A gunshot drowned out the woman’s screaming, and people began running in all directions. Greg looked up to see Frack sink to his knees, blood beginning to stain the lower portion of his nicely tailored black FBI suit. Frick returned fire, and a man dressed in a North Face ski parka dropped to the concrete, a shower of blood spraying the overcoat of the man behind him. Greg watched as the whole scene developed before him. Frack was down and bleeding, the North Face man was down and bleeding, and then the man with the stained overcoat looked up at Frick and shot him in the head. Frick had missed as well.
The overcoat man began to turn toward Greg, but then suddenly dropped to his knees, his hands clawing at his head. He tried to scream, but fell over backward instead. Greg watched the man go down and become still. He waited a second longer and then moved carefully toward the fallen terrorist. He reached down and scooped up the fallen weapon, all the while keeping his eyes trained on the man’s oddly shaped head. He moved closer and rifled through the stained overcoat. His fingers found a set of keys and a wad of paper in his chest pocket, but no other weapon. Frack had tossed him a pair of plastic wrist cuffs, but they weren’t necessary. The man was already very dead. His eyes had ruptured, his face was swollen, the skin was stretched tight and covered in small petechial hemorrhages, and what looked like bloody brain oozed from both of his ears. In his left hand was a small blue vial.
Greg stood and walked back over to Oliver. The priest was praying, and Greg sat next to him waiting for him to finish.
“I don’t know how well it will be received, but I just gave myself Last Rites.” The priest’s voice was barely a whisper. “Sorry, Greg. I screwed up.” He looked over at the still body of Frick. “It happened so fast. I think I passed out a little and then got so scared that he was going to get away that I grabbed the first mind I could.” Oliver was crying. “He shot them, and I couldn’t stop him. I tried.”
“You did stop him. He’s dead. We have the vial.” The ubiquitous New York City sirens were getting louder.
Chapter 51
The vial was getting warm. No, it’s getting hot, Issam Rahim corrected himself. He knew that if the vial was warmed too quickly the yield would be low, so he turned the lamp down. He picked up the instructions for the twentieth time in an hour, but they still didn’t tell him anything new. His Arabic was only passable, so his particular set of instructions had been written in English; only something had been lost in the translation.
It started raining again, and the drops drummed on the slate roof and Issam’s nerves. It was always raining in Seattle, and he didn’t have a clue what the rain would do to the processed paper. Part of the reconstitution process involved immersing the paper in a tub of water for five minutes, but then — and the instructions were very clear on this point — the sheets were to be dried and kept dry. He looked out the window as spring rain turned his steep driveway into a small river. Like Izhan Ahmed in Los Angeles and the other fourteen fighters, Issam had been chosen for his ability to think independently and adapt to changing circumstances. The special paper would never work here, and with each passing moment, Issam knew that his opportunity for shahada was slipping away. For more than three years, he had dreamed of his glorious martyrdom. With one act, all his offenses would be wiped away, and he would find himself sitting close to the throne of the Almighty, living in the most beautiful house in all of paradise, the dar al-shuhada, the house of martyrs. Now, the rain threatened all of that.
He stroked the blue vial and found that it had cooled. The quarantine was scheduled to begin in less than six hours, and the streets were filled with Americans hurrying to buy enough beer, potato chips, and DVDs to last a week. His heart told him that the time to act was now, but his mind hesitated. The vial had not had the requisite thirty hours to reach maximum potency.
It will have to do, he thought, and resolutely opened the vial of the Hybrid virus.
* * *
The death of Oliver had slowed everyone and everything, except for Phil’s mind. He kept running scenarios in his head, calculating how many more people would die with each second, minute, and hour delay. It had taken more than a day for the government bureaucracy to decide how to get him safely to Los Angeles and then another four hours to arrange for secure transport. Phil had become a national risk and a national treasure, both of which required a twenty-car entourage.
“This isn’t going to work,” he said to Rodney Patton through his face shield as they cruised down the 405 with a police escort. Phil was wearing a level-four contamination suit, complete with his own purified air source and a team of technicians to insure that it worked. “There’s too much going on around me to get a clear picture of what’s going on out there.”
“What do you need?” Patton screamed back.
“To be by myself,” Phil screamed. The cacophony of voices, opinions, and worry flooded every space in his head.
“There’s no way anyone is going to let you go out solo. That suit alone requires two people to make it work right.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Phil came very close to swearing from pure frustration.
Patton just shook his large head.
“We don’t have the time for this,” Phil said, and then there was a series of muted explosions. Cars ahead of them and behind them began to careen in every direction. Hoods, hubcaps, engine parts flew all around them. “Keep driving,” Phil yelled to their driver as their black suburban accelerated through the growing pile-up. “Just another day in L.A. traffic,” Phil said to Patton.
“Bullshit!” The big black man said, but his face had broken out into a grin from ear to ear. Ron Benedict looked back at them with a scowl on his face.
“You really shouldn’t have done that, Doctor,” he scolded Phil. “These bastards have infiltrated every level of our government; and after what happened in New York, you can bet your ass that they know that you’re here and what you can do.”
“Then let me do it,” Phil yelled back at Benedict, who glanced over at Patton and then finally turned back to face forward.
“Keep going,” he said to the driver.
It took them forty-five minutes to complete the first of twenty-four grids and Phil had reached his limit. “This is taking too much time. We need to use a helicopter.”
No one had wanted to accept the responsibility of putting Phil in a helicopter that was making slow circuits over America’s second largest city. Benedict had pushed for one, but had been overruled at almost every level. “You have to convince them that this is going to take too much time,” Phil had to yell to be heard.
“Tell them he forced you,” Patton added.
Benedict hesitated for a moment and then reached for his cell phone. Ten minutes of arguing, punctuated by long periods of silence, the assistant director of the FBI closed his phone and took a deep breath. “It’s going to take at least an hour for the attorney general to sign off on the presidential order. So while they worry about the niceties, we are going to misappropriate a helicopter.” Benedict turned and faced Rucker. ”This better be worth my pension.”
Thirty minutes later, the three men were skimming across the rooftops of East L.A. in a police helicopter.
“He wants you to slow down,” Patton said as Rucker started to motion with his arms. They couldn’t get him a headset without breaking the suit’s air seals, so Patton had worked out some signals with the pathologist. “Hover, right here.”