The Hades Factor Read online

  “I’m fine, Grasso. It’s Dr. Russell I’m calling about. She’s not answering her phone. You know where she is?”

  “She’s on the night list I got when I came on, and I ain’t seen her leave.”

  “What time did you come on?”

  “Midnight. She’s probably in the lab and not hearing nothing.”

  Smith glanced at his watch: 4:42 A.M.

  “Could you go up and check?”

  “Sure, Colonel. Call you back.”

  Smith recited the phone number. Every second seemed like a minute, and every minute it was harder to breathe. The cool night seemed stifling. The phone booth suffocated him.

  When the phone rang at last, he almost jumped. “Yes?”

  “Not there, Colonel. Office and lab are both closed up.”

  “Any sign of trouble?”

  “Nope. Everything’s packed away and covered up.” Grasso sounded a little defensive. “Damned if I know how I missed her. I guess she could’ve gone out one of the other exits. You could check with the gate guard.”

  “Thanks, Grasso. You want to transfer me?”

  “Hold on, Doc.”

  A different and very sleepy voice spoke: “Fort Detrick. Gate. Schroeder.”

  “This is Lt. Col. Jonathan Smith, USAMRIID. Did Dr. Sophia Russell leave the base tonight, Schroeder?”

  “Don’t know, Colonel. Don’t know Dr. Russell. Try the guy at USAMRIID.”

  Smith swore under his breath. The civilian security guards were always changing, and they worked longer shifts than MPs. It was not unknown for them to doze in the gate kiosk. The barrier would stop any cars trying to enter, and if it did not, the noise would certainly wake them up. But no barrier stopped cars leaving.

  He hung up. It sounded as if she could have been too tired to drive all the way to Thurmont. Which meant she was likely at her old condo in Frederick, which she had just sold but had not yet fully moved out of. He could call the condo, but that would tell him nothing. When they worked around the clock, they always turned off their phone’s ringer to get a few hours sleep.

  As he sped the car away, his mind raced. She had been so tired she left the lab through one of the side doors, not wanting to run into anyone. That was logical. just what she would have done. The gate guard had missed her, probably asleep. She would go to her condo. He would slip into bed beside her. She would sense his presence without waking up. She would smile in her sleep, murmur, and move close to touch him. Her hip would press warm against him. He would smile, kiss her shoulder lightly, watch her sleep before he fell asleep himself. He would …

  Few guidebooks listed Fort Detrick as one of the attractions to the historic City of Frederick. With its chain-link fence and guard post at the entrance, Detrick was a medium-secure army base set in the middle of a residential area. Sophia’s condo was five blocks away. Parked up the street again, Smith saw no signs of anyone watching here. He stepped from the Triumph, closed the door softly, and listened. He heard the distant coughs of sleepers. The occasional laughter or a voice raised in drunken anger. A solitary car squealing around a turn. The constant low hum that was the city itself.

  But no clandestine sounds or movements he could identify as threatening.

  He used his key to the lobby of the three-story condo building and strode across the exposed expanse of the tile and carpet to the elevators. All were empty at this hour.

  On the third floor, the Glock in his hand, he stepped off warily. The corridor echoed to his footfalls like the empty rooms of an ancient tomb. When he reached her door, he listened again. He heard nothing from inside. He turned the key, the quiet tumblers clicking in his mind loud as explosions.

  Silently he pulled open the door and dropped flat to the carpeting inside.

  The apartment was dark. Nothing stirred. His hand felt a film of dust covering the side table near the door.

  He stood and glided through the shadowy living room to the short corridor that led to the two bedrooms. Both were empty, the beds made and unused. The kitchen showed no sign that anyone had eaten a meal or prepared even a cup of coffee. The sink was dry. The refrigerator was silent, turned off weeks ago.

  She had not been here.

  Feeling numb, Smith walked like a robot back into the living room. He turned on lights. He inspected for signs of an attack, an injury, even a search.

  Nothing. The condo was as clean and undisturbed as an exhibit in a museum.

  If they had killed or kidnapped her, it had not been here.

  She was not at the lab. She was not at the house in Thurmont. She was not here. And he had no indications that anything had happened to her at any of those places.

  He needed help, and he knew it.

  The first step was to call the base and alert them to her disappearance. Then the police. FBI. He grabbed the portable telephone to dial Detrick.

  His hand froze midair. Outside in the corridor, footsteps echoed along the walls.

  He switched off the lights and set the phone on the table. He dropped to one knee behind the couch, the Glock in his hand trained on the door.

  Someone advanced haltingly toward Sophia’s condo, bumping into walls, progressing in fits and starts. A drunk staggering home?

  The steps stopped with a hard thump against Sophia’s door. There was ragged breathing. A key probed for the lock.

  He tensed. The door swung open as if flung.

  In the shaft of light, Sophia swayed. Her clothes were torn and stained as if she had been crawling in a gutter.

  Smith leaped forward. “Sophia!”

  She staggered in, and he caught her before she collapsed. She gasped, battled for breath. Her face burned with fever.

  Her black eyes stared up at him, tried to smile. “You’re … back, darling. Where … where were you?”

  “I’m so sorry, Soph. I had an extra day, I wanted …”

  Her hand reached up to interrupt him. Her voice sounded delirious. “ … lab … at the lab … someone … hit …”

  She fell back in his arms, unconscious. Her skin was pasty. Two bright fevered spots glowed on her cheeks. Her beautiful face was pinched with pain. She was terribly ill. What had happened to her? This was not just simple exhaustion.

  “Soph? Soph! Oh my God, Soph?”

  There was no response. She was limp, unconscious.

  Shaken and terrified, he fell back on his medical training. He was a doctor. He knew what to do. He laid her on the couch, grabbed the portable phone, and dialed 911 as he checked her pulse and breathing. The pulse was weak and rapid. She breathed in labored gasps. She burned. The symptoms of acute respiratory distress plus fever.

  He yelled into the phone, “Acute respiratory distress. Dr. Jonathan Smith, dammit. Get here. Now!”

  The unmarked van was almost invisible beneath the tree on the street outside Sophia Russell’s apartment. Above, a weak streetlight hardly pierced the night, giving the van’s inhabitants exactly what they wanted—darkness and camouflage. From the interior gloom, Bill Griffin watched the paramedic van, its beacons flashing blue and red, in front of the three-story condo building that blazed with light across the street.

  Nadal al-Hassan’s hatchet face spoke from the driver’s seat, “Dr. Russell should not have been able to leave her laboratory alone. She should never have reached this far.”

  “But she did both.” Griffin’s round face was neutral. In the darkness, his brown, mid-length hair was ebony. His big shoulders and muscular body appeared relaxed. This was a different, harder, colder man than the one who had met his friend Jon Smith just hours ago in Washington’s Rock Creek park.

  Al-Hassan said, “I did what was ordered for the woman. It was the only way she could be handled without suspicion.”

  Griffin’s silence covered the turmoil inside him. The sudden and unforeseen involvement of Jon was something he had never imagined. He had tried to warn Jon off, but al-Hassan had sent Maddux after Jon in Washington before Jon even had a chance to think about runni
ng. That would have told Jon the warning was true, but with the woman attacked, too, Jon would not back away. How in hell was he going to save his oldest friend now?

  He and al-Hassan had been waiting for the others to locate Smith again when the call from their spy inside USAMRIID, fake Specialist Four Adele Schweik, came in on al-Hassan’s cell phone. The motion sensor she had planted in Sophia Russell’s office and lab had gone off, and when she had activated the hidden video camera, she had seen Sophia staggering from her office. She had rushed to Fort Detrick, but by the time she had gotten there, Russell had vanished.

  “She couldn’t drive in her condition,” Schweik had told al-Hassan, “so I checked her file. She owns a condo close to the fort.”

  They had driven straight to the building only to find the paramedics already there, and the whole building awakened by the commotion. There was no way they could get inside without attracting attention.

  Bill Griffin said, “Only way or not, if she can talk and tells Smith too much, the boss isn’t going to be happy. And look at this.”

  Four paramedics pushed a gurney out through the lobby doors. Jon Smith strode alongside the gurney holding the hand of the woman on the stretcher as he bent close to talk to her. He appeared oblivious to anything else. He went on talking and talking.

  Al-Hassan cursed in Arabic. “We should have known of the condo.”

  Griffin had to take the chance of making al-Hassan hate him more than he already did in hopes of goading the Arab into making a mistake. “But we didn’t, and now they’re talking. She’s alive. You blew it, al-Hassan. Your hide’s going to be stretched for this. Now what do we do?”

  Nadal al-Hassan’s words were soft. “We follow them to the hospital. Then we make her dead for certain. And him, too.” He turned to stare at Griffin.

  Griffin knew al-Hassan was watching his reaction for even the slightest hint of discomfort with the idea of killing Jon. A faint stiffening, a flinch, a microscopic shudder.

  Instead, Griffin nodded at the paramedic van. His expression was arctic. “If necessary, we may have to kill them, too. Maybe they heard her say something. I hope you’re prepared for that. You’re not going to wimp out on me, are you? Turn soft?”

  Al-Hassan bristled. “I had not thought of the paramedics. Of course, if it is necessary, we will kill them.” His eyes narrowed. He paused. “It is possible Jon Smith is conversing with a corpse. Love makes fools of even the most intelligent. We will see whether she dies on her own. If so, then we have only Jon Smith to eliminate. That makes our jobs easier, yes?”

  Chapter Eight

  5:52 A.M.

  Frederick, Maryland

  Sophia lay in the curtained ICU bed gasping for breath, even under oxygen. Hooked to all the machines of a modern hospital, she was held captive by apparatus untouched by who she was or what was wrong with her. Smith held her fevered hand and wanted to yell at the machines: “She’s Sophia Russell. We talk. We laugh. We work together. We make love. We live! We’re going to be married this spring. She’s going to get well, and we’ll marry in just a few months. We’re going to live together until we’re old and gray and still in love.”

  He leaned close and said in a strong voice, “You’ll be fine, Soph, my darling.” As he had told countless young soldiers lying shattered in a MASH unit at some front line, he reassured, “You’re going to be well soon. You’ll be up and about and feeling a lot better.” He kept the fear and worry from his tones. He had to bolster their morale; there was always hope. But this was Sophia, and he had to fight harder than he had ever fought in his life to hide his despair. “Just hang on, darling. Please, darling,” he whispered. “Hang on.”

  When she was conscious, she tried to smile up at him between shuddering gasps for breath. She squeezed his hand weakly. The fever and struggle to breathe were draining her.

  She tried to smile. “ … where … were … you …”

  Tenderly he laid a finger on her lips. “Don’t try to talk. You need to concentrate on getting well. Sleep, darling. Rest, my beautiful darling.”

  Her eyes fell closed as if they were curtains dropping at the end of a play. She seemed to be concentrating, directing all her faculties inward to battle whatever was attacking her. He studied the translucent skin, the fine bones, the graceful arches of her brows. Her face had always had a kind of refined beauty that was somehow made more appealing by the intelligence that lay beneath. But now that fever wracked her, she looked thin and frail against the white hospital sheets. Her skin was almost transparent. Her fevered face had a touch of brilliance to it that frightened him.

  A trickle of blood appeared at her left nostril.

  Surprised, Smith dabbed at it with a tissue and motioned to the nurse. “Stop that bleeding.”

  The nurse took the box of gauze pads. “She must’ve broken a capillary in her nose, poor dear.”

  Smith didn’t answer. He strode across the room of machines and blinking lights to where Dr. Josiah Withers, the hospital’s pulmonary specialist, Dr. Eric Mukogawa, the internist from Fort Detrick, and Capt. Donald Gherini, USAMRIID’s best virologist, were consulting in low voices. They looked up as Smith reached them, concern on their faces.

  “Well?”

  “We’ve tried every antibiotic we can think of that might help,” Dr. Withers told him. “But it appears to be a virus, Dr. Smith. All our efforts to alleviate the symptoms have been useless. She’s responded to nothing.”

  Smith swore. “Come up with something. At least stabilize her!”

  “Jon”—Captain Gherini put a hand on Smith’s shoulder—“it looks like the virus we got in the lab last weekend. We have every Level Four lab in the world working on it, and so far we haven’t a clue what it is or how to treat it. It looks like a hantavirus, but it isn’t. At least not like any hanta we know.” He grimaced and shook his head sadly. “She must’ve somehow been contaminated—”

  Smith stared at Gherini. “You’re saying she made a mistake in the lab, Don? In the Hot Zone? No way! She’s a hell of a lot more careful and skilled than that!”

  The base internist said quietly, “We’re doing everything we can, Colonel.”

  “Then do more! Do better! Find something, for God’s sake!”

  “Doctors! Colonel!”

  The nurse stood over the ICU bed where Sophia’s whole body had jerked up into a bow of agony, as if trying to draw one single long breath.

  Smith slammed the others aside and ran. “Sophia!”

  As he reached her side, she tried to smile.

  He took her hand. “Darling?”

  Her eyes fell closed, and her hand went limp.

  “No!” he roared.

  She settled into the bed as if she were weary from a long journey. Her chest stopped moving. After her long battle of gasps and pants, there was sudden, irrevocable silence. And before that could really register, blood gushed from her nose and mouth.

  Horrified, unbelieving, Smith jerked his head up to check the monitor. A green line plodded steadily across the screen. Flat. A flatline. Death.

  “Paddles!” he bellowed.

  The nurse bit back a sob and produced the shock resuscitation electrodes.

  He fought panic. He reminded himself that he had treated injured bodies in bloody skirmishes in hot spots around the world. He was a trained physician. He saved lives. That was his job. What he did best. He was going to save Sophia’s life. He could do it.

  His gaze on the monitor, he initiated the shock. Sophia’s body curved silently in an arc and fell back.

  “Again!”

  Five times he tried, increasing the shock each time. He thought he had brought her back a couple of times. He was almost sure she had responded at least once. She could not be dead. It was impossible.

  Captain Gherini touched his wrist. “Jon?”

  “No!”

  He shocked her again. The monitors remained flat, unresponsive. It had to be a mistake. Certainly a nightmare. He must be asleep and having a nig
htmare. Sophia was alive. Full of vitality. Beautiful as a summer day. And a smart-aleck. He loved the way she teased him—

  He snapped, “Again!”

  The pulmonary specialist, Dr. Withers, put his arm around Smith’s shoulders. “Jon, let go of the paddles.”

  Smith looked at him. “What?”

  But he released the paddles, and Withers took them.

  The internist, Dr. Mukogawa, said, “I’m very sorry, Jon. We all are. This is horrible. Unbelievable.” He motioned to the others. “We’ll leave you alone. You’ll need some time.”

  They filed out. The curtains closed around Sophia’s bed, and a wasteland of pain took over Smith’s heart. He shook. He dropped down on his knees and pressed his forehead against Sophia’s limp arm. It was warm. He wanted to keep telling himself she was alive. He wanted her to move, to sit up and laugh, to tell him it was all just a bad joke.

  A tear slid down his cheek. Angrily he wiped it away. He removed the oxygen tent so he could really see her. She looked so alive still, her skin pink and moist. He sat beside her on the bed. He picked up both her hands and held them in his. He kissed her fingers.

  I remember when I first saw you. Oh, you were lovely. And giving that poor researcher hell because he had misread the slide. You’re a great scientist, Sophia. The best friend I’ve ever had. And the only woman I ever loved—

  He sat and talked to her in his thoughts. He poured out his love. Sometimes he squeezed her hands just as he did when they went to the movies together. Once he looked down and saw his tears had puddled on the sheet. It was a long time before he finally said, “Good-bye, darling.”

  In the hospital waiting room, the long, slow night was over but the morning bustle had yet to begin. Miserable and numb, Smith sat slumped alone in an armchair.

  The first day Sophia had walked into the lab at USAMRIID she had started talking before he had even taken his gaze from his microscope. “Randi hates your guts,” she had told him. “I don’t know why. I kind of like the way you took the blame for whatever you did to her and that you were sorry. It was clear you meant it, and you were suffering for it.”