Her Last Defense (9 page)

“I don’t know.” Macy watched Clint disappear into the security tent with Skip.

But I darned sure plan to find out.

C
hristian and Curtis, Macy’s logistics guy and her second lab tech, ran a squeeze play on Clint in the chow line the next morning. They pinned him right between the butter beans and the fried chicken. The food had gotten better in the last twenty-four hours. Seems the women in town found out there were some government men in the woods searching for the “rabid” monkey and they insisted on bringing casseroles and pies—not to mention fried chicken—to sustain the hearty hunters protecting their town.

Curtis and Christian certainly seemed to approve of the country hospitality. Their trays were loaded.

Curtis kept a lookout, probably watching for Macy, while Christian started the proceedings. The intimidation proceedings, that was.

“Been hearing some trash talk about you and Dr. Attois,” Christian said. He was young, but not a kid. He’d probably seen the top side of thirty a year or two ago.

“That so,” Clint said noncommittally.

Curtis glanced over his shoulder. “She’s been upset ever since you got back from checking traps yesterday.”

“She say what she was upset about?”

“She didn’t have to,” Christian said. “Macy’s not real good at hiding what she’s feeling.”

“Yeah, I noticed that.” So, apparently, had everyone else.

“She was on the rebound, man,” Curtis said more vehemently. “You had to know that. She was trying to get her head straight. She didn’t need somebody coming along messing her up again.”

Clint didn’t have a comeback for that one. Sometimes a man just had to take his lumps.

“My sister said that ever since Macy talked to you, she’s been asking all kinds of questions about Dr. Brinker and Ty Jeffries.”

“Has she now?”
Interesting. Doing a little investigating on your own, are you, doc?

“She even asked me if I thought David could have been seeing someone else.”

“Was he?”

Christian snorted. “David? Hell, no. He was more interested in laboratory mice than women. Well, except for Macy. And even she took second seat sometimes.”

“We heard she found the pilot in the woods and that he’d been shot,” Christian said.

Curtis added, “We want to know what’s up with that. And what you intend to do about Macy.”

Clint inched down the line past the chicken and grabbed himself a dinner roll. His two shadows followed.

“What’s up,” he said quietly, not wanting to announce it to the whole camp. “Is that we’re investigating Michael’s death. And that’s all I’m going to tell you about an open case.”

Curtis added two rolls to the mountain on his tray. “He was murdered for real, then?”

“For real.”

“Whoa.”

Clint turned to walk away. Christian followed, swung around in front of him, cutting him off. “And what about the other?”

“What other?”

“What you’re going to do about Macy.”

He’d said sometimes a man had to take his lumps, but some lumps were a lot bigger than others. This one was about the size of Mount Everest. The last thing he’d ever wanted to do was hurt her, and yet he had. So badly that even her staff noticed.

What the hell had he been trying to prove?

In his own stupid way, he supposed he’d been trying to prove her innocence. He’d needed to make the accusations, see her reactions. She wouldn’t be able to keep the truth from him. Everything in her heart showed on her face. Everything.

Including the hurt. The pain of the betrayal she’d felt with each ugly insinuation he’d thrown at her.

At the time, he’d thought it was better this way.

“I’ll talk to her,” he promised, and his stomach rolled even as he spoke. What could he possibly say to her?

He was still wondering five minutes later as he sat at a plastic table staring at his uneaten food and heard a commotion behind him. Looking out the clear plastic tent flap, he watched a half-dozen men pour out of the security tent and jog toward the ATVs. Engines roared to life, drowning out the shouts of the operations guys diagramming search sectors on a large map taped to a whiteboard on wheels nearby.

Macy hobbled out of her quarters in a big hurry.

She had on a full environmental suit.

Clint shoved his tray aside, grabbed his mask and caught up to her just as she swung her leg over the last ATV. “What’s going on? Have they found the monkey?”

“No.” She fiddled with the ignition switch on the four-wheeler. He thought for a moment she wasn’t going to tell him any more when she finally looked up.

Her face was pale. Her eyes looked bruised, tired. Her lips were flat, unsmiling. “A man stumbled out of the woods at one of the checkpoints on the logging road about three miles from here. He appears to be sick.”

Clint flinched. His chest went hard.

Oh, God. It was starting.

“Scoot back,” he said. When she didn’t move, he waved her toward the end of the ATV seat. “Scoot back. I’m driving.”

Macy tightened her hold on Clint’s waist as the ATV bumped over a rut in the trail. His body was hard as a
rock beneath her hands. Tension rolled off him in waves, crashed against her own.

“You don’t have to do this,” she shouted so he could hear her over the howl of the ATV as he pushed the engine past the redline.

“Like hell I don’t.”

“I can handle this.”

“You don’t even know what ‘this’ is yet.”

He was right about that. But in the minutes since she’d heard, she’d imagined a thousand scenarios, each one more horrific than the next.

She squeezed her eyes shut, tried to shut out the pictures in her mind. “What if it’s some poor hiker or camper that we missed when we cleared the forest? What if some innocent man has ARFIS?”

“Then it’s one man, and we stopped him before he got to town and spread the virus to anyone else. It could be worse.”

“Not for that man.”

She opened her eyes. Clint was looking over his shoulder at her and for once, his expression was completely open, readable.

He was worried.

He pushed the four-wheeler faster. All she could do was hold on.

And pray.

They pulled in behind a mish-mash of vehicles that resembled a multicar pileup on the expressway. Except this was a two-rut logging trail of red mud, not an expressway. And there was only one casualty, as far as she knew.

Clint climbed off the ATV and headed straight for the
man in camouflage fatigues with yellow stripes on his shoulder. Macy tried to get a look at what was in front of the vehicles, but all she could see was a bunch of soldiers standing around staring at something.

She hurried to catch up to Clint, who had outdistanced her with his ground-eating strides.

“What have you got, Lieutenant?” he was asking when she arrived.

“Subject walked out of the woods twenty-five minutes ago, failed to respond to our challenges, failed to stop. He appeared incoherent. He was stumbling. There were visible signs of blood on his face and his hands. He was ordered to stop again, at which time he turned and came right at my men. They had no choice but to take him down.”

“They shot him?” Macy asked, her voice high and tight.

The lieutenant scrutinized her. “They tranquilized him, ma’am. Used the dart gun we were given in case we saw the monkey.”

“What will animal tranquilizer do to a human?” Clint asked.

“Depends what’s wrong with him.” She looked from Clint to the other man and back. “If he’s got ARFIS, it’s not going to matter one way or the other. Has he moved since he was darted?”

“No ma’am.”

“He didn’t say anything before he went down?” Clint asked.

“Negative.”

Macy took a plastic box with a bright red cross on
the top from Susan, who’d arrived on another ATV, and started forward. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

As she walked away, she saw her lab assistant give Clint a hard look. She’d have to talk to Susan about that. Macy was a big girl. She didn’t need anyone looking out for her.

But right now, she had other things on her mind.

“Pull your men back, Lieutenant,” she asked and he barked out an order.

The pack of bodies opened up, and there in the center of a circle of soldiers with rifles pointed down at him, face down in the red, rutted road, lay the man she had been engaged to marry until just a few days ago.

David Brinker.

“David,” Susan breathed next to Clint.

Clint stared at the crumpled form on the pavement. All he could see from here was a cap of straight brown hair and a pale complexion, a pair of broken wire-rimmed glasses askew on the man’s nose and fine-boned hands. “That’s Brinker? You’re sure?”

Susan nodded.

He took a step forward. Macy must have seen him out of the corner of her eye, because she held out a hand. “Stay back.”

Every atom in his body wanted to go to her. She shouldn’t have to do this. Especially not alone. But he did as she asked, not wanting to distract her.

In full protective gear, she knelt by the man in the road. Brinker, though Clint hated to think the name. Hated to imagine the man laughing with Macy over some private joke. Touching her casually. Loving her.

Betraying her.

“Be careful,” he found himself yelling hoarsely. “He could wake up.”

If he came to confused, pulled at her mask, ripped her glove…

Clint’s hand automatically went to the Glock in his pocket. Could he use it on a sick, defenseless man?

He forced his hand away.

Hell, it didn’t matter. He couldn’t hit anything, anyway. He sure wouldn’t risk hitting Macy. She was on her own out there, whether he liked it or not.

She had opened her medical kit and picked up the man’s hand, was fixing something to his fingers.

“What’s she doing?”

Susan whispered as if she were watching a surgeon in an operating theater. “She can’t feel his pulse through her gloves, or use a stethoscope with the environmental suit, so she’s putting a heart monitor on his finger.”

Which at least meant he was alive as far as she could tell.

Once the monitor was in place, she watched the device in the medical kit that displayed its results, then began running her hands slowly over Brinker’s arms, his shoulders, his legs. She turned him slowly, steadying his head, and pressed on his abdomen, then looked up.

“Susan, get me a backboard and cervical collar. We’re going to need an ambulance—a ground vehicle, not a helicopter. I don’t want to drop a trail of virus over Texas in an open-door aircraft. Clint, find me the closest hospital with a level-four isolation ward.”

Everyone moved at once except Macy, who never left Brinker’s side. It took nearly an hour to get a specially-equipped ambulance in and get him loaded up. By then he was shifting restlessly and moaning.

Clint watched Curtis and Christian, in their full environmental suits, load him into the back of the ambulance and Macy climb in after him. He stepped up just before the door closed.

She jerked her chin up and shot him a look that brooked no argument. “No, Clint. You can’t come in here.”

“Has he got it? Is it ARFIS?”

She sat wearily on the bench seat next to David’s gurney. “I don’t know. Make a list of the soldiers who were near him. Make sure they’re quarantined, whether they were wearing protective gear or not. You scrub down good, too. Just in case.” She looked left and right as if afraid of who might be watching, and pulled a plastic bag out of her pocket. Inside the bag was a pistol.

It looked to be about the same caliber as the one that had killed the pilot.

“I’ll need you to take care of this, too. I found it in his pocket. Make sure no one handles it without decontaminating it first.”

He took the bag, but his eyes never left hers. “Macy—”

“I can’t think about it right now, Clint. Just do what you have to do.”

Then she pulled the doors shut. As the ambulance pulled away, she flattened her gloved palm against
the back window as if trying to reach through it, back to him.

Or ordering him to stay back. Stay away.

He couldn’t guess which.

“I
know some people will go to extremes to get a few extra days off, but this has got to take the cake.”

Clint recognized his partner’s voice, turned to see Ranger Del Cooper’s broad shoulders propped casually against the wall of the Houston Community Hospital intensive care waiting room. Del’s fingers were stuck in the back pockets of his jeans, and one corner of his mouth was crooked up in a half smile.

“Well maybe if I liked the people I worked with better, I’d have been in more of a hurry to come back from leave.”

Del chuckled, shook Clint’s hand and then pulled him in close and clapped him on the back a couple of times when Clint reached him. “It’s good to see you, too, partner. Look who else the armadillo drug in.”

They separated, and Kat Solomon, the newest member of Ranger Company G, stepped up to give him a hug. When she let go of him, the Captain, “Bull” Matheson shook his hand.

“Any word yet?” Clint asked. He’d been in the hospital decon unit for the last half hour. He swore he wasn’t going to have any skin left by the time this was over if he kept getting scrubbed down like that.

Bull shook his head. “I guess it’s slow going, trying to treat an injured man without touching him.”

Kat steered Clint toward a chair in the empty waiting room. “You look beat.”

He felt beat. But things were looking up now that his teammates were here. He’d missed them.

He looked at her and Del, thinking this was the last time he’d be working with them as a team, and hating the idea. “You’ve been briefed on everything?”

Del nodded. “Brinker makes five of the six passengers accounted for. One still missing.”

“Two missing. There’s still a monkey on the loose out there somewhere.”

Bull brought coffee for everyone. Clint filled them in on what little he’d learned since he’d last talked to the captain.

Bull sipped his drink thoughtfully. “Tell me more about this Dr. Attois.”

“What do you want to know?” Clint leaned back and crossed his ankle over his knee, trying to look casual. He wondered if he’d pulled it off. His teammates knew him better than most.

“Is she hot?” Del asked.

“Hey,” Kat admonished. “You’re a newlywed. You aren’t even supposed to think about things like that.”

“Honey, I’m a male. Things like that are the only things I think about most of the time. Besides, Elisa says it’s fine to look. I’d just better not touch if I want to keep all my fingers.”

Kat smiled sweetly, which meant whatever she was thinking was pure evil. “If I was her, I’d be threatening a few other body parts.”

“She doesn’t have to threaten. She’s all the woman I need or want.”

Bull raised his hand for quiet. “Can we get back to business here, people?”

Too bad. Clint liked watching the silly grin Del got on his face whenever he talked about his new wife or their baby-on-the-way. He didn’t mind a little of the focus being taken off him and his relationship with Macy, either.

As if thinking about her had somehow conjured her, he looked up to see her standing in the doorway. She was wearing surgical scrubs. Her hair was wet and her skin had that recently decontaminated glow he’d come to know all too well.

“It’s not ARFIS,” she announced without preamble. “His injuries are consistent with a major trauma like a plane crash, and the dehydration and confused state he was found in are in line with spending nearly forty-eight hours dazed and lost in the woods.”

Clint hardly heard what she said about David’s condition. He was more worried about her.

She was standing on one leg, balancing just the toe
of her sore foot on the ground to keep the weight off it. Her arms were crossed over her chest, but not in a defensive gesture. More one of protection.

Their gazes met for a moment. Held, then slipped away.

“Is he conscious?” Bull asked.

“Barely.”

“We need to ask him some questions.”

“It’ll have to wait.”

The captain sighed, obviously not happy with that answer. “Time is critical here.”

She hesitated, gave in. “You can try, but I don’t think you’ll get anything out of him that makes sense.”

“It’s worth a try.”

She unfolded her arms, nodded down the hall. “This way.”

The others trooped ahead of her. Clint hung back. “Is he going to make it?” he asked when they were out of earshot.

“I think so.” Her breath shuddered as if a weight had been lifted from her chest. “Thanks for asking.”

Macy hung back as the Ranger captain and Clint walked into the isolation observation area. The woman Ranger—Kat they’d called her—had chosen to wait outside. Double airtight doors stood between the Rangers and the patient room.

“You’ll have to question him from here,” Macy told them. “There’s an intercom system between the two rooms.”

“I thought he didn’t have ARFIS.”

“It never hurts to be cautious. We’ll keep him in isolation for another twenty-four hours to make sure he isn’t incubating the virus.”

Clint turned to her. His cheeks were tight, hollow. His eyes gray matte. “You don’t have to stay.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Dr. Brinker, can you hear me?” The captain was an imposing man, in Macy’s estimation. An inch taller than Clint, and built much heavier—bone and muscle, not fat. But he didn’t have the hard edge to him that Clint had. There was a hint of compassion in his voice when he spoke. “Is the intercom on?” he asked Macy.

She nodded.

He tried again. “Dr. Brinker? We need to ask you a few questions.”

“Mmm. Sick,” David finally mumbled, and thrashed his head. His face was as white as the pillowcase he lay on, his walnut hair mussed and matted. A heart monitor beeped and flashed next to his bed, and IV lines snaked from his arm to a hook over his head as if the vines of the Sabine National Forest had followed him here.

“I know you’re sick. We need to find out what happened. What happened on the airplane. Doctor?”

“Airplane.” David licked his cracked lips. “No. No, crashed. Crashing!”

Macy’s chest ached at the fear in David’s voice as he relived the moment. His neck arched, his head bowed back.

“It’s all right,” Captain Matheson told him. “It’s over. You’re safe now. Did something happen on board the airplane to make it crash?”

“Fight. They’re fighting.”

“Who was fighting, Dr. Brinker?”

“Michael. Michael, look out!”

“Who’s fighting with Michael?”

“God, it wasn’t supposed to happen like this!” David gasped like a drowning victim who’d just been resuscitated. His eyes snapped open wide, round with fear. His fists clenched in the sheets. For the first time, he seemed to realize he wasn’t in the airplane. Wasn’t crashing.

And perhaps…he realized what he’d just said.

Clint glanced over his shoulder at Macy. Worried about her? Or just a cop cataloguing her reaction for future interpretation?

“How was it supposed to happen, David?” the captain asked smoothly. Soothingly.

David’s tortured gaze flicked over to the window. Could he see her? Did he know she was standing by, watching and doing nothing while the Rangers battered him with their questions? Tried to maneuver him into a confession?

Her nails dug into her palms as she watched.

“How was it supposed to happen?” the captain repeated. His voice was deeper this time. Harder. “Was Captain Cain supposed to land where you told him without putting up a fight?”

Michael was a decorated veteran, Macy remembered. He wouldn’t have given up his plane without a fight.

“Did you or Ty Jeffries try to hijack the plane, Dr. Brinker?”

“Hijack? You— I can’t—”

“Where did you order him to go? Where were you taking ARFIS? Who was waiting there to pick it up?”

David tried to sit up, then fell back. His feet kicked at the cover. The beeping of his heart monitor became faster, more insistent. Macy took a step forward, but Clint stopped her without even looking back, holding his arm out in front of her.

“Who were you going to sell the virus to?”

“Sell?” The chords stood out in David’s neck. His Adam’s apple bobbed reflexively. “No! ARFIS—”

The captain pressed on. “Who put up the money? Was it a foreign group or domestic terrorists?”

“Terrorists! No.” David was panting. His breath rattled. “I didn’t.”

“Do you know what their target is?” The captain splayed one large palm on the glass window and leaned close. David must have been able to see him. He stared right at him. “How many people were you planning to help them kill, David?”

David surged off the bed. The covers slid down his hairless chest, revealing a palette of blue and green bruises, scrapes and lacerations caused, most likely, by stumbling through the thorny vines in the woods.

“Nooo!” he screamed. His face turned bright red. His IV lines ripped away from the wall as he flailed his arms. The monitor screeched.

“How many people, David?”

Macy pushed Clint aside and stepped forward. “Stop it!”

An isolation-unit nurse in full environmental gear
strode into the room through a side door. She silenced the wailing alarms and checked the monitor display, then turned toward Macy and shook her head.

Macy reached toward the wall and flicked the intercom switch to Off.

The captain glowered down at her. “We’re not done here.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Dr. Attois, that man has information that could prevent a national disaster.”

“He also just had major surgery to repair several ruptured organs and re-inflate a collapsed lung. If he goes into respiratory arrest, or tears a suture and bleeds out, you’ll never get that information.”

“Macy.” Clint moved to his captain’s side. “I know it seems harsh, but sometimes you have to pressure people to get them to talk. We know what we’re doing.”

“You don’t know David!” She studiously avoided looking at Clint. “He won’t tell you anything if you back him into a corner. He won’t talk to a bunch of disembodied voices behind a window.”

Captain Matheson gave her an appraising look. “You have another approach?”

Her knees trembled. Her palms had broken into a sweat. She couldn’t believe what she was about to propose. Couldn’t believe she was helping them, when David was so sick. So hurt. But she’d seen the same thing they’d seen in his fevered eyes.

He knew something.

She had to find out what it was before a lot of people died.

She unfolded her arms, forced her shoulders to relax and took a deep breath. “Let me go in there. I’ll ask him what happened,” she said. “He’ll talk to me.”

Macy sat heavily in the chair next to David’s bed, careful not to snag her environmental suit on the corners.

She picked up his limp hand, cradled it between hers as if the comfort she could offer would make up for what she was about to do. She tried not to think about Clint, watching her from the observation room.

“David?”

“Macy?” His voice was weak. He turned his head toward her, and his blue eyes were heavy. He’d used up all his energy earlier.

“I’m here, David. Everything’s going to be okay.”

He grasped her weakly and she remembered how soft his hands would be if she could feel them through the gloves. Not callused and abrasive like Clint’s. David wasn’t as hard a man as Clint. Wasn’t as strong. But he wasn’t a bad man, was he? She couldn’t have cared for a bad man.

“What’s happening?” he asked. “Where are we?”

Macy stroked the back of his hand. He’d already forgotten the Ranger’s interrogation. She hoped.

“We’re in a hospital. You were in a plane crash, remember?”

He groaned.

“Why did the plane crash, David? What went wrong?”

She was careful to word her questions without accusation.

“Everything. The whole plan went wrong.”

She tried not to stiffen. “What plan?”

He closed his eyes, shook his head. “No.”

“Tell me what plan, David.” She raised one hand to brush her gloved knuckles over his cheek. “I need to know.”

He swallowed hard. The pain in his eyes stabbed her like a knife. “It was all for you. I was going to make you proud.”

Oh, God.

His eyelids fluttered. “Knew you weren’t happy. Knew you were going to leave. I thought if I could do something, be somebody, something special, you would stay.”

Tears ran unabated down her cheeks. She couldn’t wipe them away through the face shield. And she was acutely aware that the men on the other side of the glass were listening to every word. “What did you do, David?”

“The monkey. The one on the plane. He’s got
antibodies.
”

Her heart skipped a beat. “He survived ARFIS?”

“He never even got sick. I injected him twice. He’s immune.”

“David, with antibodies to replicate, we might be able to develop a cure.”

He nodded.

She shook her head, lost. “So what was this big plan?”

He pulled his hand away from hers, turned his head toward the far wall. “I wasn’t going to give him to the CDC.”

“Were you working with terrorists?” She didn’t want to believe it, but she had to ask.

He jerked his head back toward her. “No.”

“Then who were you going to give the monkey to?”

“I made some contacts at Anderson Research. The CDC wouldn’t have given me anything but a pat on the back for creating an ARFIS cure, but the big pharmaceutical companies would have paid me millions. I’d have been rich. Won the Nobel, maybe.”

“David…”

“I know. I know it was stupid.” His face pinched. “I just wanted to show you. I just wanted you to love me.”

She couldn’t react to that. Didn’t know how. She needed time to process it. Space.

A place where she couldn’t feel Clint’s laser eyes burning into her back.

“What happened on the plane, David? What went wrong?”

“Ty. He went nuts. Tried to make the pilot land in the middle of nowhere.”

“Michael refused?”

“They fought. Michael tried to get the gun.”

“Ty had a gun?”

David nodded. A tear leaked out of the corner of his eye. “He tried to shoot Michael, make Bob land us, but Mike charged him. The shot went wild, then the engine made a popping sound and there were sparks and we started bouncing around in the air.”