The Devil's Pitchfork (17 page)

She began to hyperventilate, her head light, blood roaring in her ears. Two of the scientists led her out of the Biosafety Level 4 facility, down another corridor, then back through another airlock.

It looked like a motel room. She realized she was in the Biosafety Level 4 hospital suite, dubbed The Slammer. She was going to be isolated, cared for—what a joke!—by nurses and doctors wearing spacesuits and rubber gloves. She would never again feel the touch of a human hand. In the remaining hours before her painful death, blind, bleeding, paralyzed when her brain suffered a series of debilitating strokes as the arteries in her brain ruptured, she would die alone.

And this time, she did pass out.

PART II

Fire and Brimstone

21

Washington, D.C.

O
N TOP OF THE
building Derek shook himself awake, “No,” on his lips. He moved stiffly, ruefully thinking that he should have kept moving, not taken a break here out in the night air. He willed away his memories of his recruitment, of the complexities of the anthrax case, of his own frustration with the lack of communication between the investigating agencies and his vocal complaints to General Johnston that what Homeland Security needed were troubleshooters who could work inside or outside the existing bureaucracies. Someone, he had written in a now-famous memo, “to evaluate, coordinate and investigate” in a fluid, non-bureaucratic fashion. And how he had calmly, unthinkingly, braided the noose into which he would shove his own neck.

Derek tested his side and struggled to his feet. He moved cautiously across the roof to the room containing the elevator housing for the building. The steel door was locked. Of course, he thought, leaning against the concrete block of the squat outcropping. Anything else would be just too damned easy.

The door was designed to give access to the roof. He crouched by the door and examined the lock in the poor light. He could hear sirens below him. He wished he had his GO-Packs with him. One of the tools he carried was a power rake, a noisy but effective electric lock pick.

He pulled off his belt, which was a money belt. He unzipped the compartment. Along with several hundred dollars in cash, he kept the basics of a set of lock picks, a tiny flashlight, a steel match to start a fire if need be, and a narrow piece of steel that could be used to either ’loid a lock in lieu of wrecking a credit card or, in a pinch, be used as a tiny knife or screwdriver. He took out the picks and went to work on the lock. Within ten minutes he was inside the building and looking for an empty apartment.

The first four apartments were occupied. He muttered, “Hey, is this Jimmy Ray’s place,” to irritated residents. God only knew what they thought of him. It didn’t matter becase they never opened their doors, just hollered through them.

When there was no response at the fifth door he went after the lock with the picks and was inside within two minutes. He did a quick recon to assure himself nobody was home, then made for the telephone in the kitchen. He dialed James Johnston’s office and got the voice mail. He left a message and tried Sam Dalton’s number. Voice mail again.

Puzzled, he couldn’t imagine that either man had just gone home during this crisis. He had Dalton’s cell phone, and was again transferred to voice mail. He left a tense message indicating he’d be out of touch for a while, and hung up.

Now what?

The apartment was similar to the one belonging to Irina Khournikova. Two tiny bedrooms, a bath, a kitchen dining room combination. Based on photographs on the wall the residents were an older couple.

He ran through a list of people who might be able to help him, thought of Aaron Pilcher and tried that number again. Busy. His gaze fell on his hand. There was a phone number scrawled on the palm. He grinned. Well ... why not?

Twenty minutes later the coast guard helicopter was hovering over the roof of the building. A rope dropped about twenty feet from the hatch. Derek had spent the time lurking in the shadows, waiting for the Tylenol he’d stolen from the apartment to take effect. He sprinted out from hiding and strapped the harness around his chest. In moments he was being helped into the chopper by the Texan. “This is a little bit irregular,” he said.

“But much appreciated.”

“There are a couple TV choppers heading in,” said Cynthia Black, the pilot. “Let’s get out of here.”

Derek gave a thumb’s-up and the chopper roared away. He wondered what the local cops were thinking. Through the helicopter’s windows Derek looked at the Washington Monument jutting upward from the base of the mall.

Black said, “It would probably be a good idea if you tell us what’s going on. We’re going to have to eventually justify using the chopper as a taxi.”

Derek leaned forward and groaned. “You got a first aid kit here, by any chance?”

The Texan nodded. Derek pulled off his windbreaker and gingerly peeled the blood soaked shirt away from his ribs, grimacing. “I need some help here.”

“You need a doctor.”

“Later ... but ... you could set me down at Walter Reed. My truck and gear’s hopefully still over there.”

Cynthia Black repeated herself. “We need to know what’s going on.”

As the Texan cleaned and bandaged Derek’s wound, Derek considered her request, if that’s what it was. “I can’t tell you everything because your security clearance isn’t high enough.”

That got their attention. “But let’s put it this way,” he continued. “I’m tracking a terrorist organization. I’m part of Homeland Security. You’re part of Homeland Security. I answer directly to Secretary Johnston. Therefore, I outrank you in every way. As of right now, you work for me. My military rank was Colonel. So I outrank you in that way, as well. Are there any questions?”

Cindy Black met his gaze and shook her head. “No sir. But I will need to notify my commander.”

“Fine. Tell them you’re working directly for Secretary Johnston. We’ve got a mission. Suffice it to say, it’s probably one of the most important missions you’ll ever undertake. Take it seriously.”

22

Washington, D.C.

I
T TOOK
A
GENT
A
ARON
Pilcher almost an hour to race from the U.S. Immuno facility to Washington, D.C., spending most of it on his cell phone shouting orders. When he finally reached the address Derek Stillwater had given him, he realized instantly that something had gone wrong. Although there were FBI vehicles, most importantly an ERT van, there were also half a dozen D.C. police vehicles. Shit, he thought. How did they get involved?

He climbed out of his Ford Taurus, badge hung on a laniard around his neck. Simultaneously he was approached by a uniformed D.C. cop and an FBI agent in a three-piece suit.

“Sir,” the cop began, “this is a crime scene—”

”He’s with us,” the agent said, identifying himself as Agent Ron Tittaglia. “Agent Pilcher, your line’s been busy. We’ve got a situation here.”

Pilcher sighed. He glanced at the cop. “I’ll get with you in a minute.”

The cop, a middle-aged guy with flinty gray eyes and gray sideburns, hesitated. Pilcher raised his badge. “FBI. National security. Shoo!”

With a sneeze that sounded an awful lot like a muffled “fuck you,” the cop went off to inform his superiors that another federal pain-in-the-ass was here to muck things up.

Pilcher turned back to Tittaglia. “What’s going on?”

“When the ERT team and my group showed up this place was swarming with local cops. Seems some doctor from Walter Reed got shot a couple hours ago.”

“Here?”

“No, over on 19
^th
, by Reed. Name was Austin Davis.” Tittaglia took a deep breath, organizing his thoughts. He was short and wiry with curly graying hair and a bristly mustache.

“So—”

”They got witnesses who saw the shooting. Saw some guy they think might be a Derek Stillwater jump into a Chevy Blazer during or after the shooting and disappear.  He was supposedly meeting Davis at a local pub, Jimmy’s. One of the wits got the plate number on the Blazer.”

“Do they think Stillwater shot this doctor?” Pilcher asked, glancing around at the cops. He saw a couple he thought were detectives talking earnestly to the uniform he had blown off. It was only a matter of time before he got hauled into this and he wanted to see the scene first.

“Not as far as the D.C. cops can tell,” Tittagia said.

“Good. Tell me as we go to the scene.”

Tittaglia led him toward the entrance. “The D.C. cops would gladly pin Davis’s death on Stillwater right now, but they claim he’s just a witness. They got a real reliable witness who said it looked like Stillwater was being bracketed after the doc got popped.”

“Jesus, what did he grab hold of?”

“Who?”

“Stillwater. He’s with Homeland Security. One of those troubleshooters.”

Tittaglia led him up the stairs. “No shit?”

“No shit. He called in the scene here. So why do the cops—”

”The two patrol guys found Stillwater in that Chevy Blazer. They had a BOLO on the plates. When they tried to take him in for questioning he resisted arrest. One of the patrols has a sprained wrist and a broken jaw from where Stillwater kicked him when he jumped over the truck.”

Pilcher stopped on the second floor landing and focused his gaze on Tittaglia. “He jumped over the Blazer?”

“Well,” Tittaglia said with a shrug. “Over the hood of the Blazer. To listen to these cops talk, Stillwater was Superman or something. One drew down on him and the other was trying to take Stillwater’s gun when he overpowered them and ran. One chased him, but he went over a fence and disappeared. They shot at him and it looks like they hit him. There’s a blood trail, but it disappears.”

“They think somebody picked him up?”

They continued climbing the stairs. Tittaglia shrugged again. “Either somebody picked him up or he ducked into a phone booth and used his cape to fly away. They sent out a bunch of cops looking, but he’s gone.”

“Okay. I’ll think about that later. What about the scene, the apartment. Is it secure?”

Tittaglia gestured to the third-floor doorway. “Yeah, secure. This is our terrorist hit, right? It got a name yet?”

“Nobody’s told me. It’ll be something like Project Bloodstream or something.”

“Sure,” Tittaglia said. “Anyway, the ERTs headed up here right away while the rest of us screwed around with the D.C. cops, pissing over turf. They didn’t come up here. Good thing, too. This is a major clusterfuck. Even knowing what’s going on, well, sort of knowing what’s going on, I gotta say this looks bad. If the locals tied this apartment to Stillwater, they’d turn it into a massive man hunt. He
is
Homeland, right?”

Pilcher and Tittaglia stopped outside the doorway to apartment 302. Pilcher squinted, cocking his head at the agent. “He is. An expert on biowarfare. He told me there’s a witness whose fingerprints we—”

”We got ‘em. Had ‘em rushed over to the lab ASAP. They’re running them now.”

“Fine. What did she—”

He stepped into the room and froze, his heart sinking. He should have put it together. Tittaglia had all but shouted it in his face.

“Your witness is dead,” Tittaglia said. “And it looks like Stillwater tortured her to death.”

Pilcher stared at the mess in apartment 302, trying to get a handle on what he was seeing. Wondering, even more strongly than he had before, what the deal was with Derek Stillwater. At U.S. Immuno and later at the Scully house he hadn’t acted much like an investigator. He had acted like a man seeing his worst nightmares come to life. Pilcher frowned over Spigotta’s comment that the USAMRIID people who knew Stillwater thought he had seen too much, that he was flaky.

Flaky, he thought.

The table and chairs had been overturned as if during a fight. Three living room lamps had been dumped on the floor, their cords torn out of the bases. A dead woman lay neatly on the kitchen floor. Too neatly. She lay on her back, arms by her side. There were marks on her wrists that suggested they had been bound with the lamp cords. Probably the legs, too, though the cords  were now tossed carelessly in the corner. A clear plastic freezer bag was crumpled next to the cords and a cellular phone that appeared to be broken in three pieces. Pilcher thought it was Stillwater’s.

What happened here?!

The person in charge of this ERT team was a no-nonsense woman with black hair cut so short she was almost bald. She stood eye-to-eye with Pilcher and said, “We’ll have to get the local M.E. to do a post—that’s not our deal, as you know. My guess is she was tied to one of those chairs with the light cords. Somebody used the plastic bag to suffocate her, torture her, maybe, into talking.”

“You think she did?”

The tech stared at him. “I don’t know. But she died from it. And I can’t be sure, but I’ve got to wonder why if she died and her killer planned it that way, why he untied her and laid her out like this, unless it’s positioning, you know, like some sexual serial killers do? Posing their victims’ bodies? But this doesn’t feel like that to me. I may be reading too much into it. This is our terrorist thing, you said.”

“Yeah. The guy here was following a lead of some sort.”

“Yeah. The files, I bet.” She pointed to a series of manila folders now in clear evidence bags.

“Can I look?”

“Wear gloves.”

Pilcher took the files, donned rubber gloves and flipped through the evidence, frowning. Lots of photographs, but he didn’t like them. Something about the files, the excellent photographs but sketchy documentation in Russian. It struck him as being wrong. Too much of one type of information, not enough of another. He wasn’t sure what or why, but they made him suspicious. He wondered if they had made Stillwater suspicious.

Another tech walked past him carrying a computer. “We’ll tear it apart in the lab.”

“Good,” the head tech said. “Notice anything weird?”

“Yeah,” the tech said. “No phones.”

Pilcher looked up from the file. “What?”