“Anything else you want to tell us?” Zeke yelled into the noise of the rushing air. Elise shook her head, looked down, embarrassed. Daniel squeezed her hand.
Spooky remarked over the net, “If I was them I would have a tracker on this boat.”
“Right. Zeke to Vinny, meet us at alternate marina Charlie with a bug-finder. We’ll pull in and you can give it a once-over. ETA maybe five minutes, so haul ass.”
Vinny met them at a little marina a couple of miles down the coast from where they had rented the boat. He went over the speedboat with an electronic detector, soon yanking out a fist-sized GPS transmitter. He tossed that into the water.
Larry, Elise and Daniel piled into Vinny’s Toyota and drove back to the motel. Skull roared off in the powerboat, to a different marina. Vinny dropped them off, then went to pick up the rest. Good thing there were dozens of landing places up and down the coast.
In the hotel room Daniel phoned in a huge order of Chinese for delivery. In the meantime they ate and drank everything that was handy. Crackers, cookies, cans of vegetable juice, full-sugar soda, tuna, it was all shoveled into their gullets like pelicans at a fish farm. When the take-out arrived, they plowed into that, too. When the others returned to the hotel, they found a half-eaten styrofoam buffet and two stuffed Eden Plague carriers sitting on the floor half-asleep. The third, Larry, was in the bathroom cleaning up.
Zeke caught a whiff of the food and grabbed the nearest box, eating with a grim determination. Daniel saw his rigger belt was cinched up tight and he looked like he had lost twenty pounds today. The other three started eating as well, though with only normal human urgency.
“We gotta get out of here,” Daniel said over the noise of the gobbling. He forced himself up to sit on the bed. “Even if they don’t make us here, they know we’re in the area.”
The rest nodded.
“All right, people,” Zeke said between bites. “Tear it down. Get ready to roll out.”
“Wait,” said Skull forcefully. He swept everyone with an even harder look than usual. “The lab’s burnt and unless there’s a lot of data stored off-site, we set them back years. But there are two loose ends. Or three.”
“Yes,” agreed Spooky. “The scientists and the doctor.”
Daniel preempted their argument. “So we go snap them up. Now. We know where they are. We know four of six shooters are out of the picture – at least two in the helo, two from the lab. We can probably snatch the scientists in their beds not three miles from here. Does the doctor in charge live here?”
“No, Durgan lives in Annapolis,” said Elise. “He comes down once a week or so. But he’s just an educated manager; he couldn’t recreate the work, though Arthur and Roger and I together could. Daniel is right.” She hugged his arm, sitting there next to him, and he felt warm all over.
“Much easier to just put a bullet into their heads,” observed Skull. He was staring at Daniel, like he was ready for the inevitable argument.
Zeke beat him to it. “No. No murder.”
“It’s preemptive self-defense,” retorted the sniper.
“No, it’s assassination. It’s not justified.” Zeke was firm.
“The hell it’s not. Those guys were trying to kill us at the lab. That’s war in my book, and that makes them targets. Enemy combatants.”
“Those were their shooters. These guys are just scientists.”
Skull insisted, “You don’t think all those enemy nuclear physicists that disappeared in the last twenty or thirty years just fell into random holes, do you? We killed a bunch of them ourselves, and the Israelis got the rest.”
“Well, maybe we shouldn’t have done that,” chimed in Elise, her eyes blazing. “Maybe that makes us just as bad as they are.”
Daniel put a restraining hand on her arm, knowing she wasn’t going to get anywhere with these guys that way. She had proved herself to him, but not to them. “Let’s not sink to their level, I think is what she means,” he said mildly.
“Perhaps they would be useful. It is not so much more trouble to take them with us, I think,” said Spooky softly.
Skull snorted. “Zeke, your A-team is turning into a bunch of wussies.”
Zeke locked eyes with him. “Yeah, my A-team. Not yours. You want out?”
Skull stared at Zeke a long moment. “Not yet,” he finally said.
“Well, you let me know when ‘yet’ comes. Until then I need to rely on you. Can I rely on you, Skull?” His eyes bored in.
Skull swallowed, nodded once, solemnly. “Yeah. Of course you can, Zeke. It’s your call.”
Zeke grinned and patted Skull’s cheek, breaking the tension. “I love you too, man. Okay, hasty operation, we snatch our mad scientists. Half an hour for planning, then we go.”
***
An hour later they were on the road with two more guests. Both had been very happy to come with them. Both had been glad to get rid of their ankle bracelets.
They traveled in a convoy of four SUVs. Vinny had wired the vehicles with secure commo for their tactical net. That way they could talk freely as they drove, and everyone could hear. Daniel was glad; he didn’t want to wait until the end of another road trip for answers, and he had no idea where they were going or how far.
They sweated some before they got off the peninsula; until they made it through the Virginia Beach – Norfolk area, they were bottlenecked. Fortunately they were ahead of the posse, it seemed, and soon they were wending their way up I-64 toward Richmond, Charlottesville and points west.
They gave the two scientists an abbreviated version of what was going on. Elise said neither of them was an Eden Plague carrier. They both expressed relief at being out of the situation, along with natural fear of the government reaction. Welcome to the club, Daniel thought. Welcome through the looking glass.
Then it was time for some explanations. After a little bit of discussion among the former INS, Inc. employees, Roger mumbled, “Elise should tell it. She’s been around the longest, she knows the most.”
So Elise started to speak, in a kind of detached remembering voice.
-14-
“I was the first to do real research on the Eden Plague, in this century anyway, I think. Before me there was just an MD named Raphe Durgan. He said he was from the USDA, Department of Agriculture, but he didn’t act like it. He acted like an arrogant spymaster, always bragging about being ‘in the black world’ and ‘behind the green door’ and terms like those. Anyway, Durgan had figured out just from his initial analysis that the virus would have some interesting effects, maybe curative ones. He tried it out on animals but it didn’t do much; it seemed made for people. So he wanted a human test subject that would be grateful no matter what - someone dying, like I was.
“With me he got more than he bargained for - a complete cure - so he got me hired for the team and swore me to secrecy with all those government confidentiality clauses. He was ecstatic, and sent me over to Plum Island research center to take a look at the biological materials. He said the things were captured in Iraq from some technology smugglers looting the crumbling Soviet Union. Samples sealed in some Soviet-style containers, nothing but bio-hazard symbols on them. He’d gotten the Eden Plague virus from those samples - though we hadn’t named it yet.
“I knew there was some sort of politics involved. That old ‘WMD in Iraq’ argument. That’s why they set it up under the CDC, I think – someone outside of the usual national security establishment. I got the impression there was a lot of infighting among the CIA, Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice about it. It was all very hush-hush; I kept my mouth shut and just did the work. It’s what you do when you have a security clearance and you work on secret projects. I just wanted to do the research.”