He reached down and turned the paper over. “And this next one says that all of the plants rendered for examination are common variety jungle plants with no medicinal value at all, whatever the hell that means.”
“It means you fucked me, you bastards!” Blackie exclaimed, leaning forward and slapping his palm down on his desk, trying to assert some of the authority he was used to carrying.
Jinx put a puzzled look on his face. “Did we fuck the Colonel, boss?” he asked Bear.
Bear grinned. “Yep. An’ we didn’t even kiss him first.”
Blackie looked from one to the other of the men and his face paled. “Uh, just why are you here, Bear? You got your money and you screwed me, so what do you want now?”
“Who else is in this with you, Blackie? I know you don’t have the balls or the brains to put all this together without some high-powered help.”
Blackie shook his head. “I’m not going to tell you that, Bear. As long as you don’t know who else knows about your involvement, you can’t afford to kill me or they’ll make sure you never live to spend the money you stole from us.”
Bear cut his eyes to Psycho who was sitting across the room. “Psycho, see if you can convince Blackie to give us the information we need.”
Psycho was on his feet in an instant and before Blackie could move, the point of Psycho’s KA-BAR knife was almost touching his right eyeball.
Psycho leaned in close to Blackie’s ear and whispered, “I’m not near as good with one of these as Blade was, but I bet I can figure it out, Colonel.”
Bear smiled, but there was no humor in it. “Do you know how Psycho got his nickname, Blackie?”
Blackie opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out but a strangled gurgle.
“Nod your head if you don’t want to find out,” Bear added after a moment.
Blackie glanced up into Psycho’s red-rimmed, crazy eyes and he slowly nodded his head.
“Shit,” Psycho muttered and he slid his KA-BAR back into its scabbard and he sat back down.
Bear raised his eyebrows and looked at Blackie. “We’re all ears, boss,” he said in a low voice dripping with sarcasm.
Blackie sighed and leaned back in his chair, frantically trying to think of some way out of this situation. After a moment, he figured if he couldn’t bargain his way out of this, about the only thing he could hope for was a quick and relatively painless death.
“The only other man who knows about you and your team is General Mac McGuire.”
“The same McGuire who sent us to you?” Babe asked.
Blackie looked at him and nodded. “One and the same.”
“Does he know our real identities or just our nicknames?” Bear asked.
“Hell, I don’t even know your real identities,” Blackie pleaded. “You have nothing to fear from either one of us.”
“Pick up the phone and tell your Adjutant Lieutenant Collins that you’d like him to go over to the canteen and pick you up some breakfast,” Bear said.
Blackie shook his head, his eyes wide. “If I do that you’ll kill me!”
Bear sighed. “We can kill you anyway, Blackie. All it takes is for me to let Psycho loose on you with that KA-BAR and Collins wouldn’t hear a thing. I just need you to get rid of him so we can sneak out of here without being seen.”
He grinned amiably. “After all, as you just said, we don’t have anything to fear from you or McGuire.”
Blackie thought about it for a moment and then he picked up his phone and pushed a button.
“Yes, sir?” Collins said.
“Jeremy, I’m kinda hungry this mornin’. How about going over to the canteen and pickin’ us both up some breakfast? I’ll pay you for it when you get back.”
“Yes, sir!” Collins answered and hung up the phone.
“Give him a minute and then peek out the door and let us know when the coast is clear,” Bear ordered.
When they heard the outer door open and shut, Blackie stood up and peeked out of his door. “Okay, he’s gone. You can leave now.”
As he sat back down at his desk, Bear moved over and held out his hand as if to shake. “Pleasure doing business with you, Colonel.”
Blackie scowled, but he held out his right hand, “Sorry I can’t say the same thing.”
As they took hands, Bear came out from behind his back with his left hand and put a silencer against Blackie’s right temple and pulled the trigger.
The automatic coughed once and the side of Blackie’s head exploded all over the opposite wall.
Bear unscrewed the silencer and put the gun in Blackie’s limp right hand, which was hanging down at his side.
He looked over his shoulder at Jinx. “You got the paperwork?” he asked.
“Right here, boss,” Jinx said, and he took the forged registration papers for the pistol out of his pocket and stashed them in the colonel’s bottom desk drawer.
Bear then took a tissue out of his pocket and wiped his left hand with the tissue and then transferred some of the gunpowder residue to Blackie’s right hand, just in case the crime scene guys thought to check for it.
As the men started to leave, Jinx asked, “We goin’ after McGuire next?”
Bear grinned. “Whatta you think?”
“Cool,” Jinx said as he moved through the empty outer office. “I ain’t never killed a general before.”
Chapter 42
Mason took his time telling the Wildfire Team of their adventures in the Mexican jungle, and by the time he’d finished all of the cookies and most of the coffee had been consumed.
The team was flabbergasted and dismayed when he came to how he’d learned of the spy named Janus and how she’d conspired to undo all of the good works the team had accomplished, not to mention her complicity in the plan to have the Wildfire Team exterminated.
Jakes shook his head, “I just can’t believe Suzanne would do that. Just think of all the people she would’ve consigned to an early grave if she’d managed to derail our finding of a cure to this deadly disease.”
“Believe it, Sam,” Mason said. “Evidently, she is a true believer in what USAMRIID is doing and there is nothing as dangerous as a true believer.”
“I can almost see a true ideologue conspiring for USAMRIID to have control of the cure for this plague, but to agree with its leader to kill all of us… her friends who have been more like family than coworkers for more than five years? That is beyond the pale,” Shirley Cole said, shaking her head in disgust.
When no one had anything to add, Mason stood up and parceled out the specimens and plants to the various team members. “Now, I want you all to get to work and don’t spare the horsepower. The Battleship and his team back at the CDC are also working on these samples and I would like our team to be the one to come up with a reliable cure first.” He spread his arms and grinned. “After all, aren’t we the world-famous Wildfire Team?”
Everyone laughed, got up from the table, and went to work on the samples.
Joel Schumacher said, “I’ll get on the net and run down everything I can about all of these plants and see if anyone has already done any in-depth chemical analyses of their composition. It might just save us some time.”
Shirley Cole took a few of the plant samples and said, “I’ll grind up a sample of each of the plants and test them against the anthrax colonies I’ve got growing in the lab. The ones that show promise in killing the bacteria will be the first to go under the electron microscope for further analysis.”
Lionel Johnson picked up the tubes of blood samples. “I’ll run these through the blood analyzer and see if any unusual antibody formations show up. Those that look different or strange I’ll flag for further, more in-depth analysis.”