Off to the right I saw four security guards trying to tackle a mountain of a man near the east entrance to the courtyard. He was wearing a caterer’s uniform and was throwing the guards around like rag dolls. Four to one, but they were hopelessly outmatched. Ralph must have seen them the same time I did because he rushed into the middle of the melee and called to the guy doing the pummeling, “Pick on someone your own size, you freakin’ pansy.”
Just then I located Kincaid. He was about twenty meters from Ralph. I ran toward him but found my way blocked by the crowd.
Ralph waved the security guards to safety and then pointed to the capsule the guy had pulled out. “Don’t take the sissy way out. Fight me. Right now. If I win, I don’t let you die today.” Ralph was rolling up his sleeves. “I take you in, we prosecute you, put you away for the next forty years, and you get to experience all the joys of the American penal system. If you win, well, I’ll swallow your little pill.”
What are you doing, Ralph?
I wanted to help him, but I had to get to Kincaid. I pushed my way through the crowd, struggling to get to him before it was too late.
Kincaid was right in front of me. “His future, our future!” he was shouting.
He slipped his hand into his pocket.
He’s going for a capsule. Don’t let him die. You need to find out the name of the contagion.
I rushed him, tackled him, and sent the capsule he’d pulled out spinning across the cobblestone path. But not far enough. It was still within reach.
As we crashed onto the ground, he wrestled free, squirming and fighting like a madman. “Don’t do this,” I managed to say. “These people are innocent.” But he brought his elbow down with crushing strength into my gut. I gasped for breath. This guy was tougher than he looked.
He snatched up the capsule, shoved it into my mouth, then punched me hard in the jaw.
Don’t swallow, Pat. Whatever you do, don’t swallow!
Tessa waited one moment. Then another. Her heart wouldn’t stop pounding. Still no shot. The killer must have slipped away. Then she heard Officer Stilton gasp when he saw the body in the other room.. . the sound of him shouting her name… sirens blaring toward the house… the bedroom door crashing open. “Tessa!”
It was him. The cop who liked to smoke.
So then. She was safe. It was going to be OK. Everything was going to be OK.
I could taste the bitter tablet dissolving on my tongue.
I tried to spit it out. Couldn’t. Kincaid was on me with a vengeance, clamping his hand over my mouth.
Just then I saw a blur beside my face, and Kincaid’s jaw snapped back, and he flew off me.
I spit out the capsule.
Lien-hua swirled around with the grace of a gazelle, leapt into the air, and cracked her heel into the side of Kincaid’s head a second time, this time hard enough to swipe him off his feet. His body torqued around backward, and he slammed into the ground, unconscious. She landed softly on her feet, ready for another kick.
“An A,” I said. I was trying to catch my breath. “I would definitely give that kick an A.”
“’Bout time,” she said, rushing off toward a woman holding a capsule.
Marcie watched as the others slipped the capsules into their mouths and bit down… watched as the people she loved collapsed onto the floor with mouths full of foam… watched as they convulsed… as they gasped for breath… as they died.
Being captured alive had never been part of the plan.
She stared at the capsule in her hand and heard shouting all around her, voices telling her what to do. “Take it… Drop it.. . Swallow it… Stand down…” A thousand voices coming from everywhere at once.
She had a choice. She had to make a choice.
“Wait.” An Asian woman came running toward her with open hands. “Please. Don’t. No more people need to die.”
I scrambled over to Kincaid to cuff him and see if I could find out the name of the virus, but when I was only a few steps from him, he pulled out a syringe inside a plastic bag, thrust the tip through the bag, and plunged it into his heart.
No!
He fumbled for something in his pocket. “And this is for-” he started to say, but then he began to convulse.
In all my time in law enforcement I’d never witnessed such a terrible death.
In the end I had to turn away. I couldn’t watch. I looked up just in time to see Ralph punch the gorilla in the stomach. The man was gasping, backing up as Ralph went at him, bashing him with his shot-put-sized fists.
Roundhouse.
Uppercut. Finally a left hook. Ralph hit him so hard in the face that he spun around in an instant and, with a meaty crunch, collided face first against the stone wall of the hotel and toppled to the ground. Ralph wiped his hand across his face to get the blood out of his mouth as he cuffed him. “Ah,” said Ralph. “Just the way I like it. Fast and clean.”
Tessa looked around the living room.
Police and a bunch of ambulance guys had arrived, and half a dozen people she didn’t know were milling around asking her questions. They’d put the cop who’d gotten shot on a gurney. Maybe she was still alive.
“Tessa!” Agent Tucker came running in. “Are you OK?”
She blinked. “Where’s Patrick?” she said weakly.
“He’ll be coming in a minute,” he said. “Don’t worry, Tessa. I’m here to help you.”
“We would rather die free than live as slaves,” said Marcie.
“That’s what he told you, isn’t it?” asked the woman, coming closer. “Kincaid, right? Or maybe Jones? But what do you think? You get to decide. That’s the thing. A slave is someone who can no longer choose.”
“Stay back!”
The Chinese woman stopped. “What’s your name?”
After a pause. “Marcie.”
“I’m Lien-hua. Please, Marcie, help us protect these people. Please.”
Marcie watched as the security guards tried to corral people into conference rooms, control the panic, calm people down.
She thought of her daughter lying still on the floor. Saw the look in the little girl’s eyes as she’d told her to drink the “medication” back in the library. “Will it hurt, Mommy?” her daughter had asked. “No, sweetie, it won’t hurt,” Marcie had said-had lied. She’d lied to her only daughter because Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid told her to. “Of course it’ll hurt,” she’d wanted to say. But she didn’t say it. She just told her it wouldn’t hurt, and then her daughter nodded and closed her eyes and opened her mouth, a trusting little girl.
Marcie backed into the retaining wall of the fountain, lifted the tablet. “There’s nothing left for me here. My daughter is dead. I killed her.”
The woman, Lien-hua, was still talking to her. “Please. I know you loved your daughter. I know you did. Sometimes when people are afraid, they do things they later regret.”
“You don’t know what it’s like-”
“No, I don’t,” the woman said, and it surprised Marcie that she agreed with her. “None of us can know what it’s like for someone else. It’s what makes us individuals. We each have our own pain, our own mistakes. But we can reach out toward each other, help each other. That’s what makes us human.”
“It’s too late…”
Lien-hua pointed to the line of people being herded out of the courtyard, guided into conference rooms to be quarantined and treated. “It’s not too late for them, for their children. You don’t have to do what Kincaid says. He’s gone. You get to decide. Please help us.”
The capsule was in Marcie’s hand.
She raised it to her lips.
She got to decide. It was her choice.
She saw them: the children in the library. The poison still moist on their lips. Moist on their lips.
Her daughter’s trusting face.
At last, with her little girl’s smiling face drifting before her, Marcie let the last fragment of her old life fall from her fingers and onto the floor. “Francisella tularensis,” she whispered. She sensed a man beside her, a big man with a rough voice. It was almost as if she were somewhere else watching, a spectator observing a woman getting handcuffed. “Genetically enhanced…” she said in case anyone was listening. This was good. She could finally do something good with her life. Something right. “We spliced the genes… Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever…”