Hybrid (33 page)

“The patient in five, Dr. Rucker, is awake and wants to talk with you. Did you know he’s the coroner?”

“Thanks,” Cat said and weaved her way through the circus that her emergency room had become, hoping that maybe Dr. Rucker could clue her in on what was happening down here in the trenches. She pulled the curtain back with a flourish and found Phil sitting on the edge of the gurney, trying to keep his balance. “Dr. Rucker, you should not be trying to get up on your own.”

She reached for his shoulders and steadied him. When she touched his skin, he went rigid, almost as if she had given him a powerful shock. “Are you all right?” she asked and stood on tiptoe to look him in the eyes.

“Yes,” he said through tight jaws. She let go, and he slumped perceptibly. “What happened to Melissa?” As soon as he said her name, Phil knew. Some strange sense told him that she had died.

“She arrested, and we couldn’t bring her back,” Cat said softly.

Phil saw Dr. Lee running the Code that would end with an official time of death for Melissa Shay. He watched her cursing the implanted pacemaker and defibrillator that kept discharging. Every five seconds, the device jolted Melissa’s heart, and finally, the muscle stopped responding. In the end, a surgical resident was called to remove the device, but it was much too late. Her myocardium had been shocked to death.

The vision ended, and Dr. Lee was staring at him intently. “Are you all right?” she asked him again.

“I didn’t even know she had a pacemaker,” Phil said more to himself than to her. An unfamiliar feeling of loss stole over him.

“I’m sorry,” Catherine Lee said, and touched his bare arm.

A whirlwind of images invaded Phil’s mind. Unbidden and unwelcome, he saw Cat with other patients, and then with her husband. Phil was paralyzed with horror as he watched them make love in the shower. He felt like a degenerate as they enjoyed each other’s bodies in the privacy of their own home, and when he realized that parts of him were responding to the vision, he vomited.

Cat jumped back, but not in time, and the connection between them was broken.

Nurses arrived, and orders were given. He felt the IV in his arm sting as they injected him with Zofran. The powerful antiemetic agent began to cloud his thinking, but a part of him clung to the realization that he had been infected. His consciousness began to fragment, and he saw the tall, dark man staring into the eyes of a scared young man dressed in a uniform and holding a gun.

“Shoot him,” Phil said to the young man. “He’s going to kill you.”

Dr. Lee and the nurses stopped what they were doing and stared at the now unconscious Phil, waiting for him to explain what he had just said so clearly.

“Seventeen dead and fourteen wounded, all from some sort of explosion. The strange thing is that there was no fire, and none of them had any burns.”

Rodney Patton was relaying what he knew about the situation in Mescali to the mayor. “The FBI is fairly sure it was our guy Reisch. He’s using the name Lyon now.”

No one was certain what had happened or how Reisch had escaped. The single survivor who could speak said that he had been unconscious before the other guardsmen were attacked. He told the FBI that Reisch had reached into his mind and squashed it, an account uncomfortably similar to Yaeger’s. Rodney kept that part to himself. “They’re also fairly sure that he was shot. There was a whole lot of blood at the scene that can’t be accounted for. The state forensics team is working on it now.”

“Good, at least the bastard is hurt. That ought to slow him down some.” The mayor coughed loudly into the phone, and Patton winced. “Both the feds and the locals asked if they could borrow you for the day. Apparently, what happened yesterday was as close as this guy has ever come to being caught. I guess they think that some of that luck will rub off on them.” He laughed and then started into another coughing fit.

Rodney pulled the phone away from his ear until it was over. “They called me earlier. I’m leaving as soon as we are done.” Patton hoped that the mayor would take the hint.

“So let me get this straight. This Reisch is a German who worked for the Russians and then for himself.” He paused.

“Correct.”

“Then he finds his way here and starts to infect people with a virus that only two people have ever survived—him and Amanda Flynn. I remember meeting her several years ago. She had the most amazing eyes; she was also very pregnant at the time.”

Patton waited for the mayor to voice the obvious connection, but a long silence followed.

“So this virus is what’s been causing all the violence,” the mayor finally said thoughtfully. “Then why aren’t people dying by the hundreds, the thousands?”

“I’m just a cop, Mayor,” Patton said, trying to hide his frustration. This was the third time the mayor had asked that question.

“Yes,” the mayor said. “And you did a good job. I gave you a deadline, and you beat it. I won’t forget this, Rodney.” He hung up.

“Finally,” Patton said to himself. He had already decided that chief or not, he would not be giving the daily briefing to His Honor for several more days. He returned the phone to its receiver, and it immediately rang. “What?” he demanded. He needed to get over to Mescali as soon as possible, and the morning was being eaten away by phone calls.

“Chief, I have a man on the line who says he’s with the CIA. He claims to be your brother,” the desk sergeant replied quickly.

Rodney remembered the man’s name this time. “He’s my brother-in-law, Sergeant Thompson. Put him through.” He had to go a little easier with these men and women. They were starting to doubt themselves because of his overbearing nature, and timidity got people killed.

He listened as the connection was made. “Michael, how has your morning started?” he said after he heard background noise and his brother-in-law breathing impatiently.

“Busy.” It wasn’t impatience; it was excitement in Michael Weigel’s voice. “I’m sure you heard about Mescali. Our German friend was busy this morning.”

“I’m on my way down there in a couple of minutes. It was a Colorado Springs unit that he hit.”

“Sorry. Boy, you guys can’t catch a break. Okay, let me get right to it. I’m calling in the spirit of interagency cooperation, which means I’m authorized to talk to you. There are a lot of things happening that you don’t know about, and need to. Reisch is not working alone. He’s hooked himself up with some pretty bad people—Islamic terrorists. They somehow created a couple of different viruses, and with the help of Reisch, they’ve released one of them in Colorado Springs as a calling card. They have a list of demands that the president is reviewing. “

“Michael you know that most of that is on the news and we figured the rest of it out ourselves. Now, how are you federal boys going to help us?”

A pause that stretched to far followed. “We have no plans to intervene besides the quarantine.”

“So you’re just going to lock us in, and when the last of us keels over you’ll come in and bury us?” Patton said bitterly, and then regretted lashing out at his brother-in-law. Rodney knew that this decision could not have sat well with Michael. “What are they estimating as far as a death toll?” he asked.

“More than twenty thousand, but only if we can keep people at home.”

Rodney was embarrassed that his initial feelings were of relief. Twenty thousand dead, that was manageable, wasn’t it? Reflexively, a tiny fragment of his mind began to calculate the odds that he wasn’t going to be one of the unlucky twenty thousand, and his embarrassment intensified.

“There’s more,” Michael said. “We need Reisch alive.”

“Then come and get him,” Rodney said savagely and then instantly regretted his misplaced hostility. “I’m sorry, Michael. I know it’s not your fault.”

“No need to apologize,” Michael said as his brother-in-law and friend. “When you get over there, you need to let everyone know that this asshole has to be taken alive. I don’t care how alive, just so long as his heart is beating.”

“No one is going to listen. If they find Reisch, they’re going to go after him with tanks, and I can’t blame them. This guy wiped out an entire platoon . . . with a single goddamn thought.” He was remembering the Greg Flynn’s words and Amanda.

“Nonlethal force,” Michael Weigel said slowly, as a CIA senior analyst. “Catch him any way you can, then sedate him. We’ll take it from there. I’ve got to let you go, Rodney. I’ll call you if anything changes here, and you can call me if anything changes at your end.”

“’Bye,” Patton said, but the line was already dead.

There was another way, one that didn’t put people at risk. Amanda was immune to the same virus that Reisch was spreading; she had the same unique abilities as the German; and she was a lot better to look at. Patton smiled, remembering how she had effortlessly disabled the FBI team sent to take her. He had listened along with Greg Flynn to Don Heller’s radio, and secretly applauded when she warned them off with a not-so-veiled threat. He had never met her, but had taken an instant liking to her. She had an indomitable spirit that reminded of his wife. Of late, it seemed that anyone with positive attributes reminded him of Connie.

The problem was that no one was looking for her; the FBI had specifically ordered him to leave her alone. He was told that at this time apprehending her posed too great a risk, and that they should concentrate their efforts on capturing Reisch, who at first seemed to be less of a threat. He wondered if that assessment had changed.

He pulled himself out of his chair and hurriedly put his coat on, hoping to get out before the damn phone rang again. He was anxious to see for himself what had happened, and hopefully, along the way, bump into Amanda.

It had been a long, sleepless night. Martin hadn’t made it home until three-thirty in the morning and was at his desk before seven with a dozen administrative tasks that demanded his attention. He slowly started working through them, their mindless repetition helping him to focus on the more important task. He had a spy in his midst.

“Where to start?” He had asked himself a hundred times this morning, but no one answered. He had personally hired the vast majority of these people, and it sickened him to think that one of them was secretly helping those bastards. No, it was probably worse than that. One of his people was actually one of those bastards.

He was forced into doing a terrible thing. It was almost a violation of trust, a violation of his heritage, but he had to do it. He had the confidential personnel file of every person who worked in his section, and he would have to review each file. His one and only screening criteria was religion. He opened the first folder.

An hour and a half later, he pushed back from his desk and sighed loudly. Eighty-six files on one side of his desk, and six files on the opposite side. Six people who admitted to being Muslim, and he had hired each one of them. He stacked the six files into a neat pile and wondered if some low-level government clerk had done the same thing for Nazi Germany in 1938. “Twenty-three thousand dead,” he said, loud enough for his secretary to hear him.

She appeared at his door a moment later, her usual banter restrained. “Do you need anything?” she asked. She had sensed that something was wrong the moment he had walked in. He hadn’t explained the appearance of the army officers the night before, or his sudden need for personnel records that he had no right to see.

He looked up. “What?” he said tersely.

“You mumbled something, and I asked if you needed anything.” Her personality could not be entirely suppressed.

He stared at her for a moment. “Actually, yes. Come in and close the door.”

She moved a little tentatively. Never before had Martin closed his door.

“We have a problem,” he began after she had taken a seat. If he couldn’t confide in her, there was no one he could trust. “Actually, two problems.” He rapidly told her what had happened after she had left. He told her everything, despite the warnings of General McDaniels. “So we have a spy among us.”

Martha accepted the news calmly. “I would guess we have several spies among us. Most of what we do leaks out long before anything is published, but this—this is a betrayal of everything we stand for.”