Sins of the Father (25 page)

Peter could relate.

“Cooks,” the cop named Shulberg told him, presenting Peter and Julia like a hunting dog dropping a dead duck at his master’s feet.

The fed nodded and sized them up.

“IDs,” he said.

They presented the IDs again, and this time, the fed pulled out a little hand-held device to scan the barcode under each of their fake names. Peter had to force himself to breathe, calm and slow. Beside him, Julia was a brick wall. Unflappable.

The device pinged its approval, and Peter fought a smile.

Mr. Caldwell, you are a miracle worker.

“Go on in,” the fed told him, pushing the door open.

On the other side was a short hallway containing two other feds, one black and male, the other white and female. The male agent was a stocky little bantam rooster type, shorter than his red-headed female partner, and he didn’t look very happy about the fact. The way he held his shoulders and chin, Peter would have bet money that he felt threatened by her.

The woman, on the other hand, was calm and confident, her body loose and relaxed, but far from lazy. If things went bad, she was going to be the one Peter would have to worry about. She had it under control, and that made her the most dangerous person in the room.

The fed from outside nodded, silently indicating that Peter and Julia had been cleared. It was like a worker ant passing signals to its sisters. The two partners nodded back, and motioned for them to step forward.

The man took Peter by the arm, while the woman took Julia, placing her purse and shoulder bag on a table. Electronic wands were passed up and down their bodies, and then they were patted down thoroughly by hand.

At least buy a guy dinner first
, Peter thought.

“What’s this?” the female agent asked Julia.

Peter craned his head to see what she was talking about, and then he fought to keep his expression neutral.

The female agent was holding up the unzipped case that held the antidote and a syringe.

“It’s my insulin,” Julia said. “I’m diabetic. See?”

To Peter’s amazement, she pulled a blood glucose monitoring kit from her purse. He was impressed, and let himself start breathing again.

“Fine,” the female agent said, zipping the case again. “Go ahead in.”

* * *

“Now what?” Julia said as they rounded a corner. “We’re not going to the kitchens, are we?” Now that they were out of sight of the feds, her hands began to shake. She closed her eyes and steadied herself.

Peter had kept most of the plan to himself—partly because he wasn’t sure how much it would freak her out, but also because he was making a lot of it up as he went along. He probably should have given her more credit, but she had been ready to bolt once before. While it was one thing to be chased by crazy thugs with guns, it was another to actively go looking for them. She’d gotten this far, but how much further would she go?

“No,” he replied. “Me cooking would be a bad idea. We’re here to prevent a terrorist action, not create one.” He hoped the joke would get her to crack a smile, but her face remained stone-cold serious. “Now that we’re in, we should be able to move around without anyone questioning us, but we’re going to need to steal another ID.”

“Why?” she asked, a puzzled look on her face. “Can’t we get around like this?”

“Yeah, but we don’t know where we’re going. We need to access the hotel’s reservation system, and see if we can find out where these people are. Most of it’s online, but to find out who’s actually here at any given moment, we need to get into the records of who they’ve scanned using the ID cards. A line cook isn’t going to have access.

“If you have the right card,” he continued, “The system knows who you are and logs you in the moment you swipe it at one of the terminals.”

“Where do we get one of those?”

“We’re going to start with the staff locker room. If we don’t find one there, we’ll see if we can lift one from someone on the desk staff.”

“Lift?” she said. “Like, steal?”

“Don’t tell me you have a problem with that.”

“No,” she said. “I’ve just never done it before.”

“If it comes to that, I’ll handle it. I’ve got enough experience for the both of us.”

The Ambassador’s service corridors were like every other hotel all over the world—drab, utilitarian passageways with scratched and scraped white walls, allowing the staff to scurry through its innards like rats in a maze, invisible to the guests until they were needed. Peter found the employee locker room by watching people in their civvies passing through the corridors, and tracing them back. He needn’t have bothered, though. It was exactly where he thought it would be.

He had seen this kind of layout in every hotel he’d ever been in. He found himself flashing back to the hallways of the Infinity Towers in Bangkok, where this all had started. It was almost identical, save for the language most of the signs were in.

“Okay, the locker room’s going to be split between a men’s and a women’s section,” Peter said quietly as they approached. “We’ll split up. You’re looking for anyone in a blazer, or an open locker with one hanging in it. Those people are going to be with guest services, and probably have access to the front desk for reservations, concierge, that sort of thing. One of those ID cards should get us what we need. You see one of those, you poke your head into the men’s section and grab me.”

Julia nodded, and Peter slipped away from her, speeding up to make it appear as if they weren’t together when they got to the locker-room doors.

Inside, Peter found row upon row of orange lockers with worn, wooden benches sitting between them. A few men were changing into their uniforms—cook’s whites, every one of them.

He walked the aisles looking for an open locker, or an unattended pocket he could pilfer. He found a blazer hanging over a hook next to the bathroom and quickly checked the pockets. Nothing. But it wasn’t a total loss. Some hotel staff members were less visible than others, so he switched his cook’s jacket for the blazer.

He had timed their arrival in the hope that they would catch a shift break, giving them a greater opportunity to find a card, but though the corridors all looked the same, different hotels adhered to different schedules. It didn’t look as if there was a changing of the guard happening at the moment.

Suddenly, Peter heard a loud banging coming from the women’s locker room, then unintelligible yelling. Somebody was having a fight. A sinking feeling crawled through his stomach and he ran over to the other side, doing his best to look like a concerned employee.

What he saw was pretty much what he’d expected. Julia had tried to lift somebody’s ID card and gotten caught. A short Latina woman in a rust-colored blazer, whose ID card was clipped to her left breast pocket, was yelling at her, accusing Julia of theft. To her credit, Julia was throwing accusations right back at her.

A few other people were gathered around them, but as soon as he appeared they scattered, and did their best to act as if nothing had happened.

“Everybody all right in here?” he said.

“No, everything is
not
all right,” the Latina said. “She was trying to steal my wallet.”

“I was not stealing your wallet,” Julia protested. “I said I lost mine, and that the one on the bench looked like it. God, you are such a bitch.”

Yikes!

“Whoa, hang on,” Peter said, shoving himself between them and putting his hands out to separate them. “I’m sure we can work this out. That is your wallet, right Miss—” He looked at the name on the woman’s uniform. “—Marquez?”

“I wasn’t trying to steal anything,” Julia said.

“I’m going to lodge a complaint,” the Latina replied. She squinted at Julia’s ID badge. “Lucy Cooper? I am
so
going to get you goddamn fired.” Marquez grabbed her wallet from the bench, and stormed out of the locker room.

“Okay, let’s go,” Peter said. “Before anybody starts wondering what a guy is doing in the women’s locker room.”

“But what about the badge?”

“I have it,” Peter said, clipping Marquez’s ID card to his blazer pocket. “I had mine palmed when I walked in here, and switched it with hers when I got between the two of you. She probably won’t notice that it’s the wrong one until she doesn’t have access to something she needs to do.”

“Slick,” Julia said.

“I do have my moments.”

* * *

From there it didn’t take long for them to find a terminal. Besides the front desk, there was one near the kitchen where the orders for room service were verified against room reservations. A quick scan of his card and the terminal logged him in under the name Leanna Marquez.

“What are we looking for?”

“I honestly don’t know,” Peter admitted, bringing up a list of all of the hotel’s current guests. “Anything that seems, well,
wrong
. I don’t know how to describe it—it’s sort of a sixth sense you develop.

“Something that sounds English, maybe?” he said. “It’s hard to hide an accent, so he’d want to have something that explains it. I doubt he’d use the McCoy name, though. That would just be stu—”

He stopped, staring at the screen.

“Well, what do you know,” he said. “Richard McCoy. Room 803.” He looked at her, a smile on his face. “Let’s go stop a terrorist.”

“We have to hurry,” Peter said. “If they’ve already left the room, we don’t stand a chance.”

When they reached 803, Peter took what appeared to be a common cell phone out of his pocket and removed a cover from the back. He pulled out a flat, square plate and inserted it into the lock, then turned over the “phone” and activated the tiny screen. Green numerals spun while the little machine chatted up the lock and found out what it wanted to hear.

There was a soft
click
, and the light on the lock flashed green.

Peter and Julia exchanged a look, then he pushed the door open.

In the room was an attractive couple in their early thirties. He was dirty blond with a soft, thoughtful face and spidery glasses. She was lighter blond and petite with a boyish build and freckles. They were both in their underwear—he in boxers and she in a thin camisole and lacy boy-shorts.

But when Peter and Julia entered, the woman was injecting a familiar liquid into a vein in the crook of the man’s arm. There was another empty syringe sitting on the bedside table, and a revolver sitting on the top of a low wooden dresser.

They both looked up, startled.

“Who the hell are you?” the woman asked, withdrawing the now empty syringe from the man’s arm.

Julia stepped forward.

“I’m a doctor,” she said. “I’m here to help you.”

“Help us?” The man frowned and stood. “Help us how?”

“You have no idea what you’re dealing with,” Julia said. “Whatever you were told that liquid will do, it was a lie. It’s a virus, and when it matures inside of you, it will put you through the most excruciating agony you can imagine. It could take as long as twelve hours for your heart to finally stop beating and you will be conscious and aware the entire time.

“I have an antidote,” she continued. “Please, let me help you.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” the woman replied, anger beginning to play across her features. “The Englishman said…”

“He lied to me, too,” Julia said, “don’t you see? I
invented
the virus. I know better than anyone what it’s capable of doing.”

While this little chat was going on, Peter was edging slowly toward the revolver on the dresser. He couldn’t tell if it was loaded, but it might give them an edge—or at least a bargaining chip. So he continued to inch closer and closer, willing himself to be invisible, eyes fixed on the angry woman.

Then he stopped.

Something was happening to her.

It was subtle, just a little bit of swelling under the hinges of her jaw, and a rosy flush creeping up her cheeks. But then lumps appeared in her neck, and as he watched they grew so fast that they went from peas to goose eggs in a matter of seconds. Around the edges of the lumps, clusters of tiny, red-and-white pustules appeared like a crop of glistening fairy-tale mushrooms.