Final Epidemic (24 page)

“You want me to drive?”

“With all due respect, Dr. Casey, blow it out your—”

Abruptly, the road rose and dipped, curving to the right as it sloped downward. A quarter mile beyond and below the range of their headlights, specks of reflected starlight rippled over a dark area perhaps the size of a football field. April quickly reached forward and snapped off the car’s lights.

“This is the place,” April said. “See—that’s gotta be the old quarry the deputy described. Trippett’s trailer should be off to the left of it. In some trees.” Once again, she squinted into the night. “You see anything?”

Beck shook his head.

“Uh-uh,” he answered. “But if he’s there, I vote we leave the car here and go in quiet.”

April nodded, and switched off the engine. Before she could prompt him to do so, Beck reached above the rearview mirror and snapped the switch of the dome light to
OFF
. It was the action of a man who had done this sort of thing before, and for a moment it gave April pause. Then she opened her door carefully, stepped outside and gently pressed it closed until the latch engaged with an almost inaudible click.

Outside, the noises of the night filled the chill mountain air. Cicadas and other nocturnal insects crooned their ceaseless choruses of sex and procreation, sometimes enticing a willing mate, sometimes merely attracting the notice of a hungry predator. High overhead, shadowy forms darted in erratic flight, as sonar-guided bats zeroed in on unsuspecting targets. Motionless in the trees lining the road, great horned owls focused their night eyes in the low grasses, alert for the tiniest movement of some doomed prey.

Their heads close together, April and Beck spoke in low voices that carried even less than whispers would have.

“No flashlights,” April cautioned. She looked up at the sky. Far from the light pollution of any city, the sky was a heavy black velvet curtain gleaming with uncounted blue-white pinpoints. The moon was a thin Moorish crescent almost directly overhead, exceptionally decorative but decidedly nonfunctional as illumination. April decided that was lucky.

“We follow the road down to the quarry,” she told Casey. “Stick to the left side of the road, and stay close enough that we know where each of us is. Once we get down there, we ought to be able to see Trippett’s trailer. If anybody’s there, we take him down, fast. If there’s any surprises, I want them to come from us.”

“Fine with me,” Beck volunteered. “You want to flip a coin to see who goes in first?”

She shook her head. “I’m FBI,” she said. “In case you’ve forgotten the story you told me, you are a historian working for the CDC. Let’s pretend to believe that for now, shall we? I go in first, you stay behind me. You know the standard entry drill?”

He nodded—a little too quickly, April thought.

“I’ll sweep the left arc with my flashlight; you take the right. If we’re lucky, Trippett’s in there sawing wood; all that happens is he gets what you might call a rude awakening. We take him down, toss the place, bring him in. But if we run into somebody else—or if somebody else is in there with him—stay out of the line of fire, right? This case has enough bodies hanging on it.”

“Just don’t shoot me,” Beck said. He saw the look that crossed her face, and frowned, puzzled. “Sorry. It was a joke.”

“Then get serious, fast,” April said.

An image rose in her mind, and she pushed it down.

“Just a minute,” April said. She stepped to the car’s trunk and fumbled with the key in the dark. Then she eased up the hatch, removed an object as long as her arm, and closed the trunk silently. She came back to Beck, who looked at her with what she could barely make out as a frown.

“You think you’ll need that?” he asked.

April O’Connor hefted the object she had removed from the trunk, holding it firmly in two hands across her chest. It was a Mossberg shotgun, the 12-gauge pump model commonly issued to police tactical units. It was fully loaded with five rounds of double-ought buckshot, each shell packed with nine 32-caliber lead balls. At close range, she knew, its blast could cut a human being almost in half.

“The last time I ran into this guy, his friends were carrying automatic weapons,” she said grimly. “You didn’t see what happened next. I did.”

They covered the quarter mile to the edge of the quarry in less than ten minutes, moving through the grass alongside the road as quietly as if they had been in a church. Twice, April had stopped short as something substantial had scurried out of her path; once, she had even seen a flash of movement in the grass, and wondered what variety of venomous snake called this region home.

She had not looked back, but she knew Beck was behind her. She could hear his soft footfalls occasionally; once, when he stepped too close to the soft incline of the drainage ditch, she heard his sharp inhalation as he slipped and caught himself. She even imagined she could hear the regular timpani of his heartbeats, though she knew it was more likely she was listening to her own.

A few yards away, the water slapped at the banks of the quarry, loud in the night. April dropped to one knee. In a moment, Beck was next to her. She pointed into the night, and he strained to see.

It was there, a patch of darkness thicker than that which surrounded it. April could make out the lines of a trailer, the kind with flat aluminum sides and top, engineered more with economy than stylishness in mind. She discovered that she could see the object better by not looking at it directly. In her peripheral vision, it contrasted more clearly from the copse of cottonwoods that framed it at a short distance.

April felt Beck’s hand touch her shoulder lightly. She looked at him and saw him point to his eyes, then toward the trailer and lift his palms in a doubtful shrug. She mimicked his gesture; April, too, could see no sign of human presence.

They could have been playing musical instruments, these two whose approach he had heard long before he saw their silhouettes against the lighter crushed stone of the roadway. Such a clatter they made, each step rasping through the grass in a boringly regular pace that stood out starkly against the natural sounds of the night. Twice he had heard the one in
front halt, then resume the approach; the one in the rear, he had decided in a flash of wit, either had a physical defect involving his equilibrium or was simply unnaturally clumsy.

Whoever they were, they approached this place in a manner doubtless meant to be of stealth. But the pair was without adequate training and devoid of natural skill.

And now,
he thought with a shrug,
they will die.

For a moment, he toyed with the idea of feeling sorry for them; it would not alter the fate he would deal them, but he had been raised by a grandmother who took upon herself the teaching of a faith that was officially discouraged, if not banned. Despite his experiences since then, and particularly since reaching the age when military service was compulsory, he occasionally found himself pondering such half-forgotten concepts as mercy and compassion.

But only briefly, and certainly not in this matter.

No,
he decided—though deep inside, he also understood the decision had been made all along—
they will die. One of them may even be the person we seek. If so, all the better. If not, I may keep one alive long enough to find out why they, too, have come here.

The thought filled him with something he might have described as joy.

Okay,
April O’Connor told herself,
let’s keep this simple. One: I move to the trailer door; Dr. Casey will be two steps behind, on my right. Two: I kick the door and that cheap piece of tin will pop open like a beer can. And three—well, once we’re in, we’ll see if there is a three.

A sudden foreboding chilled her, and she felt her hair prickle along her neck. She recognized it as fear, and the realization startled her.

April looked at the shotgun she held, then once again eyed the trailer doorway.
Shit,
she thought,
that’s one narrow-looking door. And I’m going to barge in there carrying this goddamn clumsy blunderbuss?
She pictured trying to swing
the shotgun around in what were bound to be close, confined quarters; she had an image of the barrel hanging up against a wall while somebody carefully sighted on her.

That was the clincher. April softly laid the shotgun on the grass and drew her Glock. She checked the action by feel, and fished a small, powerful Maglite from her side pocket. This too she examined by touch, running her fingers lightly along the metal tube until she found the rubber thumb switch in its base.

Still April hesitated, and realized suddenly that she was dragging out the moment intentionally.
What’s the matter?
she chided herself silently.
Hell of a time to turn chicken, lady. . . .

Beck watched her, waiting for her sign. She pointed one forefinger toward her chest, held it upright and then jabbed it in the direction of the trailer. As one, they rose and rushed at the trailer door.

Despite the advantages he held, the speed with which the two figures moved surprised him. Almost before he realized they had risen, they were halfway across the space between the road and the concrete block being utilized as a front step.

Mi’shova mat,
he thought, falling into his native tongue at the surprise,
the one in front runs like a woman!

He felt as if he had been given a very good, and very unexpected, present.

Perhaps it was the memory of the warehouse, or perhaps it was the rush of adrenaline that coursed through her body. It may have been the shout of “FBI!” she gave, loud as any explosive scream from a martial arts master as every available erg of energy is focused on the target. It may even have been the fact that the trailer was not new, or that April O’Connor had spent hours in the gym to develop lower body strength even more impressive than what was already granted to her gender.

For whatever reason, the kick April delivered to the trailer door did not cause it to pop open like a beer can. Instead, it tore the hinge strip completely out of the light frame of the doorway and sent the entire assembly skittering across the inside width of the trailer. It smashed against the far wall and toppled to the side with a crash of metal and glass.

More important, it left no obstacle to delay, even momentarily, the entry of April and Beck.

“FBI! Nobody move!” April shouted again, and thumbed on her pocket flashlight. At that instant, she saw the movement on her left. She spun, her pistol in a right-handed grip and the flashlight in her left locked under the gun hand’s wrist. In the circle of light at the end of her extended arms, the sights filled with the chest of a man wide-eyed in surprise, seated less than a dozen feet away in a folding chair. As he jerked his own gun upward toward her face, she could see the cylinder in his revolver already rotating and knew she was about to die.

April pressed her own trigger.

The room lit up as if from a photographer’s strobe, the two flashes so close they appeared as one. Simultaneously, the concussion from the shots, vicious and flat, pressured her eardrums painfully as the pistol recoiled against her hand. Without conscious effort, as April O’Connor had learned in long hours on the firing range, she absorbed the recoil’s energy in her forearm, letting the force of the slide as it snapped back to battery help her again center the sights on her target.

There was no need. His shot had missed, gone off to who-knows-where in the objective precision of ballistics. Hers had not. The bullet had torn into the man’s left shoulder, and the impact jerked his body to the side. At the same time, the pistol flew from his right hand, clattering on the stained carpeting. The first pulse of blood jetted crimson from the wound.

“
Freeze,
you son of a bitch!” April screamed, her voice
blazing with what felt like rage. “Do not move or I
will
shoot!”

Through the ringing in her ears, she heard Beck step up close behind her.

“I’ve got this guy,” she said, her heart still racing. “Shine your light on the rest of—”

Something hard exploded into the side of her head, and the man behind her—the man who was not Beck Casey, the man who had waited motionless from the shadows outside as she and Casey approached—now watched her fall heavily to the floor.

White Bison County, Montana
July 23

Real life is seldom like the movies. In the movies, a blow to the head of the hero results in what appears little different from a brief nap. A short time later, the hero awakes, shakes her head to clear the cobwebs, and proceeds to analyze the intricacies of motive and opportunity.

The reality of April O’Connor’s situation was starkly different.

Despite the crushing force, she was never completely unconscious from the impact to her head. She could still hear, though the ringing was magnified far beyond what had been caused by her shot. She could even see her flashlight where it lay on the trailer floor a few feet from her head, though now there were two flashlights, one slightly overlapping the other, and both moving sickeningly in and out of focus. Against her cheek, she could feel the rough nap of the carpeting that covered the floor; she was even aware of the sour smell of mildew it gave off.

But she could not move, not a muscle; not even when two black shoes—boots, really, ankle high and with nylon zippers along the side—stepped close to her face. She had no strength in her body, not even to react when she felt a sharp
poke against one of her buttocks. Then a face, its identical twin again superimposed by the double vision of the concussion she had suffered, filled her field of view. April felt a thumb on her eyelid, the one that was uppermost as she lay, and then a light brighter than the midday sun exploded in her face and was gone again.

His tests completed, the man who had come up behind April straightened. He felt an irritated disappointment, as if he had broken a favored toy.

I struck harder than I intended,
he thought,
perhaps too hard.