Hybrid, p.25
Hybrid, page 25
“Certainly.” Reisch reached for his overcoat and retrieved his wallet and current identity. He was disappointed that Fessner hadn’t relaxed an iota in the face of his cooperative-Coloradoan act. “There you go, young man,” he continued in character.
“What’s your destination, Mr. Lyon?” Fessner’s voice was a little more confrontational.
“Denver,” Reisch answered. “I have a flight to catch.”
“Can you tell me where you are coming from?” Fessner studied the phony driver’s license as if it might have the correct answer written across Reisch’s picture.
“Manitou Springs. What’s all this about, soldier?” Courtesy wasn’t getting him anywhere, so he tried indignation.
“The state of Colorado is under martial law. There is a ban on traveling, and you are in violation of that ban.” He pocketed the driver’s license. “Please step out of the car, sir.” It was an order delivered by a man who was used to having his orders followed immediately.
Reisch hesitated. Thirty-one minds were focused on him. They clouded out anything beyond his immediate vicinity, and he wondered if it was enough cover to avoid alerting Amanda. He motioned to get out, and Fessner stepped back, his automatic weapon lowered for the moment. Reisch seized Fessner’s mind, and for a moment he felt the usual but always strange intermixing of their thoughts. It was over in less than an instant. John Fessner dropped to his knees, grabbing his head with a howl of pain. Reisch could feel the man’s agony, but he could also feel his own resurgence. The power to kill had returned. He resisted the urge to tear Fessner’s mind apart; he needed a diversion, not a complication.
“Lieutenant, are you all right?” the sergeant screamed. Something had just happened, and he had missed it. All he saw was Fessner drop to the ground. He raised his weapon and pointed it at Reisch. The remaining twenty-nine guardsmen did the same. “Chavez, check out the LT. You!” he screamed at Reisch. “On the ground, face down, hands behind your back, now!”
“Hold up there, sergeant. I didn’t even touch him,” Reisch said, stepping out of and away from the Mercedes, his hands held high. He started to gather all their minds, and when he had them perfectly positioned, he felt the energy pulse leave his body. Just for a moment, he became almost weightless as the air around him suddenly compressed and then exploded outward towards each of the guardsmen. He watched as they flew through the air like little toy soldiers, all of them dead or dying—except for one. Reisch did a double take. Behind him stood a completely unharmed and shocked twenty-two-year-old corporal. For a long second, they stared at each other, both with the same thought: What happened?
Reisch was the first to recover. He grabbed the mind of the corporal and started to squeeze, but not before the guardsman squeezed the trigger of his fully automatic M16.
Chapter 31
Catherine Lee quietly pulled the curtain back and found that her patient was still asleep and still in the emergency room. Sixteen hours on a hospital gurney waiting for a bed, she thought. Unfortunately, the man’s plight was not unique. The twelve-bed ER of St. Luke’s was treating, or in this case, babysitting, more than thirty. Patients were stacked everywhere. She had seen and treated more patients in the last twelve hours than in the last twelve shifts. Gunshot wounds, stabbings, and blunt trauma were supposed to be in her past. Seventeen years as an Emergency Room Attending at Grady Memorial in Atlanta had earned her the respite in sleepy Colorado Springs, but now the violence had found its way back to her doorstep. Most of the surgical patients were ultimately “turfed” to other hospitals, but only after Dr. Lee and her ER staff had stabilized them. The medical patients had to stay; no one was accepting medical transfers. Every other hospital within a fifty-mile radius was as full as St. Luke’s. It was this year’s flu bug, and it had hit Colorado hard and late in the season. She had seen her first case of it ten days earlier, and it had been a nonstop parade of sick people ever since. Then, just to make matters worse, the federal government announced a ban on travel, a medical quarantine to contain a virulent strain of TB.
The head nurse reached around her waist and spun her around. “Hey sexy, how about you give me a complete physical?” Tom Lee asked.
“Not until I get a shower and eight hours of sleep,” she replied, giving her husband a quick peck on the cheek. “Any hope of clearing out some of these patients? This guy over here has been down here for nearly two days.”
His tone changed. “Same story as yesterday—no beds anywhere. Have you talked with Dr. Branson lately?”
“Not for a week or so.” She had been so busy that she had missed all of the hospital meetings. “Why, what have you heard?”
“First, that this quarantine has nothing to do with TB.”
“Oh, there’s a big surprise,” she said, and pulled out of his embrace to let a staff nurse squeeze by. The weak excuse of a virulent form of TB was an insult to anyone who knew better, which was pretty much everybody.
“Well, Doctor Smarty-Pants, do you know why there’s a quarantine?” He pressed himself into the wall as a patient on a gurney was wheeled down the corridor.
“No, but I’m sure our omnipotent chief of staff, who knows all, revealed the deep dark secret while you both were peeing on a wall somewhere.”
She started to walk back to the nurse’s station, and he followed close behind, his voice falling to a whisper.
“Seriously, Cat, he says that it’s because of this flu bug. Apparently, a lot of people who get it are dying.”
She stopped and waited for him to catch up. “Dying? How many?” Spending all her time in the ER, she had little opportunity to keep tabs on the patients admitted through the emergency room. She would have to attend the staff meetings to get that kind of follow-up.
“About half, and it’s not just the old people.” They were back in public view, and he maintained a professional distance.
“Half! That can’t be right. We’d be up to our elbows in Health Department lookie-lous.”
“The morgue is full, and the military has been making regular trips to our loading docks, and I don’t think they’re delivering anything.”
“Damn, this is serious. I better give Dr. Branson a call. I’ll see you later.” Absently, she gave him another kiss. Ten minutes later, she was still waiting for Bob Branson to return her page. He probably won’t answer because he thinks I want him to shake some beds loose, she thought, leafing through the Health Department’s notification forms. Influenza was a reportable disease, and every case they saw generated a report.
“Seventy-nine,” Cary Tees said, and Cat looked up. “Seventy-nine cases in the last . . .” She checked her watch. “. . . nineteen hours. Episcopal and General are both over a hundred. TB, my ass. This quarantine is about this flu, or whatever the hell it is.” Cary was from New York, and Cat occasionally enjoyed her in-your-face style, but this wasn’t one of those occasions.
“Do you have something for me, Cary?” Cat passed the stack of reports to the unit assistant.
“The patient in five, Dr. Rucker, is awake and wants to talk with you. Did you know he’s the coroner?”
“Thanks,” Cat said. She weaved her way through the circus that her emergency room had become and hoped that maybe Dr. Rucker could clue her in on what was happening down here in the trenches. She pulled the curtain back with a flourish and found him sitting on the edge of the gurney, trying to keep his balance. “Dr. Rucker, you should not be trying to get up on your own.”
She reached for his shoulders and steadied him. When she touched his skin, he went rigid, almost as if she had given him a powerful shock. “Are you all right?” she asked. She stood on tiptoe to look him in the eyes.
“Yes,” he said through tight jaws. She let go, and he slumped perceptibly.
***
“What happened to Melissa?” As soon as Phil said her name, he knew. Some strange sense told him that she had died.
“She arrested, and we couldn’t bring her back,” Cat said softly.
Phil saw Dr. Lee running the code that would end with an official time of death for Melissa Shay. He watched her cursing the implanted pacemaker and defibrillator that kept discharging. Every five seconds, the device jolted Melissa’s heart, and finally, the muscle stopped responding. In the end, a surgical resident was called to remove the device, but it was much too late. Her myocardium had been shocked to death.
The vision ended, and Dr. Lee was staring at him intently. “Are you all right?” she asked him again.
“I didn’t even know she had a pacemaker,” Phil said, more to himself than to her. An unfamiliar feeling of loss stole over him.
“I’m sorry,” Catherine Lee said, and touched his bare arm.
A whirlwind of images invaded Phil’s mind. Unbidden and unwelcome, he saw Dr. Lee with other patients, and then with her husband. Phil was paralyzed with horror as he watched them make love in the shower. He felt like a degenerate as they enjoyed each other’s bodies in the privacy of their own home, and when he realized that parts of him were responding to the vision, he vomited.
Cat jumped back, but not in time, and the connection between them was broken.
Nurses arrived, and orders were given. He felt the IV in his arm sting as they injected him with Zofran. The powerful antiemetic agent began to cloud his thinking, but a part of him clung to the realization that he had been infected. His consciousness began to fragment, and he saw the tall, dark man staring into the eyes of a scared young man dressed in a uniform and holding a gun.
“Shoot him,” Phil said to the young man. “He’s going to kill you.”
Dr. Lee and the nurses stopped what they were doing and stared at the now unconscious Phil.
“What did he just say?” Dr. Lee asked.
***
“Seventeen dead and fourteen wounded, all from some sort of explosion. The strange thing is that there was no fire, and none of them had any burns.”
Rodney Patton was relaying what he knew about the situation in Mescali to the mayor. “The FBI is fairly sure it was our guy Reisch. He’s using the name Lyon now.”
No one was certain what had happened or how Reisch had escaped. The single survivor who could speak said that he had been unconscious before the other guardsmen were attacked. He told the FBI that Reisch had reached into his mind and squashed it, an account uncomfortably similar to Yaeger’s. Rodney kept that part to himself. “They’re also fairly sure that he was shot. There was a whole lot of blood at the scene that can’t be accounted for. The state forensics team is working on it now.”
“Good, at least the bastard is hurt. That ought to slow him down some.” The mayor coughed loudly into the phone, and Patton winced. “Both the feds and the local Mescali police asked if they could borrow you for the day. Apparently, what happened yesterday at the Sheraton was as close as this guy has ever come to being caught. I guess they think that some of that luck will rub off on them.” He laughed and then started into another coughing fit.
Rodney pulled the phone away from his ear until it was over. “They called me earlier. I’m leaving as soon as we are done.” Patton hoped that the mayor would take the hint.
“So let me get this straight. This Reisch is a German who worked for the Russians and then for himself.”
“Correct.”
“Then he finds his way here and starts to infect people with a virus that only two people have ever survived—him and Amanda Flynn. I remember meeting her several years ago. She had the most amazing eyes; she was also very pregnant at the time.”
Patton waited for the mayor to voice the obvious connection, but a long silence followed.
“So this virus is what’s been causing all the violence,” the mayor finally said. “Then why aren’t people dying by the hundreds, the thousands?”
“I’m just a cop, mayor,” Patton said, trying to hide his frustration. This was the third time the mayor had asked that question.
“Yes,” the mayor said. “And you did a good job. I gave you a deadline, and you beat it. I won’t forget this, Rodney.” He hung up.
“Finally,” Patton said to himself. He had already decided that, chief or not, he would not be giving the daily briefing to His Honor for several more days. He returned the phone to its receiver, and it immediately rang. “What?” he demanded. He needed to get over to Mescali as soon as possible, and the morning was being eaten away by phone calls.
“Chief, I have a man on the line who says he’s with the CIA. He claims to be your brother,” the desk sergeant replied quickly.
Rodney remembered the man’s name this time. “He’s my brother-in-law, Sergeant Thompson. Put him through.” He had to go a little easier with these men and women. They were starting to doubt themselves because of his overbearing nature, and timidity got people killed.
He listened as the connection was made. “Michael, how has your morning started?” he said after he heard background noise and his brother-in-law breathing impatiently.
“Busy.” It wasn’t impatience; it was excitement in Michael Weigel’s voice. “I’m sure you heard about Mescali. Our German friend was busy this morning.”
“I’m on my way down there in a couple of minutes. It was a Colorado Springs unit that he hit.”
“Sorry. Boy, you guys can’t catch a break. Okay, let me get right to it. I’m calling in the spirit of interagency cooperation, which means I’m authorized to talk to you. There are a lot of things happening that you don’t know about, and need to. Reisch is not working alone. He’s hooked himself up with some pretty bad people—Islamic terrorists. They somehow created a couple of different viruses and, with the help of Reisch, they’ve released one of them in Colorado Springs as a calling card. They have a list of demands that the president is reviewing. “
“Michael, you know that most of that is on the news and we figured the rest of it out ourselves. Now, how are you federal boys going to help us?”
A pause that stretched too far followed. “We have no plans to intervene besides the quarantine.”
“So you’re just going to lock us in, and when the last of us keels over you’ll come in and bury us?” Patton said bitterly, and then regretted lashing out at his brother-in-law. Rodney knew that this decision could not have sat well with Michael. “What are they estimating as far as a death toll?” he asked.
“More than twenty thousand, but only if we can keep people at home.”
Rodney was embarrassed that his initial feelings were of relief. Twenty thousand dead; that was manageable, wasn’t it? Reflexively, a tiny fragment of his mind began to calculate the odds that he wasn’t going to be one of the unlucky twenty thousand, and his embarrassment intensified.
“There’s more,” Michael said. “We need Reisch alive.”
“Then come and get him,” Rodney said savagely and then, again, regretted his misplaced hostility. “I’m sorry, Michael. I know it’s not your fault.”
“No need to apologize,” Michael said quickly. “When you get over there, you need to let everyone know that this asshole has to be taken alive. I don’t care how alive, just so long as his heart is beating.”
“No one is going to listen. If they find Reisch, they’re going to go after him with tanks, and I can’t blame them. This guy wiped out an entire platoon . . . with a single goddamn thought.” He was remembering Greg Flynn’s words and Amanda.
“Nonlethal force,” Michael Weigel said slowly. “Catch him any way you can, then sedate him. We’ll take it from there. I’ve got to let you go, Rodney. I’ll call you if anything changes here, and you can call me if anything changes at your end.”
“Bye,” Patton said, but the line was already dead.
There was another way, one that didn’t put people at risk. Amanda was immune to the same virus that Reisch was spreading. She had the same unique abilities as the German, and supposedly she was a lot better to look at. Patton smiled, remembering how she had effortlessly disabled the FBI team sent to take her. He had listened along with Greg Flynn to Don Heller’s radio, and secretly applauded when she warned them off with a not-so-veiled threat. He had never met her, but had taken an instant liking to her. She had an indomitable spirit that reminded of his wife. Of late, it seemed that anyone with positive attributes reminded him of Connie.
The problem was that no one was looking for her; the FBI had specifically ordered him to leave her alone. He was told that at this time apprehending her posed too great a risk, and that they should concentrate their efforts on capturing Reisch, who at first seemed to be less of a threat. He wondered if that assessment had changed.
He pulled himself out of his chair and hurriedly put his coat on, hoping to get out before the damn phone rang again. He was anxious to see for himself what had happened, and hopefully, along the way, bump into Amanda.
Chapter 32
It had been a long, sleepless night. Martin hadn’t made it home until three-thirty in the morning and was at his desk before seven with a dozen administrative tasks that demanded his attention. He slowly started working through them, avoiding the more important task: finding the spy in their midst.
“Where to start?” he asked himself after all his diversionary tasks had been completed, but no one answered. He had personally hired the vast majority of these people, and it sickened him to think that one of them was secretly helping those bastards. No, it was probably worse than that. One of his people was actually one of those bastards.
He was forced into doing a terrible thing. It was almost a violation of trust, a violation of his heritage, but he had to do it. He assembled the confidential personnel file of every person who worked in his section and would review each file. His one and only screening criterion was religion. He opened the first folder.
