed.
“What’s the FBI’s interest?” Mathers asked when they were alone. He was a lean man, trying to look younger than his forty-odd years. He had a conspiratorial air, chewing his gum in an anxious rhythm. Calder, whose dark glasses were still in place, treated him to a stony, blank face. Mathers lost a little of his bonhomie.
“We’re investigating the possibility of terrorist activity.”
“Thought so. Is it because of this lab run by Dr. Talcott? You got a tip on her or somethin’? Some reason to think she’s in league with Al-Qaeda or someone like that?”
Calder said nothing, letting Mathers draw his own conclusions. The FBI on a terrorist investigation was a common-enough story. It would hold for a while, keep this thing from attracting the interest of the wrong people.
“We have the fire department and an arson expert on-site,” Mathers said.
“We just sent in our own. They’ll be taking over. For now, we’re on media blackout.”
Mathers frowned at this, scratched his chin. “You want me to stick around? Go over—”
“I want you to clear out. You and your men. You have notes? Photographs? Information on Dr. Talcott? You will have interviewed her. I’d like a transcript.”
“She’s unconscious. Been asleep since we brought her in. Doctors advised that we let her. She’s had a fever over a hundred and two. Viral, they think.”
Calder felt relieved but didn’t show it. These past few hours had been frustrating, waiting for everything to be put into place, thinking about what Talcott might be telling the Seattle police inside this very building while he waited outside like a cuckolded husband.
“Fine. Just hand over whatever you have. If I have questions, I’ll call you.”
Mathers was getting pissed at the brush-off. “I thought the FBI worked in conjunction with local authorities. This is our university, our kids.”
“This is a national security issue, Detective Mathers, and no longer your responsibility.”
Within five minutes, Calder’s men had the entire floor cleared of Seattle’s finest. Objective achieved: contain the situation; eliminate outsiders. Mathers would probably hold up his reports for hours to make a point. Let him. Calder had Talcott, and he’d already done his own background check on her.
He accepted a paper cup of cold water from one of his associates and drank it in a gulp. He removed his coat and went in, alone, to see her.
There, in the hospital bed, making barely a mound under the sheets, was a woman. Calder walked to the foot of the bed and took off his glasses, stared. Her arms stuck out of the hospital gown, thin and pale and freckled. Her hair was a nondescript shade of dirty blond and was unwashed (probably sick for a few days at least, Calder noted). Her face was narrow, aquiline, unexceptional, but not unattractive and not without character. It reminded him of the faces of plainswomen he’d seen in photographs: hard, not with denigration, the way hookers’ faces are hard, but with a rocklike determination to take whatever life threw their way. She might prove stubborn, but she was female, after all, and looked too physically insignificant to be a real problem.
As if feeling his eyes like cold spots on her flesh, the woman shivered in her sleep and turned over.
He could wake her now. But he had other things to take care of—making sure the on-site team at the university had cleared out the local workers, for example, and seeing if she had any confidantes, despite Grover’s remark that she was a loner. She could wait. She wasn’t going anywhere.
Calder picked up her chart and smiled: Jill Talcott, doctorate in physics from the University of Tennessee, onetime graduate student of Dr. Henry Ansel.