His driver was blown off his feet and knocked unconscious by the blast but was otherwise unharmed.
Bear and his team shielded their faces from the heat as they emerged from the forest alongside the road and got into the car blocking the highway and pulled away, another job completed.
Jinx leaned his head out of the driver’s side window and whistled softly. “Good thing this is a stolen car, boss. All the paint on this side has been melted plumb off.”
“You didn’t hurt yourself when you jumped out of that eighteen-wheeler, did you, Babe?” Bear asked over his shoulder.
Babe answered from the rear seat. “Naw, boss. Piece of cake.”
Bear leaned back in the front seat, pulled out a cigar, and lit it, thinking that by this time next week he’d be on a beach drinking mai tais with his money earning ten percent.
He grinned around the cigar, realizing his nephew Victor could now go to any college he wished since cost was no object. Hell, maybe Patricia would even let him come visit them once in a while now that he was a retired man of leisure.
Chapter 43
For the next several hours, Mason moved from one member of his team to another, checking on their progress and in some cases offering suggestions on additional steps to take to find a cure.
Finally, he took a break and went in search of Lauren. He had some unfinished business with her that needed clearing up; the thought of her and their time in the jungle river kept intruding on his mind and screwing up his concentration.
He stood in the doorway to Shirley’s lab and watched as the two women worked quietly and efficiently side by side. Lauren was busily grinding up plants while Shirley was examining the slurry under her various microscopes.
Lauren’s hair was bound up in a ponytail, and as she turned her face to wipe off a drop of sweat, she noticed him standing there staring at her.
“Uh-oh,” she said in a stage whisper to Shirley, “watch it girlfriend, the boss is checking up on us.”
Shirley turned around and shook her hair out of her eyes and glared at Mason. “So, if you don’t have anything better to do than to skulk around and check up on the worker bees, I’ve got some samples that need staining.”
Mason blushed and stammered, “Uh… I need… that is… I’d like…”
Shirley glanced at Lauren and then back at Mason, a slow grin curling up the corners of her mouth. “Oh… I see. Well,” she said, taking off her lab apron, “I think I’ll go brew up some fresh coffee for the troops.”
She grinned again and glanced at her wristwatch. “I’ll probably also make some chocolate chip cookies so it’ll probably take me a good fifteen or twenty minutes, if you’d like to keep Lauren company until I get back.”
Mason nodded, returning the smile. “I think I can spare a few minutes for such an agreeable task.”
As Shirley squeezed by him in the doorway, she whispered, “Go get ’em, tiger.”
Lauren crossed her arms across her chest and leaned back against the counter, looking at him from under raised eyebrows. “Did you need to see me about something, Dr. Williams?”
He walked over to her and put his hands on her shoulders, moving into her personal space. “Yeah, I need to remind you of something.”
“What?” she asked quizzically.
“This,” he said, and he bent his head down and covered her lips with his.
Hesitantly at first, and then with more vigor, she put her arms around him and pulled him to her, feeling the hardness between them as she pressed against him.
After a moment, she broke free and leaned back, staring into his eyes. “Oh, that,” she said, smiling. “And you thought you needed to remind me because… what… you thought I’d forgotten?”
“No,” he said, bending to kiss the side of her neck, “because I wanted more of the same.”
She shuddered at his touch and then she took a deep breath and pushed him away. “Mason, as much as I’d like to keep doing this for the rest of the day, this is neither the time nor the place for kissy-face. We’ve got serious, lifesaving work to do.”
His face reddened and he nodded. “Yes, of course you’re right.” He turned to go, but he stopped in the doorway and pointed at her, “But as soon as we’ve gotten the cure, you and I are going to have a long, serious talk.”
“What about?” she asked coquettishly.
“About the future,” he said, and then he was gone.
Ten minutes later, when Shirley returned, Lauren was still flushed.
Shirley grinned. “The man does have quite an impact, doesn’t he?”
“Man, you can say that again.”
Shirley sighed. “Yeah, I’ve worked with him since he was a pup, and frankly, if I was a dozen years younger, I’d be giving you a run for your money for him.”
“Wow, does everyone love him?”
“I wouldn’t say that, but he’s the kinda guy that men want to be his friend, and women want to either mother him or bed him, depending on their ages.”
Lauren laughed. “Can you guess which one it is with me?”
Shirley joined in. “The answer to that, my dear, is perfectly obvious.”
It took the team the better part of two weeks to come up with an answer to the anthrax plague. Shirley Cole had noticed some anomalies in the electron microscope images of the roots of a particular plant with a yellow flower, species unknown. She took the images to Lionel Johnson, the team specialist in fungi and mycobacteria, and asked his opinion.
After some digging and some complex chemical analysis, Lionel came up with the answer. “Shirley, I’m damned if this chemical structure doesn’t resemble tigecycline.”
“Tigecycline? You mean the latest generation of tetracycline?”
He nodded, still examining the complex chemical structure they’d mapped out.
“But that doesn’t occur naturally,” Shirley said. “It’s made by tweaking the original tetracycline molecules.”
He sighed. “I didn’t say it was exactly the same, Shirley. I merely said it was similar.”
She shook her head. “Well, no matter. Tigecycline only works on cutaneous anthrax, so even if this is similar, it probably won’t do us any good.”
He shrugged. “Hey, you never know until you try. Remember, this plague isn’t being caused by typical anthrax but a mutated form. Just maybe a mutated form of tigecycline will work on it.”
“You’re dreaming, pal, but what the hell. I’ll throw some of it on the cultures in the lab and see what happens.”
What happened was the drug distilled from the yellow-flowered plant killed the anthrax bacterial colonies at an amazing rate.
When they showed Mason the results, he got on the sat-phone and discussed the discovery with Dr. Battersee. Less than four days later the drug was being manufactured in quantity and within two weeks was being shipped to every country in the world.
Additional good news came less than a month later when the scientists at the CDC were able to concoct a preventative vaccine from the blood samples of the villagers that Mason and Lauren had brought out of the jungle.
With the twin discoveries, the worst plague in the history of the world was essentially over.
Their work accomplished, the team was in the process of dismantling the Bio-Lab when Mason was finally able to break away from his administrative duties long enough to find Lauren and hustle her outside for a private conversation.
As they strolled through the jungle adjacent to the lab, he took her hand in his.
“So,” he began, “about that talk we need to have about our future…”