Hybrid (45 page)

“You did stop him. He’s dead. We have the vial.” The ubiquitous New York City sirens were getting louder.

The vial was getting warm.
No, it’s getting hot
, Issam Rahim corrected himself. He knew that if the vial was warmed too quickly the yield would be low, so he turned the lamp down. He picked up the instructions for the twentieth time in an hour, but they still didn’t tell him anything new. His Arabic was only passable, so his particular set of instructions had been written in English; only something had been lost in the translation.

It started raining again, and the drops drummed on the slate roof and Issam’s nerves. It was always raining in Seattle, and he didn’t have a clue what the rain would do to the processed paper. Part of the reconstitution process involved immersing the paper in a tub of water for five minutes, but then—and the instructions were very clear on this point—the sheets were to be dried and kept dry. He looked out the window as spring rain turned his steep driveway into a small river. Like Izhan Ahmed in Los Angeles and the other fourteen fighters, Issam had been chosen for his ability to think independently and adapt to changing circumstances. The special paper would never work here, and with each passing moment, Issam knew that his opportunity for
shahada
was slipping away. For more than three years, he had dreamed of his glorious martyrdom. With one act, all his offenses would be wiped away, and he would find himself sitting close to the throne of the Almighty, living in the most beautiful house in all of paradise, the
dar al-shuhada
, the house of martyrs. Now, the rain threatened all of that.

He stroked the blue vial and found that it had cooled. The quarantine was scheduled to begin in less than six hours, and the streets were filled with Americans hurrying to buy enough beer, potato chips, and DVDs to last a week. His heart told him that the time to act was now, but his mind hesitated. The vial had not had the requisite thirty hours to reach maximum potency.

It will have to do
, he thought, and resolutely opened the vial of the Hybrid virus.

The death of Oliver had slowed everyone and everything, except for Phil’s mind. He kept running scenarios in his head, calculating how many more people would die with each second, minute, and hour delay. It had taken more than a day for the government bureaucracy to decide how to get him safely to Los Angeles and then another four hours to arrange for secure transport. Phil had become a national risk and a national treasure, both of which required a twenty-car entourage.

“This isn’t going to work,” he said to Rodney Patton through his face shield as they cruised down the 405 with a police escort. Phil was wearing a level-four contamination suit, complete with his own purified air source and a team of technicians to insure that it worked. “There’s too much going on around me to get a clear picture of what’s going on out there.”

“What do you need?” Patton screamed back.

“To be by myself,” Phil screamed. The cacophony of voices, opinions, and worry flooded every space in his head.

“There’s no way anyone is going to let you go out solo. That suit alone requires two people to make it work right.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Phil came very close to swearing from pure frustration.

Patton just shook his large head.

“We don’t have the time for this,” Phil said, and then there was a series of muted explosions. Cars ahead of them and behind them began to careen in every direction. Hoods, hubcaps, engine parts flew all around them. “Keep driving,” Phil yelled to their driver as their black suburban accelerated through the growing pile-up. “Just another day in L.A. traffic,” Phil said to Patton.

“Bullshit!” The big black man said, but his face had broken out into a grin from ear to ear. Ron Benedict looked back at them with a scowl on his face.

“You really shouldn’t have done that, Doctor,” he scolded Phil. “These bastards have infiltrated every level of our government; and after what happened in New York, you can bet your ass that they know that you’re here and what you can do.”

“Then let me do it,” Phil yelled back at Benedict, who glanced over at Patton and then finally turned back to face forward.

“Keep going,” he said to the driver.

It took them forty-five minutes to complete the first of twenty-four grids and Phil had reached his limit. “This is taking too much time. We need to use a helicopter.”

No one had wanted to accept the responsibility of putting Phil in a helicopter that was making slow circuits over America’s second largest city. Benedict had pushed for one, but had been overruled at almost every level. “You have to convince them that this is going to take too much time,” Phil had to yell to be heard.

“Tell them he forced you,” Patton added.

Benedict hesitated for a moment and then reached for his cell phone. Ten minutes of arguing, punctuated by long periods of silence, the assistant director of the FBI closed his phone and took a deep breath. “It’s going to take at least an hour for the attorney general to sign off on the presidential order. So while they worry about the niceties, we are going to misappropriate a helicopter.” Benedict turned and faced Rucker. ”This better be worth my pension.”

Thirty minutes later, the three men were skimming across the rooftops of East L.A. in a police helicopter.

“He wants you to slow down,” Patton said as Rucker started to motion with his arms. They couldn’t get him a headset without breaking the suit’s air seals, so Patton had worked out some signals with the pathologist. “Hover, right here.”

Phil began to scribble a note and passed it to Patton. “Can you drop us any lower?” Rodney asked the pilot. The LAPD pilot nodded and dropped down low enough that grass and dust began to fly through the open window.

Phil listened with his mind—there had been something here, but it seemed remote.
He was here—gone now;
Phil quickly wrote and showed it to Patton.

The big man frowned and the search went on. Seven more times, Phil had them pause and nearly land, but each time the spore had grown cold.

“We’re going to need to refuel,” the pilot told Benedict after nearly two hours of the yo-yo flying. Patton twirled his finger in the air for Phil who nodded that he understood.

Phil couldn’t shut out his companions growing frustration and panic, and reached for the pad of paper, which had slipped between his seat and Patton’s; he was just straightening up when he felt it again, only stronger. He grabbed Patton’s arm so hard and suddenly that the big man yelped.

“Son of a bitch!” Rodney screamed, while trying to pry Phil’s gloved hand from his forearm. Benedict looked back at the sudden commotion, and it took him a moment before he understood.

“Stop!” he yelled to the pilot. “Hold this position.”

Phil was writing again, and Rodney was rubbing his injured arm.

“That’s some grip he’s got,” Patton said to Benedict as Phil finished his note. “He wants to land there.” Phil was pointing at the tallest building in a cluster of tall buildings. A circled H marked a helipad.

“That can’t be right. That’s the Federal Building,” the pilot said.

“Shit,” said Benedict.

“Son of a bitch,” replied Patton. “This should have been the first place we looked.”

The pilot flared the helicopter and bumped to a soft landing. Phil was out a moment after the skids had touched down. “He’s here,” he yelled to Ron Benedict through the roar of the blades and his isolation suit.

“Say again?”

“He’s here.” Phil’s voice was still muffled even though the pair had moved away from the helicopter. Patton trailed behind, blocking out some of the rotor noise. “He works in this building,” he said, pulling open a door. A powerful stream of mental energy compelled him down a flight of stairs.

“Dr. Rucker, it’s safer to take the elevator,” Benedict called after him, but all he got in return was a series of unintelligible noises that under the right circumstances could have been words.

“Yeah, he’s always this way,” Patton said in answer to Benedict’s questioning look. “After you,” he said, and Patton followed the Assistant Director of the FBI down the stairs.

Phil had gone down seven flights before he started checking the floors individually. At first, he would just open the fire door and stand there for a moment. By the twenty-fifth floor, he was walking the circuit of the floor. When he opened the door to the twenty-third floor, he stopped and turned to his two escorts. “In here,” he said, and they followed him into the Los Angeles County Office of Emergency Management with their weapons drawn. A number of people began to stand and challenge them, but they were immediately silenced when Benedict introduced himself. Phil just kept walking until he came to a small corner office. Phil read the nameplate:
Joseph
Rider
.

“Is this the guy?” Patton poked his head into the empty office.

Phil didn’t hear him. He had wheeled around and was striding towards a young black woman. He almost made it, but the isolation suit wasn’t designed for running. Phil fell face first into a file cabinet and cracked his faceplate. The young woman screamed and dropped the phone. “She’s warning him!” Phil yelled, struggling to his feet.

Benedict saw the crack and lifted his weapon. “No one move! Everybody down on the floor, now!” Patton had also raised his weapon, and the two panned across the room. “Dr. Rucker, are you still secure?” asked Benedict.

“No leaks, I’m fine. Lower your weapons. They’re not involved.” Phil was back on his feet and had picked up the phone. Joseph Rider, aka Izhan Ahmed, had already hung up. “Where is he?” Phil addressed the cowering woman.

Adrienne Mays just stared back at the man in the space suit, shaking. The two men with guns and badges came up from behind the spaceman, and that terrified her even more.

“I am Ronald Benedict, assistant director of the FBI, and we need to find Joseph Rider.”

“He j-just left for the airport not five minutes ago,” she stammered. The two cops exchanged a look of panic. The woman added, “He’s not going anywhere. They’re setting up a command center there.”

It seemed reasonable, since the airports were going to be empty very soon. “What did you tell him?” Patton asked, wondering how accurate Rucker’s senses were. It seemed awfully coincidental that she just happened to be on the phone with the man they were looking for.

“I just told him that some people were here with guns. He said that he was calling our security force.” Adrienne could sense Patton’s suspicion. “I wasn’t doing anything wrong,” she pleaded.

“She doesn’t know anything,” Phil said to both of them. “Call him back,” Phil said to the crying woman.

“What do I tell him?”

“Anything, it doesn’t matter, just get him on the phone.”

She looked confused, but it was a relatively easy task, so she moved closer to the desk. Phil had obligingly backed away. She picked up the phone with a shaky hand and dialed the number. Benedict reached over and hit the speaker button.

The phone rang, and rang, and rang. “Damn it,” Patton said. “Tell us exactly what you told him.”

It was sad but necessary, and on the whole inevitable; but Rider liked his boss, and a part of him regretted that circumstances required him to shoot the man in the head. It had also been fairly messy, and he was glad that he had a different car to switch to.