And that would be the end of Jack.
2:56 a.m.
Sheraton Hotel, Fifth Floor
Diet Coke guy had Kelly’s head in his arms, and he was surrounded by other guests who had popped out of their rooms to see what the screaming was about. He looked up at Kowalski. Disappointment washed over his face when he saw that Kowalski wasn’t an EMT. That quickly turned to rage when he recognized him.
“Hey! What did you do to her?”
Kowalski knelt down to examine Kelly. She was still breathing, but unconscious. Blood had spurted from her nose, ears … and yeah, he could see a little rimmed around the bottoms of her eyes, too. Diet Coke guy had some of it on his hands and lips.
“What’s your name?”
“Brian.”
“Brian, did you give her mouth-to-mouth?”
“She wasn’t breathing. I saved her. And I asked you, What did you do to her?”
Kowalski sighed. “Spare me.”
Brian tried to shove Kowalski backward, and it would have been impressive, had he connected. But Kowalski caught him by the wrist, taking care not to touch any of the blood, then twisted. Kelly’s head bobbed in the guy’s lap as he jolted.
“Ow!”
“See this? My girlfriend here’s got AIDS. She’s maintaining, but she passes out like this all the time when her T-cell count gets low. Wash off all of the blood you can. Scrub hard. Rinse your mouth out, too. You’ll also want to get tested.”
Brian turned white. Good, let him be afraid. Might be the thing that saves his life.
Truth was, whatever Kelly White was carrying, he’d probably already picked it up with the mouth-to-mouth thing. That’s what chivalry gets you these days.
Kelly’s head was gingerly lowered to the hallway carpet. Brian stood up, trying not to touch anything else, himself especially, then backed up and elbowed the up button on the elevator.
“Go ahead, wash up. I’ve got it from here.”
Kowalski looked around the hallway.
“Go back to your rooms, folks. She’s going to be okay once she gets hooked up to an IV.”
He had a decision to make: Take her now, or later? He wasn’t sure Kelly had a chance of making it down to D.C., as planned, without medical attention. Her breathing was shallow, and that much blood from the head was never a good sign. With the multiple distress calls of the past few minutes, the Sheraton was going to be swarming with uniforms. It was going to be tough carrying her out of there, past all of that. And his most recent instructions from his handler covered bringing her in alive, not dead.
The only chance she had was to let the EMTs take over from here. Hook her up, get her breathing stabilized. He wasn’t equipped for any of that.
Kowalski could come back for her later. From the hospital or the morgue, if it came to that. Either would be easier to breach than this hotel in the next ten minutes. City EMT response times varied; he remembered reading that Philly had arguably the worst in the nation. Tonight, he hoped to be proven wrong.
Zero a.m.
She wanted to cry. He’d fought hard to force his air into lungs she couldn ‘t feel. His lips mashed against hers, and she couldn ‘t feel those, either. Maybe she was already crying. She wouldn ‘t have been able to feel the drops on her cheeks.
She couldn’t feel anything, but she could see and hear and think. That was the worst part.
She knew exactly what had happened.
Back in the lab, she’d overheard them speculating.
Partial engagement.
When the self-replicating supramolecular assemblies—oh, how the Operator hated the nickname Mary Kates, even from the beginning— were faced with a choice, they reset to zero. That’s what must have happened to her. The doors of the elevator may have opened a full second, or a fraction of a millisecond, in time; that didn’t matter to the Mary Kates. They reset to zero.
Leaving her brain-damaged in this oh-so-creative way.
This was not how she’d imagined it. She thought it would have been quick and efficient. And she hoped she’d live long enough for a bit of revenge.
Not to look up into the eyes of another man she’d doomed to the grave.
Her Diet Coke-loving savior.
Pressing his lips to hers, genuine concern in his blue eyes.
And then the other one showed up. The one the Operator sent.
“What’s your name?”
“Brian.”
“Brian, did you give her mouth-to-mouth?”
Yeah, this guy knew the score. But he wasn ‘t a complete dick. Here, he was warning Brian—her savior had a name—to wash up, rinse out his mouth, like that would help. At least it was a gesture of humanity.
And then the Operator’s man looked into her eyes, and somehow sensed she was still in there, because he touched her chin with his index finger and spoke to her.
“Now that wasn’t very smart.”
3:05 a.m.
Sheraton Lobby Eighteenth Street
The security guy, Charles Lee Vincent, had locked the front doors, much to the displeasure of a curly-haired guy in a tuxedo, who was missing his tie and had his cummerbund slung rakishly over his shoulder. Vincent didn’t seem to give a shit. He pressed the master key into the desk clerk’s hands and said, “Only for the cops and EMT guys. Got it?” He got it. And for the next nine minutes—Jack watched them tick by on the clock mounted above a shimmering koi pool in the middle of the lobby—they stayed locked. The curly-haired guy threatened all kinds of violence, both physical and legal. The desk clerk didn’t seem to give a shit, either.
Now the cops had finally arrived. Showtime. Red and blue lights danced across the walls of the lobby. If the lobby lights had been dimmed, it would have looked like Disco Night at the Sheraton.
Jack got ready. All he needed was a cab to be outside those doors. This was a hotel. And sure, it was three o’clock in the morning, but cabs flocked to hotels like iron fillings to a magnet, right? Once he was in a cab, he could get to the airport. There were a lot of people in airports, no matter what time of day. He could feign an illness, get a security escort. Hang with that person the whole time. Buy a flight to D.C. He could use the home-equity credit card. They’d always kept that for emergencies, and Theresa hadn’t closed out the account yet. If this didn’t qualify for emergency, he didn’t know what would.
In D.C., he’d go to the FBI. The CIA. Homeland Security. Whoever. Someone who would listen to his story, then dispatch somebody to the Westin Horton Plaza in San Diego and verify everything.
Somebody in the government had to be around at this time of the morning.
All he had to do was get into a cab, and he would have a chance to breathe again, and think this through a bit more. But D.C. still seemed like the right move.
There. A flash of dark yellow and black in a checkerboard pattern.
Go, go, go.
Slip past the bustle. Pray no one paid him any mind. Quick glance at Charles Lee Vincent: busy with an EMT chick. Laughing about something, probably a dumb joke to break the tension. Yeah, laugh it up. You’re not the ones whose brains could explode at any given moment. Out the door, from the air-conditioned cool into the damp summer night. The cab, dead ahead.