The Hades Factor c-1 Page 7

  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 running. 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, alHassan. 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 Gherim. “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 dra
w 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 nightmare. 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 door 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.”

  He had turned then, took one look, and knew again why he had badgered the army into bringing her to Fort Detrick. He had seen her first in the NIH lab where she had castigated a careless researcher, and he had been shocked to meet her again at her sister's place, but those two encounters had been enough to know he wanted to spend time with her. He had sat there under Randi's angry gaze admiring Sophia. She had long cornsilk hair pulled back in a ponytail and a slim figure full of curves.

  She had not missed his interest. That first day in the USAMRIID lab, she had told him, “I'll take the empty bench over there. You can stop staring at me, and I'll get to work. Everyone tells me you're a hotshot combat doctor. I respect that. But I'm a better researcher than you'll ever be, and you'd better get used to it.”

  “I'll remember that.”

  She had stared him straight in the eye. “And keep your dick in your pants until I say take it out.”

  He nodded, smiled, and told her, “I can wait.”

  The hospital's waiting room was an island out of time. In his mind the world was somewhere else. Crazy memories rampaged through his brain. He seemed to be out of control. He would have to call the wedding off. Cancel everything. The caterers, the limousine, the…

  My God, what was he doing?

  He shook his head violently. Tried to focus his mind. He was in the hospital.

  Dawn's light reflected pink and yellow on the buildings across the street. He would have to put his dress uniform back into mothballs.

  Where had she been in recent weeks? He should have been with her. He should never have gotten her the job at USAMRIID.

  How many people had they invited to the wedding? He had to write each one. Personally. Tell them she was gone… gone…

  He had killed her. Sophia. He had made USAMRIID make an offer so good she had taken the job at Detrick, and he had killed her. He had known he wanted her the moment he saw her at Randi's. When he had tried to tell Randi how sorry he was her fiancé had died, Randi had been too angry to listen. But Sophia had understood. He had seen it in her eyes ― those black eyes, so intense, so lively, so alive…

  He had to tell her family. But she had no family. Only Randi. He had to tell Randi.

  He lurched to his feet to find a pay telephone, and Somalia came back to him in a rush. He had been posted to a hospital ship in the minor invasion to bring order and protect our citizens in a country torn apart by the war raging between two warlords who had divided Mogadishu and the country. They summoned him into the remote bush to treat a major with fever. Exhausted from a twelve-hour shift, he had diagnosed malaria, but then it had turned out to be the far-less-known and far-more-deadly Lassa fever. The major had died before the diagnosis could be corrected and better treatment begun.

  The army exonerated him of wrongdoing. It was a mistake many more experienced doctors ― unfamiliar with virology ― had made before and would make again, and Lassa usually killed even with the best treatment. There was no cure. But he knew he had been arrogant, so full of himself that he had not called for help until too late. He blamed himself. So much so that he had pressured the army to assign him to Fort Detrick to become an expert in virology and microbiology.

  There, after he really understood the rarity of Lassa compared to malaria, he finally accepted his error as a risk of field medicine in distant and unfamiliar places. But the major had been Randi Russell's fiancé, and Randi had never forgiven Smith, never stopped blaming him for his death. Now he had to tell her he had killed another person she loved.

  He slumped back onto the couch.

  Sophia. Soph. He had killed her. Darling Sophia. They would marry in the spring, but she was dead. He should never have brought her to Detrick. Never!

  * * *

  “Colonel Smith?”

  Smith heard the voice as if from under miles of water at the bottom of a murky lagoon. He saw a shape. Then a face. And burst through the surface to blink in the hard light.

  “Smith? Are you all right?” Brigadier General Kielburger stood over him.

  Then it struck him and left him chilled to the marrow. Sophia was dead.

  He sat up. “I have to be there at the autopsy! If―”

  “Relax. They haven't started yet.”

  Smith g
lared. “Why the hell wasn't I told about this new virus? You knew damn well where I was.”

  “Don't use that tone with me, Colonel! You weren't contacted at first because the matter didn't seem urgent ― a single soldier in California. By the time the two other cases were reported, you were due home in a little over a day anyway. If you'd returned when your orders instructed, you would have known. And perhaps―”

  Smith's stomach clenched into an enormous fist, and his hands followed suit. Was Kielburger suggesting he might have saved Sophia had he been here? Then he slumped back. He did not need the general to do what he was already doing himself. Over and over as he sat in the dawn waiting room he blamed himself.

  He stood up abruptly. “I have to make a call.”

  He walked to the telephone near the elevators and dialed Randi Russell's home. After two rings the machine picked up, and he heard her precise, get-to-the-point voice: “Randi Russell. Can't talk now. After the beep, leave a message…. Thanks.”

  That “thanks” came grudgingly, as if an inner voice had told her to not be all business all the time. That was Randi.

  He dialed her office at the Foreign Affairs Inquiries Institute, an international think tank. This message was even crisper: “Russell. Leave a message.” No thanks this time, not even as an afterthought.

  Bitterly, he considered leaving the same kind of message: “Smith here. Bad news. Sophia's dead. Sorry.”

  But he simply hung up. There was no way he could leave a death message. He would have to keep trying to reach her, no matter how much it hurt. If he could not get her by tomorrow, he would tell her boss what had happened and ask him or her to have Randi call him. What else could he do?

  Randi had always been a sometime thing, frequently away on long business trips. She saw Sophia rarely. After he and Sophia grew close, Randi seldom called and never came around.

  Back in the waiting room, he found Kielburger impatiently swinging a knife-creased uniform leg and polished boot.

  Smith dropped into a chair beside the general. “Tell me about this virus. Where did it break out? What kind is it? Another hemorrhagic like Machupo?”