‘Stay down!’ Ethan whispered to Lopez, before crawling on his belly across to Zamora.
Two more rounds zipped through the apartment, crossing at an angle above Ethan’s head and smacking into the bedroom door in the far corner behind him and he realized that their assailants were retreating down the corridor outside. He crawled the last three feet to Zamora and grabbed his pistol before he could aim it.
‘Don’t! The apartment’s rigged to blow on a spark!’ Zamora lowered the pistol. ‘You okay?’
‘I’ll live.’ Zamora writhed in pain. ‘They’re quitting?’
‘No,’ Ethan said. ‘They’re running. And I know why. Call for back-up!’
Ethan got to his feet and dragged Zamora up into a sitting position, the trooper sweating profusely as he radioed their position in.
‘We’ve got to get out of here. Can you walk?’
Zamora didn’t reply but instead nodded his head, running his remaining good hand through his hair with a trembling motion. Lopez grabbed him under his good arm and gently helped him up.
A burst of automatic fire shattered the windows of the apartment behind them, letting in a billowing breeze from outside.
‘Oxygen,’ Ethan said urgently. ‘Go, get out of here. Quickly.’
He turned and dashed back to the window of the apartment in time to see the black Impala’s doors slam shut. Ethan squinted to read the license plate, but the vehicle’s tires squealed as it pulled away and shot out of sight down the street.
Ethan whirled and sprinted for the apartment door.
22
Doug Jarvis strode purposefully down a corridor toward a briefing center deep within the DIAC building, dogged by a sense of foreboding. Being summoned by a department head or senior analyst was one thing, but receiving orders to report to the director of the agency was another entirely.
The office of the director of the DIA was not quite hallowed ground but it represented the command of one of the most powerful and secretive agencies in the United States’ arsenal. Most everybody had heard of the FBI, the CIA, even the ultra-classified NSA, but the DIA straddled a mysterious line running throughout the Pentagon’s many departments. It was responsible for studying and protecting against all potential threats to United States security, and anything that the other agencies knew about, in all theaters, was also reported to the DIA.
Jarvis stopped at the director’s door, passing his assistant at her desk who waved him forward with a dutiful smile that did little to improve his mood. He adjusted his tie before knocking discreetly.
‘Enter.’
Jarvis walked in to see three-star Lieutenant-General Abraham Mitchell’s broad and craggy form hunched, as it usually was, behind a large desk cluttered with documents and photographs. More of a surprise was the man sitting opposite him, a hawkish-looking individual wearing the uniform of a full colonel of the United States Army, replete with a ceremonial silver pistol in a holster at his side.
‘Jarvis,’ Mitchell said, gesturing to the stranger with one shovel-like hand as Jarvis shut the door to the office. ‘This is Colonel Donald Wolfe, research director at USAMRIID. He flew in this morning from Santa Fe.’
Jarvis shook Wolfe’s hand, instinctively cautious of the man’s aquiline nose and sharp, beady eyes. He had heard of Wolfe by reputation, a high-ranking US Army officer specializing in nuclear, biological and chemical warfare, but he knew nothing of the man personally. They sat down and Jarvis waited for Mitchell to speak.
‘Doug, Colonel Wolfe is here regarding a series of events occurring down in New Mexico. You got any operations ongoing down there?’
‘I have a small team investigating a disappearance in Santa Fe,’ Jarvis answered before turning to Wolfe. ‘They’re effectively undercover, so I’m surprised that you’re here at all, sir.’
‘Donald,’ Wolfe murmured in a surprisingly soft voice. ‘The matter in Santa Fe was considered serious enough for us to find out who exactly was operating in the area.’
‘Serious?’ Jarvis asked, glancing at Mitchell. ‘I didn’t realize there was anything of any more concern than an unusual disappearance.’
‘It’s the nature of who, or what, disappeared that’s bothering USAMRIID,’ Mitchell rumbled. ‘According to USAMRIID there is believed to have been a possibility of some kind of infectious outbreak surrounding the theft of a corpse from a Santa Fe morgue, the same morgue from which the doctor your team is searching for disappeared.’
Jarvis raised a concerned eyebrow.
‘There was no mention of any kind of outbreak by local law enforcement,’ he said. ‘We received information on the case from the FBI, who had been approached by the Santa Fe county sheriff with biological samples from the corpse of a man shot dead the day before by state troopers. There were some anomalies, apparently, with the samples, so I sent two reliable detectives to Santa Fe to follow it up and see what had happened.’
Donald Wolfe spoke slowly, as though he were verbally stalking Jarvis.
‘You sent two agents from one of the government’s most powerful agencies to pursue the disappearance of a lowly doctor out of Santa Fe?’ He smiled in bemusement. ‘Shouldn’t you guys be chasing terrorists in Helmand Province or something?’
‘I didn’t say I’d sent agents,’ Jarvis corrected him. ‘I sent two detectives with a proven track record down there. It’s not considered a priority case, more of an interesting one.’
‘In what way?’ Mitchell asked, his big hands folded together on the desk before him.
Jarvis performed a series of rapid mental gymnastics.
‘Because it seemed like a planned abduction. Close-circuit cameras captured the kidnapping, involving several men who were masked and were smart enough to disable cameras and phones in the morgue before attacking. Whatever they wanted it must have been important or valuable, and thus worth sending someone down there to investigate.’ He turned to Wolfe. ‘Which is why I don’t understand why you’re here. If there was a biological aspect to this case, we’d have passed it on to the National Center for Medical Intelligence at Fort Detrick. But local law enforcement, forensics and the specialists who work in the morgue found no such thing.’
Wolfe shook his head.
‘One of the state troopers involved in the shooting reported that the victim appeared to be falling apart, as though he were decaying. The threat is in the corpse itself and any contamination it may have caused on site. I’d have thought that a possible case of leprosy or worse in the middle of New Mexico would have warranted at least alerting us to the event instead of sending two gumshoes down there.’
Jarvis grinned tightly.
‘One of them is a former United States Marine who’s worked for us before. The other is a former DC detective. Both are highly skilled and reliable. Quite apart from that, the morgue itself was wiped clean, a real professional job. Any infectious agents were removed from the site at that time. Which is why I don’t understand why the NCMI wasn’t involved if there was a biological case. It’s our own medical department, quite capable of handling epidemiological situations: USAMRIID has no place in this investigation.’
‘Nor do your investigators,’ Wolfe fired back. ‘They cannot be relied upon to handle the work competently should they indeed find an infected corpse.’
‘Ethan Warner and Nicola Lopez are highly competent,’ Jarvis replied without emotion.
Wolfe glanced at Abraham Mitchell, who looked down at his desk and read from a sheet of paper.
‘Warner and Lopez,’ he rumbled. ‘As I understand it, Warner was almost imprisoned last year after fleeing a major fire-fight in Israel and then killing a church minister in Washington DC. Lopez was hunted down by the FBI at the same time. Both escaped only by the intervention of this agency and the President himself.’