Quinn reached in the fold of his dishdasha, wishing he had the Masamune blade Mrs. Miyagi had given him. Whatever was going on in this lab, the chief veterinarian had to be up to his neck in it. He handed over the letter.
Suleiman read it, then paused a moment, letting his eyes slide up and down Quinn. He handed back the letter, then turned without asking a single question. At the door, he paused to speak for a moment in hushed tones to the two guards. The expressions of both men tensed. The jumpy one’s shoulders bobbed noticeably at Dr. Suleiman’s words. His hand slid almost imperceptibly toward the butt of his pistol.
Quinn’s eyes shot around the room, taking quick stock of his situation. The heavy door, whitewashed walls, sealed concrete floor with a drain set in a depressed center — a length of hose coiled on a wall hook like a black snake.
He was in a killing cell.
Quinn was already in motion as Dr. Suleiman stepped from the room into the hallway, timing his first strike with the snick of the door snapping shut. He’d crumpled the introduction letter into a tight ball and tossed it at the older guard’s face. The paper was worthless as a weapon, but the man didn’t know that. He flinched instinctively jerking his gun hand up to ward off the incoming missile.
Quinn used this split-second diversion to drive the flat of his hand into the younger guard’s face, shattering his nose and slamming the back of his head against the concrete wall with a sickening thwack. He slid to the ground leaving a pink smear of blood behind him. Swelling at the back of his brain would soon stop his heart for good.
As the jumpy guard regained his composure and brought the pistol back to bear, Quinn ran at him with the weight of his entire body. He wrenched the man’s wrist and the gun along with it inward toward the startled Saudi’s soft belly. Tendons stretched past the breaking point; fragile wrist bones snapped with a sickening pop. His finger convulsed on the trigger. The guard’s eyes flew wide as the cold reality of what had happened washed across his face.
“Killed…” He coughed, a tinge of blood coating his cracked lips. “Killed by… a stinking… Kuwaiti…”
The man died before Quinn could set him straight.
His two immediate threats neutralized, Quinn stuffed the old revolver in the folds of his dishdasha with his cell phone. The other pocket contained the glass jar of iodine crystals. He had to keep from breaking the glass jar at all costs. He checked the Beretta for ammunition. The magazine still held ten rounds. Years of habit and mistrust of machines made him press-check the slide to be certain there was a cartridge in the chamber. Neither guard carried any reloads. That left him with seventeen rounds including the six iffy shots in the rusty wheel gun.
Quinn stood at the door for a moment, hand on the knob, concentrating to slow his breathing. He would have to make every shot count. The two men now dead on the floor had been the easy ones. Now he had to deal with the guard at the table, unknown other personnel, and Suleiman, the real professional of the group — and he’d have to do it all on camera.
CHAPTER 28
Megan Mahoney had never considered herself a worrywart. Working nose to nose with deadly diseases took ice-cold nerves not to mention a certain amount of stoic detachment — but, lately, it seemed that worrying was all she ever did. Gory images of four hundred Ebola-infected airline passengers haunted her dreams. Nagging thoughts of a virus capable of wiping out half the continent kept her stomach in knots, and she found herself eating nothing but junk food. Justin, for all his idiotic flirtation, didn’t deserve to be stuck in the Slammer. But he was, and now the poor kid sat with nothing to do but wait and wonder if the tiny needle stick had been enough to infect him with an unknown strain of hemorrhagic fever — enough to kill him.
The Ebola blood variant had jumped almost immediately from one macaque to another breathing the same air. Both had crashed in a matter of hours. It had been two days since she’d had to put down C-45 and injected C-06 with the virus strain contained in the optic jelly. Though the monkey’s blood teamed with spaghettilike filovirus it had yet to show a single symptom. Tests on C-12, the macaque she’d put in the adjoining cage, breathing the same air as C-06, remained virus free.
Science was, more often that not, a waiting game, but when she considered what would happen if an Ebola variant escaped into the U.S. population, she wanted to pull her hair out for lack of something positive to do.
Then a man named Winfield Palmer had called. He said he was the Director of National Intelligence and asked if he could please pile a little more on her worry plate.
Now, deep in the lush forests of Northern Virginia, behind layers of electronic and physical security, Mahoney leaned forward in a soft leather office chair, her face bathed in a yellow-green glow from a series of flat-screen monitors.
Beside her, dwarfing a similar chair, a giant of a man with a Louisiana accent had welcomed her to the team like a big brother. He wore faded jeans and a tight black T-shirt that bunched above enormous biceps. His high-and-tight haircut and stern demeanor said he would have been more comfortable in uniform. His name was Jacques Thibodaux and he fidgeted as if he was ready to bounce off the walls.
A pimple-faced Air Force staff sergeant named Guttman sat, big ears pinched between a set of cheap headphones, looking outward from the blinking panel. His fingers worked a game controller connected to a separate laptop computer on his knees.
“Nothing yet?” Thibodaux asked
Staff Sergeant Guttmann was a prodigy, one of four Air Force enlisted personnel handpicked for their extraordinary hand-eye coordination and almost superhuman computer gaming skills to pioneer the advancement of a very specific unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV. Above his head, in ornate golden script was a three-foot blue banner with the motto of his secret unit, Detachment Seven of the Fifty-third Test and Evaluation Group: HIC SUNT DRACONES
Here there be dragons. It was the inscription on medieval maps for sections of uncharted sea.
“No contact from your friend, sir,” Guttmann said. His voice cracked as he spoke, making Mahoney wonder just how old he really was. “I did, however, just take out a Nazi field marshal and two of his zombie underlings using a World War II — era grease gun with extreme skill.”
Mahoney wrinkled her nose. These military types were so hard to understand. She shot a look at the Cajun. “Zombies?”
Thibodaux shook his head, muttering under his breath. “This damned multitaskin’ generation. While he should be tending to the business of looking out for Jericho, he’s playin’ Call of Duty — a computer game with Nazis of the living dead or some such thing. My boys love it.”
“What’s not to love?” Guttman smiled. “Who wouldn’t get a kick out of killing Nazi zombies? A bunch of guys in my squadron play all the—”
“You know, Guttman,” Thibodaux said, rubbing his jaw with a hand the size of a pie pan. “I got a friend out there, all by his lonesome self in parts unknown, facing some real-life shit that would make your zombie games look like a Scooby-Doo cartoon. You might consider showing some attention to your duties at hand.”
Guttman, flustered, snapped his personal laptop shut without another word. He glanced at Mahoney, blushing like a schoolboy taken to task in front of a pretty girl.
Thibodaux rose quickly from his chair and strode to the large wall map of the Middle East. He tapped the tiny red dot with a forefinger the size of a sausage between Riyadh and the Persian Gulf. Al-Hofuf, Saudi Arabia.