Sins of the Father (31 page)

Another man stopped the waiter en route, asking for a refill.

“I just want to get a closer look,” Julia whispered through smiling teeth. “If he’s infected, a distinctive ammonia-like odor should be detectable at close range.”

The waiter ended up refilling glasses for the whole nearby table as Peter clenched his fists in his lap with anxious frustration.

“
Then
what?” he asked.

“Then I stick him in the arm while he’s pouring the water,” she replied.

Julia raised her glass again, to make sure the waiter hadn’t forgotten her. He looked up, noticed her and nodded, trudging toward her like a child resigned to some punishment.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Peter asked. “Feds’ll be all over you in a heartbeat if you try to pull a stunt like that.”

She turned back toward Peter and opened her mouth to deliver a snappy retort, when the sound of breaking glass and splashing water whipped her head around.

The waiter had gone down beside the neighboring table, his body wracked with a violent seizure. In the time it took Peter to get to his feet, a ring of feds surrounded the convulsing man. Up on the stage, the presidential candidate trailed off, his brow furrowed by a practiced look of concern.

There was no time to think. Peter had to act and fast. He grabbed Julia’s arm, pulled her to her feet, and shouldered his way through the concerned crowd.

“My wife is a doctor!” he called out in a clear, steady voice that sounded way more confident than he felt. “Please, let her through.”

The two closest feds turned toward his voice, their broad shoulders parting like a gate.

“Who’s a doctor?” the older of the two feds asked. He was a burly, sunburned man with thinning white hair. He turned to Julia. “You?”

“Yes, that’s right,” she said, seamlessly running with Peter’s ruse as she got down one knee and opened her purse. “There’s no reason to be alarmed. This man is clearly epileptic, and he’s experiencing a severe grand mal seizure.” She pulled out the antidote and syringe, raising it up and drawing out a dose. “An injection of a mild sedative will stop the muscle contractions and prevent accidental injury. It will also allow you to remove the patient safely to another location, so that the banquet can continue as planned.

“Hold him, please.”

The two feds exchanged a look like they weren’t entirely sold on Julia’s suggestion. In the meanwhile, Peter could see strange, erratic movement underneath the man’s uniform, as if his clothing was infested with some sort of vermin. The telltale lumps under his chin were starting to swell. Any minute now it would become horribly obvious—even to someone with no medical background—that this wasn’t an ordinary epileptic seizure.

Julia paused, waiting for the feds to decide whether or not they would allow her to go ahead with the injection. It was like watching someone try to defuse a time bomb. His fists were clenched so hard, his fingers ached.

Blood began to ooze between the waiter’s chattering teeth as he banged his head repeatedly against the glossy tile floor, eyes rolled up and unseeing.

“You,” Julia said, indicated the younger of the two agents standing directly beside her. Her tone was clipped, authoritative. “Get something between his teeth before he bites his tongue off. You.” She turned to the older fed. “Hold his head as still as you can, chin turned away. In his current state, the carotid artery will be our safest target.”

The younger agent reacted unquestioningly to her barked instruction, grabbing a silver butter knife off a nearby table and wedging it between the waiter’s bloody teeth.

But the older man hesitated.

“
Now
,” Julia added, her tone calm and matter-of-fact, as if following her exact instructions was the only possible option.

Peter was about ready to shove the older agent aside and grab the waiter’s head himself, but to his surprise, he didn’t have to. The older guy gave a curt nod and did what Julia asked. If he noticed the swelling nodes under the waiter’s chin, he chose not to mention them.

Julia deftly injected the waiter, depressing the plunger and emptying the syringe into his bloodstream. The twitching and spasming of his limbs began to slow immediately. The nodes in his neck pulsed erratically, like miniature dying hearts, then began to shrink. He let out a long, slow, shaky breath that whistled past the silver knife in his teeth.

Peter let out a matching breath, his own fists and tightly strung muscles starting to relax.

We did it.
It was over.

That’s when Peter noticed the female FBI agent who had checked them into the kitchen.

She was standing alone by an emergency exit near the far end of the raised platform, scanning the room.

Peter ducked down, feigning concern for the fallen waiter and tucking his own head into his shoulders like a turtle. If her sharp, searchlight gaze came to rest on either of them, he was certain she would recognize them as the two line cooks she’d allowed to pass earlier.

They would be screwed, and royally.

He reached down and gripped Julia’s arm, probably harder than he intended.

“You’re amazing, honey!” he said, leaning in to kiss her cheek and whispering in her ear. “But remember the kids. We need to go,
now
.”

Julia nodded.

“Gentlemen,” she said to the feds. “I’m sure you can handle things from here.”

“No problem,” the older agent replied, his attention focused on the waiter. “Thank you, doctor.”

Julia stood, and Peter swiftly steered her around so that the two of them were facing away from the raised platform and the female agent. The presidential candidate had taken the mishap in stride, and was encouraging the guests to return to their seats so that he could continue talking about whatever people who want to run the country talked about.

Peter couldn’t have cared less.

All he cared about was getting the two of them out of the hall before everyone else sat back down. While they were part of a milling crowd, they had a chance of escaping unnoticed. But once they were the only ones left standing, they might as well have had giant neon arrows floating around their heads.

Rabbit season…

Peter slung his arm around Julia’s shoulders, leaning on her as he limped along and pressing his cheek close to hers as if whispering sweet nothings. Really he was just trying to hide his face.

The smell of her was just a bonus.

* * *

Peter dried his hair on a threadbare towel. The hotel they’d chosen, one of a generic chain designed for weekenders and people stuck overnight in the city, was a far cry from the opulence of the Ambassador. But what it lacked in amenities, it made up for in anonymity.

He wrapped another towel around his waist and left the steam of the bathroom to find Julia lying on the bed wrapped in a bathrobe. Though they had checked into separate rooms, neither of them wanted to be alone just now. They were both wired and exhausted after the Ambassador.

“You okay?” he asked.

She was idly flipping through the hotel’s magazine, one of those touristy garbage publications that showed ads for local restaurants and boutiques that most of the hotel’s patrons would either ignore or couldn’t afford.

“I’m just trying to figure out what I’m going to do next.” She put the magazine down and looked at Peter. “I’ve spent years on this cure. And now it’s gone.”

“I know it can’t be easy,” Peter said. “To have it stolen, to get duped, to see it used in a terrorist attack. That’s not what you created it for. People died today, and I know that’s not easy to think about.”

She shrugged.

“That’s not it,” she said. “Yes, that’s part of it, I suppose, but really, I just want to get back on track. I’m going to have to start over. God, Peter, what am I going to do?”

“Exactly that,” he said. “Hey, the virus is gone, but they didn’t take away what you know. You still have that. You can rebuild.”

It was easy for him to say that. It wasn’t his life’s work. And he had more pressing concerns to address. He still had to figure out how he was going to get Big Eddie’s money.
One thing at a time
, he thought, and he lay down on the bed next to her.

He touched her hair and she curled into him, her fingers running along his jawline. Since that night at Doctor Westerson’s house, neither of them had made a move on each other. There were still some lingering doubts in Peter’s mind about why she had decided to run out on him that morning, but they had been through so much today, and it had been so intense, that he just wanted a break for a bit.

A little time to forget himself.

He bent his head to kiss her, and his phone rang.

The sudden noise startled them both and they jerked away from each other. Peter grabbed the phone off his nightstand and looked at it. He didn’t recognize the number, but didn’t expect to. The phone was a burner he had picked up that morning, and supposedly no one had the number.

Tentatively, he answered.

“Peter, thank God you’re all right,” Bernard Stokes said the moment Peter put the phone to his ear. “I heard there was quite the kerfuffle at the Ambassador this afternoon.”

“Stokes?” he said. “How’d you get this number? And why are you calling? This isn’t exactly a secure line.”

“A magician never reveals his secrets,” Stokes replied, sounding pleased with himself. “Whatever you did, bravo. Considering that you’re still alive, I’m assuming it all went well. However, you have another, much larger problem.”

A pit started to form in his stomach. Was it Big Eddie? Had he tracked him to New York?

“How so?”

“The Englishman isn’t finished. Once I heard about what happened at the Ambassador I assumed—rightly as it turns out—that there would be some online chatter. The same people have been talking all day, about another buy.”

“Another buy, like today was a buy?”

“Sounds like,” Stokes acknowledged. “It’s couched in some ridiculously obtuse wording, but I think they’re looking at another attack. Only much larger.”

“How much larger?” Peter said.

“The last time they were talking about individual doses. This time there’s talk about liters.”

Peter’s blood turned to ice.

“Do they say where?”

“Somewhere in the subway.”

“That doesn’t narrow it down much.”

“Look, it’s all very cryptic, so I’m doing what I can,” Stokes said. “Do you know anything about”—he paused, tapping away at keys—“a tunnel at Atlantic Avenue?”

“The Atlantic Avenue station? That’s down in Brooklyn.”

“No, I don’t think that’s what they’re talking about. They’re saying something about unused track. That station’s still used, isn’t it?”

“As far as I know it is,” Peter said.

He hadn’t been down in Brooklyn in a long time, but that was a heavily trafficked area. They had taken the subway earlier that day, and with all the garbled messages about station and track closures being piped over the PA system, he would have expected to hear something if the station had been shut down.

“Could it be a different station?”

“Some of the messages are actually encrypted,” Stokes said. “I’m trying to get into one of them to see if there’s anything more concrete…” He went silent for a moment, and Peter could hear the clacking of a keyboard. “Here we go. ‘Atlantic Avenue Tunnel.’ No mention of a station, though.”

There was something about the name that was triggering a memory.

“Hang on,” he said. “I need to check something.”

“Is there something I can do?” Julia asked, getting off of the bed.

“Yeah,” Peter said. “Look up Atlantic Avenue Tunnel. Wait. No. Make it ‘historic Atlantic Avenue Tunnel’.”

She opened up the laptop they had brought with them from the lab, and typed it in.

“Here it is,” she said, her eyes scanning a web page.

“World’s oldest subway tunnel. Built in 1844. Abandoned. Rediscovered in 1980. Goes under Atlantic from Boerum Place to Columbia Street. They do tours.”