Submit (The Underground Book 4) (17 page)

“I know. Haley’s in the most danger, and I would never do anything to jeopardize her life. Besides, the FBI has made a deal with my boss.”

“What deal is that?”

“Exclusive rights to the story in exchange for waiting until the case is closed. A gag order like this isn’t something we in journalism like to hear, but we don’t have any options in this case.”

Katie nodded. “Good.”

“So, Nikolav mentioned something about weird blood work?”

“Yep. That’s where this all started. Piecing it together, we believe the six guys were given some sort of immunizations as babies and toddlers in various orphanages around Russia. Except these weren’t ordinary inoculations.”

Belinda held up a finger and reached for her computer bag. “Mind if I take notes?”

“Not at all.” Katie waited a moment and then continued. “Anyway, Mikhail is the only one who remembers getting the shots as a kid. He was almost five. Older than most.”

“He and Alena were in the same orphanage, right? Did she get the shots too?”

Katie shook her head. “Nope. Mikhail hid her.”

“What? Why?”

“He watched one kid die after the immunizations and freaked out in fear the same would happen to Alena. He couldn’t prevent them from getting to him, but he hid Alena on her day.”

“At four years old?” Belinda was shocked. That kid was amazing.

“Yeah. I know. Incredible. Right?” Katie continued, “He was five by then, but still. We’re going out on a limb here, but it would seem the guys were given something that made them immune to all illnesses.”

“You mean like chicken pox and mumps?”

“And things that didn’t exist yet or had been eradicated already.”

“What the hell?”

“Smallpox. Diphtheria. Rubella. To name a few.”

“How do you know that?”

“I’m hedging they were injected with a drug that made them incapable of contracting anything and then given a variety of crazy diseases to ensure the first drug worked.”

“Holy shit. That’s huge.” Belinda yanked her gaze to Nikolav, forgetting to take notes. He’d been given this experimental drug? “You don’t get sick?”

“No.” He shook his head.

“That’s why I got food poisoning and Mikhail didn’t,” she muttered. Nikolav had already insinuated exactly that on Monday. And then she sat up straighter. “But what about Haley?”

Katie answered. “It would seem she was given the same drug, or a variation of it while Yenin held her in his lab for two weeks.”

“Jesus.” Belinda ran a hand through her hair, tucking the curls behind her ear futilely afterward.

“What about the dead people?”

“That’s the part we don’t get yet. We’re betting Yenin has been developing this drug for years. He must have recently come up with a viable sample and started testing it on people.”

“Who died,” Belinda added unnecessarily. “Why did Haley live?”

“No idea. But unlike the guys, she doesn’t show any obscure disease antibodies running through her blood, which might indicate he wasn’t done with her yet.”

“Do you think someone poisoned us on purpose to test the drug?” Belinda asked.

Nikolav was the first to shake his head. “Thought of that, but it’s not really feasible. How did one of Yenin’s men plant tainted hummus in Haley’s apartment?”

“It was the hummus?” Belinda asked. She’d certainly eaten enough of it.

Katie nodded. “We went through everything in the trash and refrigerator Monday. It was definitely the hummus.”

“But that’s the one thing I didn’t bring with me to the apartment Saturday night. Haley had it in the fridge already. I don’t think it was open before then.”

“Nevertheless, it was bad.”

Belinda’s mind raced to keep up with the possibilities. She had always been the sort of person to question every angle. That’s what made her a good reporter. “Has anyone checked to see if anyone else has gotten sick from the hummus purchased from the same store?”

Leo cleared his throat. “Yeah. Dead end. Not one complaint.”

“And this isn’t a red flag?” Belinda sat up straighter, her notes completely forgotten.

“Sure it is, but that still doesn’t explain how it got tainted in the first place. We’ve considered every angle with the FBI. Taylor was here for hours last night going over the details. She’s been to Haley’s apartment several times. The place was locked. No one could have entered but the FBI.

“And it’s insane to think Yenin had something tampered with in the grocery store before it was even purchased. There was no grocery list, no specific plan to buy hummus that day, nor even a certain store.”

That left one possibility no one had mentioned. “How many FBI agents had access to the apartment?”

Nikolav blew out a breath. “Too many to count.”

“Shit.”

“And that idea makes me want to punch a hole in the wall,” Leo added. “I swear to God, if we’re spinning our wheels trying to stay alive only to find out an insider is helping Yenin, the man or woman will not live to see the light of the next day if I get my hands on them.”

Belinda couldn’t blame him. She agreed. She tried to backtrack in her mind. What were they talking about before this tangent?
Oh yeah
. “If Alena wasn’t given the shots, I assume she doesn’t show the same weird antibodies?”

“Correct. Her story’s more complicated because she lived in Russia until a year ago, spending the last six months kept in captivity by God only knows who. But that’s another story.” Katie waved a hand through the air. “Her blood looks the same as Haley’s, which isn’t strange. Haley lived in Russia for a few years when she was a baby.”

“Right. Forgot about that. Her parents are missionaries,” Belinda recalled. Her head was spinning. Alena was held in captivity? This was a nightmare.

“Exactly. So both she and Alena had Hepatitis A when they were young. Not strange, either. They might not have even had symptoms. Lots of people had Hep A in areas with poor sanitation. It is usually transmitted through fecal matter in drinking water.”

“Gross, but okay.”

“Probably half the population of Russia born in that time period would have nothing in their blood except Hepatitis A. It was a rough period when immunizations weren’t widely available and the current theory was that immunizations could do more harm than good. Many parents didn’t immunize.”

“But orphanages did?” Belinda asked.

Nikolav smirked. “Weird, right?”

“But possible,” Leo added. “The government could have mandated it. They might have done it to keep the mortality rate down in the cramped quarters of orphanages.”

“Or,” Belinda hedged, “there was no policy on immunizations, and they weren’t distributed rampantly in orphanages in the late eighties at all.”

Everyone froze for a moment.

Nikolav groaned. “You’re suggesting a conspiracy that would have been enormous.”

“I am. But how is that so hard to believe after finding out you were given a strange experimental drug twenty-five years ago before the fall of the USSR that seems to have made you immune to everything, including the common cold?”

“Oh, it’s bigger than that,” Nikolav added, wincing.

“There’s more?”

“We heal fast too.”

“Seriously?” She twisted in her seat to face him more fully.

He nodded. “Dmitry was the first to fall under Katie’s suspicion. He had a kidney injury that seemed far too healed for how long he’d sustained it. And then Mikhail was jumped in an alley after a fight a few weeks ago. He broke four ribs. They’re completely healed.”

She stopped breathing, her eyes widening as if she could absorb this information better if she could see more of the room.

Katie spoke calmly at her side. “It was a coincidence I happened to take a blood sample from Dmitry a year ago. I was testing his blood to make sure his kidneys were functioning properly. I stumbled upon the antibodies by accident. Or my lab guy did.

“And then when I saw Mikhail’s rib X-ray, I was suspicious. Turned out he had the same antibodies.”

“And we know now we all do,” Leo added.

“Shit. That’s…impossible to grasp.”

“You’re not kidding.”

“You don’t think you can’t die or anything, do you?” she asked the room at large.

Katie shook her head. “Not going to go so far as that, no. Because the right injury would end a life before it had a chance to heal. A gunshot or something. And we don’t know how far the drug extends. Cancer? Stroke? Heart attack? There’s no way to know until it happens to one of them.”

“How many others could be out there?” Belinda thought out loud.

“No idea,” Leo responded. “But Mikhail believes only a handful of kids received both the early shots and then the later ones. Probably the first shot was the experimental drug, and the second set of shots were the live cultures to prove the drugs worked.”

“But this could be huge. There could be hundreds or thousands of people in Russia today who’re living with this strange ability to heal.” Her mind raced with the possibilities. She’d give anything to get on the next plane to Russia and investigate this further.

And she fully intended to bring it up to her boss tomorrow.

“How is it the government hasn’t brought all of you in to poke and prod you like mice?” She glanced at each of them.

Nikolav smiled. “Because they don’t know about it.”

“What? The FBI…?”

“Isn’t breathing a word of what they know to anyone.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because they care more about catching Yenin in the act and stopping him from killing others, or worse—distributing this drug on the black market. If they let any other branch of the government know about us, their case would be blown to shit. The CDC would take over, and we’d all be sent to Atlanta to become lab rats.”

“I’m shocked they haven’t found out already.”

“And now you know why it’s so important for you to keep this inside this room. If you breathe a word of it to a single soul, the entire case could blow to shit.” Nikolav lowered his hand from the back of the couch to cup her shoulder. “None of us want to become guinea pigs, but more importantly, we want to keep it under wraps until Yenin is caught and put away for life.

“We don’t want one more person to die. And no one hopes for a mass drug distribution marketed as some sort of fountain of youth. The repercussions are enormous.”

She whispered the unspoken, “Because you still have no idea what the long-term effects are.” Suddenly she wanted to pull this man into her embrace. The burden he lived with…

“Hey,” he hugged her into his side, “I have no intention of dying anytime soon. After all these years, the most likely scenario is the drug gradually becomes ineffective, leaving us all vulnerable in ways we can’t anticipate.”

“But you can test that theory from time to time, right?” She looked toward Katie.

“Perhaps. We haven’t gotten that far yet.”

“So a faction of the FBI is working on this case, and they aren’t sharing it with any other government agency,” she reiterated.

“Right. But they aren’t sharing it with many of their own, either. Most of the agents put on our detail are operating on the instructions that they keep us safe. They aren’t privy to what they’re guarding us from. It’s not uncommon,” Leo said.

Belinda pinched the bridge of her nose and leaned into Nikolav’s side. She glanced down at her lap. “I sure took a lot of notes,” she mumbled.

“It’s all up here,” Nikolav stated, pointing to his temple. “Don’t worry.”

“Trust me. I’m worried for lots of reasons, but none of them have anything to do with not taking proper notes. I can’t print this shit, anyway. Probably never.”

“And now you see why I don’t want you out of my sight. Yenin undoubtedly knows you’re a reporter and working this case. He would sooner blow up the entire city of Chicago with a nuclear weapon than have any of this leak out. Which means he’d go to incredible extremes to ensure it doesn’t happen.”

She nodded. She didn’t have an argument to trump his line of thinking.

It was after dark when Belinda led Nikolav down the hall of her fifth-floor apartment and handed him the keys. She was exhausted. And her head was still reeling from overload.

Nikolav unlocked the door and turned off the alarm before she followed him inside.

She glanced around, rubbing her arms at the thought that someone might have entered while they were gone and planted something. And she wasn’t picturing the Russian Mafia. She was stuck on the idea that the FBI had someone working for the enemy.

Thank God Katie had graciously cooked dinner for them. The woman was an amazing cook, and Belinda didn’t have the energy to lift a finger. “I’m exhausted. And I don’t even have a good reason. Mental overload, I guess.”

Nikolav smiled. “You’ve been bombarded with a lot of information. It’s understandable. Why don’t you take a long, hot bath? I’ll pour you a glass of wine.”

She stared at his retreating back as he headed for the kitchen area. Moments like these made him seem like the epitome of the perfect man. Without argument, she left him to head for her bedroom and attached bath, where she stripped off her clothes and climbed into the tub while it was still filling.

It was a relief to get out of those jeans. Spending the day without a barrier between her skin and the denim had been a very bad idea. It kept her far too aware of her sex and made her squirm more often than she would have liked, which only exacerbated the problem.

She added a long squirt of bubbles directly into the stream of hot water coming out of the spigot and leaned back to close her eyes. She was almost asleep when a noise forced her to bolt upright to find Nikolav standing in the bathroom, holding a glass of red wine.

“Shit. Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you. How do you keep from drowning?” he teased as he handed her the glass.

She took several sips and set the glass on the edge of the tub. And then she let her gaze wander up his body from his bare feet to his bare chest. How many times had she seen him in nothing but low-hung jeans? Too many to count. How many times had she seen him naked? Never.

Her exhaustion faded as she watched his muscles flex with every movement. Bold. She needed to be bold. “Why don’t you get in? The tub’s large enough for both of us.”