Payback (21 page)

At
least she hasn’t given up hope.

Sarah
hadn’t either, but she had to admit with each passing hour what spirit she had
left was being gradually drummed out of her. The pressure of dealing with the
sick and dying, of having no support team, of worrying about what might happen
if they were left without Koroma to protect them, and of worrying about when
Koroma would decide he didn’t need them anymore, it was all quickly getting to
her.

“I don’t
know how much longer I can last,” she finally whispered. Her head dropped as
she rested her elbows on her knees. “I just pray they find us soon. You said
Koroma was leaving for the United States. I’m afraid he’s going to kill us
before he does.”

Tanya
shook her head. “There’s no way. As long as that little girl is alive, we’re
alive.”

Sarah
looked up at her friend. “I wish I had your confidence.”

“Think
about it. He lost his wife and son and look what he did! He’s kidnapped us,
killed Jacques, stolen supplies from his government and committed God only
knows what other crimes. There’s no way he’s going to let his daughter die
after doing all that!”

Sarah
sat back up. “Or, he’s going to let her die, or worse, kill her, so that she’s
not left alone when he’s gone. He’s going to do something back in the States,
something bad, and my guess is he won’t survive whatever it is. And if he’s
leaving soon, he can’t wait for her to die. I wonder…” She paused for a moment,
thinking back on her conversation with him.

Then
I will have a decision to make.

“He said
he’d have a decision to make if she tested positive,” she murmured, her eyes
meeting Tanya’s with a look of horror.

“You
don’t think…” Tanya’s voice trailed off in shock as her eyes opened wide, her
jaw dropping. “You don’t think he’d kill her, do you?”

It had
to be what he had meant. What other possible kind of decision could he have
been referring to? The very thought was inconceivable to her, but from her
experience, she knew it was possible. “I’ve seen enough murder-suicides in my
life to know that some people, in a moment of weakness, will kill their
children before they kill themselves so they won’t be left alone with no one to
take care of them. We don’t know this man, we don’t know if he’s mentally
unbalanced, but I wouldn’t put anything past him.”

“My God,
what have I done?” cried Tanya, gripping her hair and pulling at it viciously.

Sarah
felt her chest tighten, a sense of foreboding crawling up her spine. “What do
you mean?” she asked, terrified of what the answer might be.

“It
never occurred to me, I never thought he’d kill her! I mean, what kind of
maniac does that?”

Sarah’s
chest was like a vise and she felt herself going cold. She gripped the arms of
the chair as her mouth filled with bile. “You switched the samples!”

The
words smacked Tanya like a two-by-four to the chest, the distraught woman
shoving herself back in her chair, her eyes, red and wide, staring at Sarah as
she let go of her hair and began to beat her thighs with balled up fists. “It
was the only way to save us!”

Sarah
turned in her chair, unable to look at Tanya. She swallowed the saliva quickly
building in her mouth and jammed a thumb in the pressure point on her left
wrist, slowly massaging it, trying to fight off the urge to vomit. What her
friend—and could she even call her that anymore?—had done was unbelievable.
Inexcusable. Unimaginable. To risk the life of a little girl to save your own?

“How
could you?” she murmured, still not looking at Tanya.

“I-I—”
No more was forthcoming, instead sobs filled the room eventually accompanied by
pleas to God for forgiveness. As Sarah listened, she thought of her own
rationalizations when she had been doing the testing, and couldn’t help but
realize that she had been secretly happy that the little girl had tested
positive as her illness would most likely lead to their survival.

“We have
to get her out of there,” she finally said, pushing herself to her feet. “Now!”

Tanya
reached out and grabbed her arm. “But she’s been exposed now. We can’t take her
out.”

“We
don’t know that. I put her behind a curtain and nobody has touched her.”

“But how
will we explain it? If he finds out what I’ve done, he’ll kill me!”

Sarah
wanted to tell her she deserved to die for what she had done, but couldn’t. She
knew deep down that she herself had debated what she would do if the blood test
had been negative, and a small part of her had decided she would claim it was
positive just so they’d have this poor, innocent child to use as leverage in
their struggle to survive.

But she
hadn’t had to make that decision. She had been saved from that by Tanya switching
the samples.

A
thought dawned on her.

“Do we
know for sure she was negative?”

Tanya’s
sobs stopped for a moment. “Wh-what?”

“You
switched the samples but we tested her because she was symptomatic. What did
you do with her real sample? Did you test it?”

Tanya
shook her head, a sudden look of hope appearing. “No, I mean, I just—” She
stopped, the look of hope replaced by one of shame. “Oh God, I’m doing it
again.” She stood and picked up her gloves, pulling them on as she walked over
to one of the desks. Opening a drawer, she reached inside then held up a vial.
“This is hers.”

Sarah
rushed over to the electron microscope, flicking the switch to turn it on, this
building one of the few actually with power, solar panels and batteries making
it by far the most modern structure she had seen here. The microscope hummed to
life as she pulled the chair out from the desk. “Test it.”

Tanya
nodded and quickly donned her head gear then sat down and prepared the sample.
Sarah felt like she was holding her breath the entire time. She kept eyeing the
door, terrified someone would come in to wonder where they had gone. They were
supposed to only come here for a few minutes so she could brief Tanya on
Koroma’s daughter. It had never occurred to her that this woman, this mother,
would risk the life of another child just to save her own.

Yet she
couldn’t condemn her and she found herself placing her hands on Tanya’s
shoulders, squeezing them gently. Tanya looked up at her through the goggles
and facemask, smiling tentatively.

The
machine beeped and they both looked at the display then each other.

“Oh no,”
they echoed.

Embassy of the United States, Freetown, Sierra Leone

“How sure are you of this?”

Dawson
sat with the rest of his team in a small conference room provided to them after
their arrival. It had been decided there was no point in remaining at the
clinic and risking continued exposure since the FBI forensics team were the
needed expertise, not Spec Ops. Right now they were in a holding pattern until
additional intel came in, and by the sounds of it, it was finally arriving.

“Not a
hundred percent, but it’s highly probable that these are the trucks we’ve been
looking for.”

Dawson
recognized the voice of the CIA Analyst he had dealt with on several occasions,
but hadn’t been certain for the first few minutes since the voice seemed to
sound slightly different, as if there was something there that hadn’t been
before.

Confidence?

If so he
was happy for the kid.
Kid!
He wasn’t that much younger than Dawson,
certainly not anywhere near young enough to be his son, but his demeanor, the
way he carried himself, had always suggested insecure teenager. How he had ever
managed to land the honey he was dating he’d never know, but he obviously had
some confidence somewhere in order to hold on to her. And now it sounded like
the young man might have finally found where it had been hiding.

“Two
short Caucasians accompanied by two black taller people in a truck heading
north. That’s all you’ve got?”

There
was a pause filled with quiet white noise coming from the speaker. “Yes.”

“Sounds
good to me. Have we got eyes in the sky there?”

“UAVs
should be starting overflights shortly but it’s a huge area,” replied Leroux.
“We’re concentrating on the area where all of our suspects have come from which
might help narrow the search.”

“Okay,
we’ll make arrangements to head into that area. Any word on the outbreak
there?”

“Only
that it’s bad, but the population is sparse. There’s hardly any medical
facilities in the area so we suspect most of the sick have moved away. There’s
really nothing beyond a three month old report from the World Health
Organization so you’re going in pretty much blind.”

 Niner
elbowed Atlas. “We’re used to that.”

“Not
with this kind of enemy,” boomed Atlas. And he was right. Heading into a
situation blind with an unknown number of hostiles in unknown locations wasn’t
the preferred option, but wasn’t unheard of if it were absolutely necessary.
But a disease? It was just something they hadn’t encountered before. They
trained for it, though rarely for viral outbreaks like Ebola. It was more for
biological, radiological or chemical warfare situations.

Not a
pissed off Mother Nature.

“We’ll
arrange transport through our liaison here. As soon as you have something from
those UAVs, let us know. I’d prefer to not be going in completely blind.”

“Yes,
sir,” replied Leroux. “Another piece of intel has just come through that
suggests the northern connection is more plausible. We’ve linked one of the
Norfolk hostage takers to Major Koroma. He’s his brother.”

Niner
slammed a fist on the table. “Now that’s simply too much of a coincidence!”

“That
pretty much settles it,” agreed Jimmy. “Even Vegas bookies wouldn’t touch those
odds.”

Dawson
had to agree. There was no way these two events weren’t connected now that they
had this familial link. Cousins were one thing. Brothers? No way.

Leroux
continued. “There’s one more thing I’ve been asked to warn you about.”

Dawson
glanced at the others, leaning in. “What?”

“You’re
still secure?”

Dawson
knew they were, but glanced about regardless. “Yes.”

“The
intel you were provided indicating they had gone south, well, we could find
nothing to corroborate it, and the fact that we found them going north suggests
an intentional false flag.”

Dawson’s
head bobbed slowly. He had already picked up on that little discrepancy, but
what he didn’t know yet was who was responsible. Their liaison Margai had told
them of the southerly sightings, but had he made it up, or had he been provided
the bad or false intel? Either way it didn’t matter. All that he could say for
certain was that any intel provided by Margai, or the Sierra Leoneans, couldn’t
be relied upon.

Now he
had to determine what side Margai was playing for.

“Understood.
I want you to dig a little deeper into our contact here. See if there’s any
connection with Koroma or any of his men from Norfolk.”

“Will
do.”

“Good. Keep
us posted, Freetown, out.” He hit the button killing the call then turned to
his men. “What do you think?”

Atlas
cleared his throat. “The intel sending them south never made sense to me—almost
intentionally opposite of what was to be expected with all the connections
pointing north. If you really wanted to throw us off, why not east? An exact
one-eighty just seemed too convenient.”

“Not to
mention I don’t trust anyone in a suit,” added Niner. “That guy just came off
as too slick. I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him, and he’s a big
bastard so that wouldn’t be far.”

“Pussy!”
coughed Jimmy who was rewarded with a none-too-gentle punch to the shoulder
from Niner.

“Agreed,”
said Dawson.

“What,
that I’m a pussy?”

Dawson
deadpanned Niner for a moment, saying nothing. “I don’t think we can trust any
intel provided by the locals until we determine the source of the bad intel.”

“He
thinks I’m a pussy,” hissed Niner as an exaggerated aside to Jimmy who was
still massaging his shoulder.

“Agreed,”
said Jimmy in response to Dawson, quickly leaning out of reach of Niner’s fist.
“Do we trust this guy to make our transportation arrangements?”

“We
don’t really have a choice.” Dawson tapped the table. “That doesn’t mean we
don’t take precautions, though.”

Somewhere in Sierra Leone

Sarah woke to the sounds of a car horn honking. She looked at her
watch and frowned, her shift not due to begin for another two hours. She lay
her head back down and tried to will herself back to sleep, but some excited
shouts from outside had her curious and a bit afraid.

To
hell with it!

Wiping
the sleep out of her eyes with some well-placed knuckles, she rose from her
makeshift bed, looking around to make sure she was alone. Satisfied, she pulled
her hair back, tying it with a rubber band she had found in the administration
office, then slipped into her shoes, stepping out of the room given to them in
Koroma’s home and heading toward the noise of gathering people.

Idiots.
Don’t they know crowds are how this disease is spread?

Stepping
into the morning sunlight she squinted, letting her eyes adjust for a moment as
she shielded them with her hand. She spotted Tanya standing in the rear doorway
to the clinic as she was hosed down by one of Koroma’s men. She waved, Sarah
smiling at her as she walked toward the road that passed in front of the
community center.

Several
cars and trucks were present, including one large black Mercedes with Sierra
Leonean flags flying from the front corners of the hood.