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Dattar swallowed the building rage. “You despicable money trader. What makes you think you’re in any position to deal?”

She laughed in his face.

He broke away from Rajiid and lunged at her, slashing with his knife. He sliced at her right shoulder and slit open a long line along the sweater. Blood poured from it. He moved in for the kill, and Rajiid grabbed at him.

“Help me hold him back!” Rajiid yelled at Manhar. Dattar felt the younger man wrap an arm around his neck and pull. Nolan was against the wall. She looked over his left shoulder and her gaze locked there.

Khalil stepped into view. He held his own knife and walked calmly to Nolan. She pressed back against the wall as he approached. He placed the knife against her neck, right under her left ear, and turned it so that it cut her. Yet more of her blood ran. He moved the tip of the knife to the edge of her right eye.

“The money that you retain is interesting, yes, but if you continue to anger me, I’d just as soon kill you. Don’t push me over the edge. Understand that you have nothing that I need so desperately that I’ll put up with you. Get to work on the bacteria or this will be the first to go. Say one more word and I’ll take both. If you don’t place the bacteria we have several more that will, so your resistance is worthless and will accomplish nothing except your blindness.” He stepped out of her way.

She stared at him. After a moment she dropped her gaze, took a deep breath, and walked to the coolers. She picked up a pair of rubber gloves and slid them over her damaged hand, wincing as she did. She went to the coolers and lifted out a tray that held several flasks, each filled with a yellow liquid.

“What do I do?” she said to Rajiid. He let go of Dattar, walked to the cooler, and removed a tray that held six flat jars, each filled with a gelatinous base.

“Pour the bacteria into the substance.” Nolan grasped the first jar with her good hand, but gasped when she tried to unscrew the lid with her bad one.

“I can’t do it.”

Rajiid reached over and unscrewed the jars, then dumped the contents of each flask on top of the gelatinous base.

“Now we need to test the water temperature.”

Khalil jutted his chin at Manhar. “You. Get moving.” Manhar let go of Dattar and headed to the coolers. Rajiid handed him a thermometer. Manhar looked at it with dread.

“Are you sure the third rail is off? Is the water electrified?”

“For the moment the rail is off. You keep wasting time, and it will eventually turn back on.” Rajiid waved him forward. Manhar crawled down onto the tracks. Dattar moved closer, watching.

“How hot do you need the water to be?” he asked. Rajiid once again crouched by the tracks’ edge.

“It’s not how hot, but how cold. The bacteria die if the water is over thirty-five degrees centigrade. Since water boils at one hundred, I presume it hasn’t yet cooled enough, but we will see.” Manhar stuck the thermometer into the water and waited. Sixty seconds later it beeped.

“And?” Dattar said.

“Eighty.”

Rajiid hissed. “Too hot. Khalil, tell the men upstairs to turn the hydrant back on. We’ll add cooler water.” Khalil left. Manhar started back to the platform, his booted feet sloshing through the blackened water.

“If they turn the third rail back on, will we be able to place the bacteria?” Dattar asked.

Rajiid shook his head. “No. So we’d better get this water cooled fast. Eventually someone at the MTA is going to appear and try to fix the problem.”

Dattar snorted. “If they do, then someone at the MTA is going to die. I didn’t come this far to be stopped.” He looked at Nolan.

“You’re a thief. We punish thieves by cutting off their hands. You give me the money, then you live, but without your hands. If you don’t, you die.”

42

Smith woke to find Russell and Ohnara leaning over him. Russell looked dreadful as opposed to near death, which was actually a gain. Ohnara looked pensive and frightened. Smith shifted his head to gaze around the room. It appeared that he was flat on his back on the floor of a lab. Something soft was bunched under his head as a makeshift pillow, but it wasn’t even close to comfortable.

“Where am I?” Smith said.

“In the Medicon Corporation’s laboratory,” Ohnara said. “Ms. Russell brought you here. How are you feeling?”

Smith rose to a sitting position and groaned. His head pounded, and the world went dark for a moment as the blood failed to rush upward.

“Aspirin,” he managed to croak. Sixty seconds later, a hand holding a cup of coffee was thrust in front of his nose.

“That’s not aspirin.” He inhaled deeply, taking in the heady smell of roasted coffee, and then breathed out. “But I’ll take it. What time is it?”

Russell consulted her watch. “Midnight.”

He sipped the coffee, thought about Nolan, and felt a welling sadness, but he shoved the feeling away. He wouldn’t assume that she was dead. She had her trump card to use against Dattar, and he hoped she’d play it well enough to stay alive until he could find her.

“Thanks for showing up when you did,” he said to Russell, who sat on a stool facing him. “How did you know where I was?”

“Marty called me, as did Klein.”

Smith raised an eyebrow. “Klein?”

“I asked him to keep me informed about any actions taken by the FBI or DHS. He said that Harcourt had asked the CIA to pick you up on suspicion of terrorist activity, and his monitors heard that they had located you and were sending a SWAT team. Marty told me where you were.”

“And Howell and Beckmann?”

“Beckmann is in FBI custody. Howell managed to escape. We don’t know where he is.”

Smith eyed a stool to his right that he would have loved to sit on, but he wasn’t entirely sure that his legs would work yet.

“Need help getting up?” Ohnara said.

Smith nodded. “Yes.” Ohnara lent an arm while Smith struggled upward. When he was on the stool, he leveled a look at Ohnara. “Talk to me.”

Ohnara sighed. “I can’t determine if the avian flu that Ms. Russell contracted was the same that attached to the Shewanella in the swab. It’s extremely difficult to get bird flu without close contact with an infected animal. Ms. Russell’s distance from the refrigerator swab seems to rule that out as a factor. Also, the cholera died, and Shewanella MR-1 does not cause illness.”

Smith looked back at Russell. “Despite all that, you have a hunch that the swab was involved in some way, don’t you?” She nodded. Smith kept sipping the coffee, thinking. “Let’s approach this thing from another angle.” He addressed Ohnara. “Tell me again about the Shewanella. Gram negative, lives underwater in an anaerobic environment, and conducts electricity.”

Ohnara nodded. “It not only conducts electricity but it actually feeds off it. We’re not sure how, but its nanowires attach and communicate with metal or an electric source. And I can’t emphasize this enough, but it doesn’t, as far as we know, cause any disease or illness of any kind.”

“What if it were weaponized?” Russell asked.

Ohnara shook his head. “I don’t see how it could be. Most weaponized substances have, at their core, a toxic capability. Since it doesn’t, it’s a poor candidate for such a use. In fact, it is actually the opposite. It can create energy and because it feeds off metals, it’s used in rivers in a beneficial manner.”

“DMRB bacteria,” Smith said.

“English, please, for the one who’s not a microbiologist in the room.” Russell swung her stool to face Smith. He gave her a small smile and she smiled back.