Authors: Daniel Kalla
Pandemic (50 page)
She closed all her windows and blinds. Then she locked both deadbolts on her door. When she managed to catch her wind, she stumbled back to the bedroom.
Two days after the shootout in Maryland, the first day of the New Year, Haldane sat at his office in the early afternoon sorting through a huge stack of accumulated paperwork. He had difficulty concentrating on the work; he kept wondering why Gwen hadn't returned his calls. What had changed between them?
McLeod flew through his door and interrupted the ruminations. "Don't tell me," McLeod said, pointing to the pile. "A model of Mt. Fuji, right?"
"Feels like it," Haldane sighed. "What can I do for you, Duncan?"
He looked over his shoulder. "For starters, you could get me a coffee," he bellowed.
Haldane's secretary, Karen Jackson, yelled from outside the room. "I saw two feet on you. Go get your own damn coffee!"
McLeod laughed. "I like that one." He thumbed over his shoulder and smiled. "Hey, I visited James Bond this morning in Baltimore."
"And?"
"Clayton is doing better." Haldane nodded. "He's awake. Fortunately, he's still on the ventilator, so I got to do all the talking."
Haldane leaned back in his seat and laughed. "I'm sure he appreciated that."
"I think so." McLeod nodded earnestly. "He seemed to particularly enjoy our conversation on what a better place the world would be without the CIA."
Haldane shook his head. "Duncan, you're a cruel man."
McLeod stopped smiling. "By the way, I've come to tell you I'm leaving."
"About time," Haldane said. "You're going back to Glasgow for a while?"
"Not for a while," McLeod said. "For good. I'm leaving the WHO. I'm going to take up some lazy-ass hospital post in Scotland. Time to get back on a first-name basis with my family."
Haldane nodded. "No point in me trying to talk you out of it?"
"Not unless you still have that gun Clayton gave you," McLeod said.
Haldane shook his head.
"By the way, I wanted to say good-bye to Gwen, too, but I haven't been able to reach her."
"Me, neither," Haldane said, feeling the niggling worry resurface. "I spoke to her yesterday. She seemed somewhat evasive. She said she was really run-down. Totally understandable, but I thought ... you know ... it might have something to do with Clayton and me."
"Ah, love triangles are a mysterious and wonderful thing, aren't they?" McLeod heaved an exaggerated sigh.
Haldane nodded distractedly.
"I even tried the Department of Homeland Security," McLeod said. "She hasn't been to work since coming home either. Apparently, she even stood up her boss this morning for some meeting."
"That's kind of odd," Haldane said, feeling a different kind of concern swell.
"I guess she was traumatized by what happened with Sabri and all." McLeod shrugged. "Maybe she just wants to lock herself away for a while."
The phrase "lock herself away" resonated inside Noah. He rose from his chair. "Duncan, you don't think..." He left it unfinished.
McLeod looked up at him with a puzzled frown. "Think what?"
"When I spoke to her yesterday, she was still in bed and it was after 2:00 P.M.," Haldane said as much to himself as McLeod. "She said she was feeling really run-down." He pointed his finger at McLeod. "And Duncan she coughed once, too!"
Both McLeod's eyebrows shot up. "Oh, Christ, Haldane, she wouldn't!"
"She would if she thought she was protecting the world."
Haldane stood outside the condominium, watching the paramedic smash through the door with a portable battering ram.
As soon as the hinges gave way and the door burst open, Haldane, McLeod, and the four paramedics all stormed inside. Haldane ran as fast as his HAZMAT suit would allow toward the master bedroom.
He rushed into the room, but he didn't see Gwen in the bed. The covers were pulled back and lay in a tangled heap at the foot of the bed. A box of Kleenex sat perched on the pillow. Empty wadded tissues were scattered over the sheets. Some were bloody.
Through the plastic face shield of his hood, he scanned the room checking the other side of the bed and even sifting through the blankets.
"Over here!" one of the paramedics called out. "In the bathroom."
Haldane pivoted and ran into the bathroom across the corridor. He had to shove his way between the paramedics, made even bulkier by their biohazard suits, to get to her.
She lay collapsed by the bathtub.
Her color was gray. Her hair was matted in clumps. She wore off-white pajamas that had bloodstains on the tops. At first Haldane couldn't tell if she was alive or dead, but then she coughed with a horrible, harsh rattling sound and her whole body shook.
When he took a closer look at the hand tucked underneath her, he realized it clutched a familiar pill bottle but it was empty.
That's when he noticed Isaac Moskor's little yellow pills had scattered all over the bathroom floor around her.
CHAPTER 44
GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL ICU, WASHINGTON, D.C.In his blue rubber biohazard suit, Haldane sat by the bed in the ICU negative-air-pressure isolation room hoping to see some sign of life from Gwen. He had spent most of the past ninety-six hours in the same spot. Much of the time, he struggled to stave off the mental comparisons between this vigil and the previous time in Singapore, sitting at Franco Bertulli's bedside watching him die.
Haldane was particularly anxious this afternoon. The doctors had only weaned Gwen off the life support of the ventilator two hours earlier, but she had yet to wake up through her heavy sedation.
Noah studied Gwen. In a hospital gown with two IVs and an oxygen mask, she looked frail; she carried little fat before the illness, but now the outlines of her hip bones pushed through the sheets. Still, compared to the near corpse they had found on the floor of her bathroom, her improvement in four days had been monumental.
Gwen's eyes began to blink and she slowly rotated her head, first away from Noah and then toward him. As his joy and relief mounted, he couldn't keep the huge smile off his face.
She raised her right hand to him and he took it in his latex-gloved hand and gave it a squeeze. "Welcome back," he said.
"Good to be back," she croaked from having had a tube passed through her vocal cords. She smiled weakly.
With his other hand, Noah shook a finger at her. "Don't you ever pull a stunt like that again!"
"I get that a lot these days." She chuckled. The laugh gave way to a small coughing spell, but it paled in comparison to episodes when they first found her.
"Thank you," she said. "You saved my life. Again."
"No." Haldane shook his head. "You have your friend Isaac Moskor to thank for that."
Gwen's eyes went wide. "His drug?"
Haldane nodded. "When we made the decision to give it to you, there was nothing left to lose." He swallowed away the lump. "We were convinced you weren't going to make it. But once you were started on A36112 ... wow, what a difference!"
"Where did you get it?" she asked.
"Luckily, we kept all the pills you had spilt on your bathroom floor." Noah smiled. "But as soon as Isaac heard what happened, he flew straight up to Washington himself with a suitcase full of the drug including the IV stuff which you were given."
"And no hepatitis?" She frowned.
"Your blood tests are good so far." Haldane reassured her with a squeeze of her hand.
She nodded. "Remind me to send Isaac a card." She smiled, before yawning.
Haldane leaned forward and ran his other hand over Gwen's brow. "Why, Gwen? Why did you do it?"
"It was so stupid," she said, flushing with embarrassment.
Haldane refused to let it go. "Tell me, please."
"The day after I was freed from the motel, I began to feel so achy and unwell. I just assumed it was some drug Sabri had given me." Gwen paused and took a few deeper breaths of her oxygen. "But when the chills came and I started to cough ... I knew." Another deep breath. "Obviously, I wasn't thinking straight anymore."
"But ..." Haldane's hand rested against her head.
She looked away. "I thought if I went into hospital, something might happen."
"Like what?"
"What if the paramedics who found me got sick? Or what if someone poked a finger with a dirty needle? Or what if my mask was faulty and leaked?" Her voice cracked. "I was just so sick of all the sickness this virus had caused. One way or another, I wanted the virus to die with me. No one else." Tears welled in her eyes. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be. You were just being selfless." He smiled and winked. "Once a Bug Czar always a Bug Czar, right?"
She shrugged and wiped away the rest of her tears.
Noah squeezed her hand tightly. "Want to hear the best part?"
She nodded.
"The Gansu Flu virus did die in you," he said.
"Good," she said softly, and then yawned.
"There was only one other potential carrier to worry about, anyway," Haldane said.
"Sabri?"
"Yeah, but his postmortem blood tests showed that the infection was early. He wouldn't have been contagious for another day," Haldane said. "He probably infected himself at the same time as he did you. That way his contagiousness would peak the next day for New Year's Eve at Times Square."
Gwen exhaled heavily. "So that's why he smiled at me and 'spared' my life back in the motel."
"He thought you were going to be his Trojan horse," Haldane said. "At the very least, it was his way of getting in one final shot at us."
She nodded and yawned again. "How's Alex?"
"Doing well," Haldane said. "He might even beat you out of hospital."
"Not if I can help it. I should be home by tomorrow," she said, but her eyelids drooped with exhaustion.
"Gwen," Haldane asked. "When you do get out, do you have any time off?"
"I probably qualify for some sick time," she murmured. "Why?"
"I get Chloe every second week," Haldane said. "So between times, I thought it might be a nice chance to get away somewhere."
"Hmmm," she agreed, though her eyes had closed completely shut.
"Maybe somewhere warm," Haldane said, thinking he was just talking to himself. "It would be nice for us to get away."
"Nice and warm," she mumbled, dreamily. "And no bugs or terrorists."
Haldane laughed. "That's an absolute must!"
Holding her hand, he watched her drift into a deep slumber. Staring at her sleeping form, Haldane realized that he felt something that he hadn't experienced in a very long time.
Peace.
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