Her Last Defense (12 page)

Her cheeks heated at the memory of exactly what he’d been doing that had so distracted her. Macy saw the same memory swirl in his quicksilver eyes.

Knowing she was holding a lit match to a pile of dry tinder, she raised her hand and brushed her fingers across his cheek. “I stopped you because I’m afraid of you, Clint Hayes. When I’m with you, everything else fades into the background. No matter how important a thought might be, my mind can’t hold on to it. There
isn’t a
me
anymore, there’s only
us.
Only you, really. You fill up the room, the woods, the universe. I’m afraid one day I’ll cease to exist altogether. Poof, and I’m gone.”

He covered her hand with his, pulled the linked fingers away from his face and kissed her. Slowly. Gently. Chastely. Only their lips touched, and then only lightly. Then he lifted his mouth away and tipped his forehead to rest against hers, his breath ragged but slow. “There, you see? No poof. You’re still here.”

She smiled, and the smile welled into a giggle. “It’s a start, I suppose.” She lifted her head and fell serious. “I still need more time. A lot has happened in the last few days. I’m not ready to, how did you put it…cross the tube…again so soon.”

He answered her with a nod. “S’okay. I’m a little gun-shy myself right now.”

With their hands still linked, they strolled back down the pier to shore. Clint tugged her toward the pickup. “We’d better get back to camp before my partner sends a search party after his truck.”

She lifted one eyebrow. “His truck?”

“He knows I can take care of myself.” He patted the hood of the big diesel. “Baby Blue, here, is another matter.”

“He calls this monster Baby Blue?”

“What can I say? The man is very paternal toward his vehicle.” He opened the truck door, steadied her while she climbed inside.

“That’s not really why we’re leaving, is it?”

“No,” he admitted, meeting her gaze evenly. She
waited for him to explain. “We’re leaving because having you out here all alone, in my favorite spot in the whole world, on a warm, starry night is not conducive to me giving you time.”

Then he closed the truck door and strode around to the other side, whistling “Yellow Rose of Texas” and jangling the keys in his hand.

C
lint should have felt more at ease now that he’d worked out a truce—or maybe it was more like a time-out—with Macy, but instead his stomach churned harder than ever. He never should have dragged her out to Grandpop’s cabin. He should have left things alone. He’d been better off when he thought she’d rejected him cold. Now that they’d hashed things out, the door was open again to some kind of ongoing relationship.

The kind of relationship he never got involved in. Ever.

Sitting in a folding chair in Macy’s tent, he slumped. She handed him a cup of coffee and their gazes brushed, sending a frisson of awareness clicking up his spine. Quickly he looked away.

His teammates sat in a circle in the middle of the
room, all of them watching him. Lord knew what they saw. With some effort, he screwed on an impassive expression. It wasn’t such a big deal what they gleaned about him, but he didn’t want to put Macy in an uncomfortable position.

She poured coffee for the last of them and then took her own chair for the powwow. “I was able to get a good bit of information about his work with the test subject, the macaque called José, from Dav—Dr. Brinker yesterday as his condition improved.”

Bull leaned forward, dangling his cup in one hand between his knees. “You think that information is pertinent to this investigation?”

“Yes, I do.”

“You mind if I tape-record this discussion, then?” He pulled a miniature cassette deck out of his shirt pocket and set it on the trunk in the center of their circle.

Macy shook her head. “No.”

“So how come this monkey doesn’t get sick?” Kat said.

Clint would have bet a week’s pay that she’d been the kind of kid who did a cannonball right into the deep end of the swimming pool without so much as dipping a toe in to check the water first, except he could see from the looks on his teammates’ faces that none of them would have taken the wager. The odds were stacked in his favor.

“Start from the beginning,” Bull suggested. “None of us are doctors, so you’ll have to explain as best you can in layman’s terms.”

She did, although the concepts were still complex.
Eventually, Clint lost track of the words, and just watched the play of emotion across her face. The way she pursed her lips to make an important point. The way her brows drew together when she tried to figure out how to say something another way. The way her chicory-coffee eyes rounded when she wanted to drive home a point to her audience.

At the moment, her eyes were very round.

“Whoa. Rewind,” Del said, setting his empty coffee cup aside and making a twirling motion with one hand. “So you’re telling us that the reason Brinker’s monkey didn’t get sick was because he’d been exposed to ARFIS sometime in the past and survived, and so he was immune?”

She nodded. “At least that’s what David thought. When the monkey didn’t show any symptoms, he said he tested José’s titer, and it was off the scale.”

“His what?”

“Titer. It’s basically how we measure immunity. High titer equals lots of antibodies to fight off a virus. Low titer means you get sick and die. Thing is, the human victims’ immune systems hadn’t proven to be effective at all in fighting this particular virus. So when David saw José’s titer he thought the monkey had some kind of superantibody that could beat ARFIS. He thought if he could get the antibody into a lab and study the way the antigen disrupted the life cycle of the virus, he might be able to recreate that action synthetically. Create a cure that would save thousands. Maybe millions.”

“There’s a problem with that logic?” Bull asked.

“Not the logic so much as the assumptions behind it.” She leaned forward, propped her elbows on her knees and planted her gaze on the floor between her feet. “I ran some tissue samples on José last night. I didn’t find a single bit of damage to any of his internal organs. Nothing. ARFIS is such a violent disease…there should have been some residual effects of his illness, even if he did make a miraculous recovery. I don’t think that monkey’s been sick a day in his life, and I certainly don’t think some superantibody produced by his immune system beat ARFIS. The virus reproduces too quickly. In humans, symptoms appear within twenty-four hours. In forty-eight, death is imminent. In a simian, like José, the progression would happen even more quickly. There just isn’t time for the body to produce antigen in sufficient quantities to fight the massive amount of virus.”

Clint shook his head, trying to make sense of the medical mumbo jumbo. “So if José never contracted the disease, why is his titer so high?”

“That’s exactly what I asked myself. And then I started thinking, maybe a person—or monkey—can’t produce enough antibodies to kill ARFIS before it kills them. But if the antibodies were already there before the virus was introduced, the bug couldn’t get a foothold, couldn’t reproduce in large quantities, and the patient would survive.”

“Is that possible?” Bull asked.

“We do it every day.” Macy looked up and shrugged. Her brown eyes were round as copper pennies, making the hair stand up on Clint’s forearms. Here came the bombshell. He’d bet on it.

“With vaccinations,” she finished.

A tomb wouldn’t have been more silent than that tent at that moment.

“How…?” Del finally began to ask, then trailed off, his forehead furrowed.

“Once we’ve isolated a virus, we can kill it and inject it into a live, but neutral, cell so that the body reacts to it, or just modify the live virus to make it harmless, and then introduce it to the body. Even though the patient can’t get sick from the altered cells, the immune system recognizes the viral material as a threat and produces antibodies to fight it.”

“I get how vaccinations work,” Del said. “I meant how did that monkey get vaccinated?”

“There is no vaccine against ARFIS,” Kat piped up in her usual ingenuous way. Her gaze jumped around the group seated in a circle like children at storybook hour. “Is there?”

Clint swore. “Brinker couldn’t have seen this little inconsistency with his data?” He tried not to make the question sound like an accusation, but he was pretty sure it was obvious to all in the room that he didn’t think much of Dr. David Brinker.

“I don’t believe he had time,” Macy explained. “We were so busy treating patients and trying to isolate the organism…. Plus he’d have needed to run tests that would have caused questions. He’d have had to explain what he was working on to me or one of the lab techs.”

“Are you sure he didn’t?” Del looked speculative. “We haven’t really considered that one of the other members of Macy’s team could have been involved.”

“I’ve run backgrounds on them and interviewed them,” Kat said. “Didn’t turn up anything.”

Bull kicked his chair back on two legs. “For now let’s stick with Jeffries as our suspect. Doctor, you were speculating on how a monkey could have received a vaccination that doesn’t exist.”

“This is where it gets a little scary,” Macy admitted in a low voice.

“Like talking about a bug that can kill you in forty-eight hours hasn’t been?” Kat said.

Bull gave the junior Ranger a quelling look. “Go ahead, doctor. Explain.”

“ARFIS only reared its ugly head, what? Ten or twelve weeks ago? To have a viable vaccine, someone would have to have been working with the bug much longer than that. Maybe years. I couldn’t imagine how or why that could be. Usually scientists are more than ready to blab about their discoveries. Then I remembered what you said about terrorists.”

“You think terrorists vaccinated the monkey?” Kat looked confused.

“To cut to the chase, yes.”

Bull pinched his nose like he had a headache. “If terrorists were using this monkey, how did he end up in Brinker’s lab.”

“I’ve thought about that,” Macy said. “And of course, this is pure speculation, but most labs have a policy that requires them to humanely destroy test animals once experimentation is finished.”

“So…what? He escaped?”

“I don’t think so. These animals are fairly expensive.

They’re supposed to be destroyed, but I have heard of cases where unscrupulous labs, or the handlers that acquired and were supposed to terminate the monkeys, resold them.”

Del cocked his jaw to the side. “Don’t tell me. Ty Jeffries was the one who acquired David’s monkeys.”

She nodded.

“Okay,” Bull said, his voice speculative. “So let’s say the terrorists are experimenting with a vaccine or a cure. It works, and little Jose is immune. He’s supposed to be destroyed, but instead someone resells him to Ty Jeffries.”

Clint uncrossed his legs and leaned back in his chair. “Or maybe there was no middleman. Ty Jeffries acquired the monkeys for the terrorists, too. When he’s done with them there, he sells them to David. Doubles his profit.”

“Either way,” Bull said. “Somehow the terrorists find out about it.”

Kat’s eyes brightened. “They go to Ty, want their monkey back. But David has latched on to this particular animal. Now Ty—and the terrorists—are sweating.”

“So they threaten him. Come up with a plan to hijack the plane and get the proof of their existence back before anyone is the wiser,” Bull finished. He shook his head. “Christ, where did they get an ARFIS vaccine to begin with?”

Macy looked at Bull and rubbed her arms as if she were cold. Or frightened. “That’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question, isn’t it? So I went over all the data we had so far on ARFIS.”

Reaching behind her, she pulled a folder off the table and opened it, then held up two eight-by-ten printouts of what looked like inkblots to Clint, but which must have meant something significant to her. “ARFIS is a negative-strand RNA virus, specifically a filovirus.”

She held out one picture to her rapt audience and set the other down behind her. “See the thin, snakelike shape and the looped tails? Those are common to all filoviruses, although the exact shapes vary. They also have lower-level details in common. At the chromo-some level, they share genetic markers, just useless remnants of atomic structure that serve no purpose today, nevertheless that are always present. The thing is, ARFIS doesn’t carry all of the genetic markers it should.” She set the second picture down and looked at each of the Rangers seriously in turn.

“Of course, these results are preliminary. We have a lot more work to do and the facilities in Malaysia made it impossible to get complete data. We need a Level Four lab—the highest level of biohazard protection—to run the tests that will tell us for sure. But some of the genetic markers that a naturally occurring filovirus should carry are missing.”

No one seemed to know what to make of that.

“Meaning?” Clint finally asked, afraid to hear the answer.

“Meaning that I don’t think ARFIS is a naturally occurring virus. I think someone genetically engineered it.”

By noon the next day, the CDC base camp was gone. Generators carted off, tents folded and packed, garbage
burned. The quarantined workers had been sent back to their families with a strict warning about national security—as if that was going to do any good. By two o’clock half the county would have heard tales about their brush with ARFIS. Maybe half the state. A road had been bulldozed in for removal of the larger pieces of the wrecked jet. Clint thought he saw one of the security guards pocket a dial from the control panel, probably as a souvenir. The monkey, José, had been crated and sent to a holding facility in Lufkin until he could be shipped back to Atlanta.

On the slim chance that Ty Jeffries had succumbed to injuries suffered in the plane crash out in the woods somewhere, cadaver dogs from the state search and rescue task force had deployed that morning looking for his remains, and state guardsmen were lined up in shoulder-to-shoulder lines searching fallow fields and farmland, hoping to stumble over a body.

They should all be so lucky.

No one was saying so, but everyone knew Ty was out there somewhere in what searchers described as the ROW—the rest of the world.

God knew where.

Bull, Clint and Del had been on the phone all morning with law-enforcement agencies from the Sabine County Sheriff’s Department to the CIA, with no leads on Jeffries’s whereabouts. He’d disappeared, and now the Rangers were gearing up for a full-fledged manhunt.

Which meant it was time for Clint to let go of the silver circle and star that had been the center of his life for the last few years, and his only goal during the re
quired eleven years as a Texas State Trooper before that. He wasn’t quarantined any longer. And this had become a case with global implications.

The world deserved the best on this job, and he wasn’t the best any longer. To pretend he was fit for duty put everyone around him at risk.

But he didn’t turn in his badge. Didn’t say a word to his teammates about his inability to handle a gun.

He might have blamed it on foolish pride. He might have blamed the stubborn nature he’d inherited from his Grandpop and his father.

The truth was, he stayed because of Macy. As soon as he’d learned she wasn’t going back to Atlanta with the rest of her CDC team, he’d known he couldn’t walk away. She’d uncovered what might be the biggest terrorist plot since 9/11, and now she was working with authorities to figure out how to foil it. As far as he was concerned, that made her a terrorist target.

No way he was leaving her.

Standing on the tarmac at Lufkin Airfield, he watched her through reflective sunglasses as she said goodbye to her team. Even from a distance he could see the sorrow on her face, the moisture in her eyes as she hugged Susan and they whispered some girl talk in each others’ ears, throwing furtive glances at him all the while, before they parted.

She would miss them, her team. Her friends. Seeing how open she was with people, how easily she connected with them, it was hard to imagine her locked in a sterile laboratory day after day. Hard to imagine that she routinely handled deadly pathogens in that laboratory.

She was tougher than she looked, he reminded himself. She’d handled herself in the forest. She’d handled herself in the hospital with her ex-fiancé. If things went south with this virus, she’d handle herself again.