Then Drake heard the distant wail of sirens. Cursing, he staggered to his feet. Although the room was still a blur he made it to the windows. His vision cleared enough for him to make out two red dots flickering between the trees bordering the access road.
“Goddamnit!” he roared as he heard the sirens. Smith had brought his own backup! Who were they? How many?
His vision almost normal, Drake rushed to where he’d seen Smith fall.
But he wasn’t there!
The sirens were getting louder. Cursing, Drake snatched up the backpack and headed into the stairwell. He made it outside just in time to see two sedans pull up in front of the gates.
Let ’em come, he thought. All they’re going to find is a body!
__________
Staring at the loose wires dangling from the panel, Megan Olson struggled to fend off her despair. She had lost track of all the combinations she had tried, running different wires to different terminals. So far, nothing had worked. The shuttle’s air-lock door remained firmly sealed.
Her only consolation was that she thought she’d fixed her mike. But she didn’t want to test it just yet.
Calm down, she told herself. There’s a way out of here. All you have to do is find it.
It was maddening that less than a foot away, on the other side of the door, was the emergency-release lever. All Dylan Reed had had to do was pull it.
Instead he’s going to let you die. Like all the others…
No matter how hard she tried, Megan could not distance herself from the horror of Reed’s actions. For the last several hours she had listened in on his terse, intermittent conversations with Harry Landon at mission control. In one of them, he had given a graphic description of the bodies.
But how did he get a sample?
From Treloar! Klein had told her about the theft from Bioaparat and how Treloar had helped smuggle the Russian smallpox sample into the country. But how had Treloar gotten the virus to the launch site? He was killed soon after landing in Washington.
That’s when she remembered the morning of the liftoff, being unable to sleep, taking a walk in the darkness, seeing the launch pad in the distance, seeing Reed… Then the anonymous visitor, approaching him, handing him something, and leaving. Could it have been a last-minute transfer? It had to be.
If what Reed had received was in fact smallpox, Megan thought, then it would have remained stable until the shuttle was in orbit and Reed could store it in the biofreezer.
The Spacelab! Suddenly she remembered the message that had come in to the flight deck. Minutes later, Reed had changed the experiments’ schedule, bumping her and taking the first slot for himself. He had explained it away so smoothly that no one, not even she, had questioned him.
Not even when you had seen the NASA log number for that message. Reed’s number. And you asked yourself how he could possibly have sent that message to himself…
Megan shook her head. The questions had been there, but she had ignored them. Instead, she had accepted the events as coincidence, had chosen to believe in the integrity of the man who had brought her to the stars.
The question of why Reed would be party to such a barbaric act plagued her. Even after she’d gone over everything she knew about him, no answer was forthcoming. There was something in him, about him, that she hadn’t seen. No one had.
Earlier, Megan had clung to the frail hope that Reed would return. A part of her could not believe that he would kill her in cold blood. But as the hours passed and she listened to his communication with mission control, she came to accept that as far as he was concerned, she was already dead.
Megan stared hard at the wiring panel. Because she was able to eavesdrop on the conversations with mission control, she knew how Harry Landon intended to bring down the shuttle and, more important, how long that would take. She still had time to figure out how to escape. Once she did, she would head straight for the auxiliary communications unit in the lower bay.
But if the wiring continued to foil her and time began to run out, she had one final option. Choosing to exercise it meant that the door would open— no doubt about that. But there was no guarantee that she would survive the aftermath.
__________
Smith staggered to his feet, ripped off his jacket, and tore at the Velcro straps of his Kevlar Second Chance bulletproof vest. It was rated to stop anything up to a 9mm slug. But even though it had absorbed Drake’s .22s easily, Smith still felt as though he’d been kicked in the chest by a mule.
Getting into his car, he activated the global positioning system built into the dash. Instantly a glowing blue dot appeared on the small screen that showed a map of Fairfax County.
Smith reached for the phone.
“Klein here.”
“It’s me, sir.” Smith said.
“Jon! Are you all right? I received reports of an explosion.”
“That was my doing.”
“Where are you?”
“Just outside the plant. The target’s moving— by the looks of it, on foot. Whoever you sent, sir, did the job. They got here just in time to spook Drake.”
“What about Drake? Did he take the bait?”
Smith glanced at the pulsing blue dot. “Yes, sir. He’s on the move.
__________
It took Sergeant Patrick Drake five minutes to cover the one-mile hiking path through the woods between the power plant and the deserted recreational area where he’d parked his vehicle.
Alert for any sign of a tail, Drake drove to the outskirts of Alexandria. Pulling into the lot of a Howard Johnson motor lodge, he parked in front of the last unit in the row. Drake opened the door to find General Richardson and Anthony Price inside.
“Mission report, Sergeant?” Richardson asked.
“The target was neutralized, sir,” Drake replied smartly. “Two hits, center mass.”
“You’re sure?” Price demanded.
“What do you want, Tony?” Richardson snapped. “Smith’s head on a platter?” He turned to Drake. “At ease, Sergeant. You did well.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Price gestured at the backpack that Drake had brought with him. “What’s that?”
Drake dropped the pack on one of the beds. “Something Smith left behind.”
Undoing the straps, he laid out the contents: two spare ammunition clips, a road map, a cell phone, a microcassette recorder, and a small, round object that got Price’s attention.
“What’s that?”
“A flash grenade, sir,” Drake said, pretending not to notice Price’s shocked expression. “It’s okay, sir. The pin is secure.”
“Give us some privacy, soldier,” Price said.
As Drake went into the bathroom, Price grabbed Richardson’s arm. “Enough of this soldier-boy shit, Frank. Neither one of us needed to be here. Drake could have called in the results.”
Richardson jerked his arm away. “That’s not the way I work, Tony. I lost a soldier boy, as you call him, over in Palermo. He had a name. Travis Nichols. And in case you’ve forgotten, Smith got close enough to us to call me at Fort Belvoir— on a line you guaranteed was secure!”
“The number was secure!” Price shot back. “Your man gave it up.”
Richardson shook his head. “For someone who’s done the things you have, you sure don’t like getting your hands dirty, do you? You prefer to give orders and let others die while you watch the results on television, like this is all a big game.” Richardson leaned in close. “I’m not playing a game, Tony. I’m doing this because I believe it is necessary. I’m doing this for my country. What do you believe in?”
“The same,” Price replied.
Richardson snorted. “But you’ve feathered your bed with Bauer-Zermatt, haven’t you? As soon as we give the world a small taste of what our bug can do, everyone will be clamoring for an antidote. Coincidentally Bauer-Zermatt will leak that it has the inside track on the research and its stock will skyrocket. I’m curious, Tony. Just how many shares did Bauer give you?”
“A million,” Price replied calmly. “And he didn’t give them to me, Frank. I earned them. Don’t forget that I was the one who found Beria, who watched your back, making sure that no one even got a whiff of what was happening in Hawaii. So don’t try to rub my nose in this hero horseshit!”
He glanced at the items Drake had removed from the backpack. “Now let’s wrap this thing up…”
His words trailed off.
“What’s wrong?” Richardson asked.
Price picked up the microcassette recorder, examined the casing, and popped open the cover. “Say it ain’t so,” he muttered.
“What?” Richardson demanded. “Smith brought it along so that he could tape a confession.”
“Maybe…”
Price removed the cassette and pulled one of the two pins that held it in place. The assembly came away in one piece.