Mahoney made a note in the chart hanging below the enclosures while she worked to connect the dots in her mind. Maybe the eye gel was just some byproduct at the lab. Vitreous gel was mostly water with a few proteins; maybe it had been used as a culture medium. The thought of where anyone had gotten such a thing turned her stomach. If the stuff had contained the same variant as the blood, C-45 and C-06 would be goners by now. Maybe it was something else altogether. Inside the cumbersome blue plastic suit, Mahoney shook her head. Hers was not a job where you could afford to miss things…
“Boss…” Justin’s voice crackled across her earpiece. “You’re gonna want to see this.”
It was his favorite trick — to lure her to the microscope with the promise of something interesting and use the opportunity to slide his arm around her while they stood cheek to cheek, or at least bubble to bubble.
“I’m really busy in here, Justin,” she said. “What have you got?”
“Okay, but I’m telling you—”
“Just tell me what you see.”
“Okay,” Justin groaned, sounding slightly bored. To him, this was just another of many brushes with killer animalcules. He could never know the particulars of Northwest Flight 2. “The Roissy blood contains large amounts of filovirus… Looks a lot like Ebola Zaire — shepherds’ crooks and spaghetti worms everywhere.”
Mahoney leaned against a metal table, stretching her back. “That’s what I suspected. And the vitreous gel… nothing, right?”
C-45 suddenly went berserk, banging his head against the front of his enclosure.
“Kraaa! Kraaa!” The enraged macaque bared long yellow fangs, focusing all his anger on Mahoney.
Justin paused from his rundown. “You all right in there?”
“We’re fine.” Mahoney turned away from the cage, hoping that might calm the enraged beast. “You were telling me about the second sample.”
“That’s what you’ll want to see, Meg.” He had to throw in her name. “The vitreous gel is teaming with virus, more even than the blood. The thing is, each strand in the gel appears to be encased in some sort of heavy sheath… maybe a protein… I’m guessing that’s why C-45 and C-6 aren’t showing any symptoms. Maybe it affects them same way Ebola Reston hits humans — communicable but not deadly. I’m thinking what we have here is one of the bad guys’ failures in the bioweapon department.”
“Good.” Mahoney nodded, tapping the clipboard with her pen. “Failure is a good thing when it’s them doing it. Of course, we don’t know how the stuff will affect a human…” She looked up to see Justin on the other side of the window, his young face drawn tight in abject terror.
“What?”
“Dr. Mahoney, you need to get out of there now!”
“Justin,” Mahoney said, glancing up to make certain she was still attached to an air hose. “What the hell are you talking about? Is my su—”
The metal clang of a cage door behind her answered her question. She turned slowly, to find C-45—all 31 pounds of him — hunched on the spotless tile floor. In his fist, he held his wooden gnawing stick like a club.
“Justin, honey,” Mahoney said, voice sticky as a Georgia peach. “Did you remember to fasten the door after you put C-45 back in his cage?”
“I… I… thought I did,” the boy stammered. “I’m sorry, Doctor. I’ll come in and help you get him caught.”
“Stay put!” Mahoney barked. Justin underfoot was the last thing she needed. The horny idiot would flirt on his way to the guillotine.
Mahoney clutched the clipboard in front of her chest. The tiny square of Formica would work about as well against a running chainsaw when C-45 attacked, but it was all she had.
The big macaque heaved as it squatted on the floor not ten feet away. She’d been the one to give him the needle full of virus-laden juice. The scowling face said he held a grudge. Blue lips pulled tight. Fangs dripped ribbons of thick saliva down the green numbers tattooed across his pink chest — saliva that was surely hot with an unknown strain of hemorrhagic fever.
Mahoney reached slowly to unhook her breathing hose, then began to ease — inch by inch — toward the door. She didn’t think about the pain of teeth ripping into the flesh under the flimsy layer of her rubberized suit. The agony and almost certain death from exposure to the virus didn’t even cross her mind. One sound dominated her thoughts, a sound that pressed at her chest and made it impossible to catch a full breath. The whooshing thud of a three-hundred-pound metal door echoed in her imagination like a recurring nightmare — the Slammer.
The angry macaque didn’t even have to break her skin. A simple tear of her suit — one breath of ambient air — and her next stop would be the stuff of nightmares. She could already hear the door crashing shut behind her, trapping her in the empty bleach bottle that would be her prison — possibly for the remainder of a very short and agonizing life.
CHAPTER 19
“I don’t think she likes me very much.” Thibodaux grunted, tossing back a liter bottle containing a mixture of water, chocolate protein powder, and a cup of raw oatmeal he’d let soak long enough he could chew it.
Across the breakfast table, Quinn made do with granola and soy milk. “Why do you say that?”
“I dunno…” The Marine wiped his mouth with the back of his forearm. “Because I can’t do a handstand on my nose or some shit like that.”
Mrs. Miyagi had woken them before five with an entire new wardrobe, including T-shirts, running shorts, and shoes. They’d arrived with literally nothing more than what they had on their backs and had given their sizes to Palmer the day before, but neither expected to have the promised clothes by the next morning.
Each man was accustomed to a strict regimen of exercise and they put the new gear to use without being told. Thibodaux didn’t look like a runner, but as big as he was, he stayed shoulder to shoulder with Quinn for six miles through the neighborhoods around Mt. Vernon at a blazing seven-minute-mile pace. When they sprinted up Mrs. Miyagi’s tree-lined driveway, they found her in the backyard, resting serenely in a sort of handstand on her forearms; her back arched slightly, legs straight up in the air. It was, she explained, a yoga move called Pincha Mayurasana and the sooner they mastered it the better for everyone involved.
It was impossible to tell the mysterious woman’s age. She was compactly built, just a breath over five feet tall. Her black leotard revealed the muscular upper body of an Olympic gymnast, the defined hips and thighs of a sprinter. She moved like an athlete with a sort of fluid, feline confidence that took immediate control when she was present. Her coal-black hair was pulled back in a short ponytail. She wore no nail polish or any apparent makeup; her only adornment was the fleeting, crimson edge of an unidentifiable tattoo, barely visible at the scoop neck of the leotard over the swell of her left breast.
Her workout over, she dressed in faded jeans snug enough to accentuate the curves of her figure, and a white oxford polo that left the tattoo a hidden mystery. Under some lights, her flawless skin and ever serene demeanor made Quinn guess she was still in her thirties, but in momentary flashes, particularly when she spoke, the deep, ageless wisdom in her eyes said she was much older.
Miyagi joined the two men in the dining room just as Thibodaux finished his protein and raw oats. She carried an aluminum Zero Halliburton briefcase in each hand.