The Aegis Solution (48 page)

Tillie had followed to the doorway and was aiming the shotgun at Boehn while sneaking quick
peeks in Elias' direction to make sure that he did not need her assistance.

Elias saw, standing dead-center and farther back in the hallway, one of those he knew was a Zipper.
The man had obviously withdrawn to escape the effects of the tear-gas clouds still swirling around in
the proximity of the utility room. Elias had no idea why the beige-suited character was holding his
position, and he was torn as to whether to simply put a bullet into the man. Watching the Zipper, Elias
could see that the speed demon's eyes were looking past him, riveted on something or someone else,
and determined that he was waiting for a signal from his boss.

Elias was about to twist around to tell Tillie to take Boehn into the utility room, when several things
happened at once. The grille, which was directly over the Zipper, lifted, and something dropped. Before
he completely took his eyes off the beige figure, he saw the change of expression on the Accelerant's
face and realized that Boehn had turned him loose. At the same moment, Elias pulled the trigger on his
rifle, knowing that the stranger was too fast and would no longer be standing where he aimed.

Despite the behaviorally enhanced performance of the Zipper, the rules of physics still applied. The
coefficient of friction between the stranger's shoes and the tile floor required his initial acceleration to
be relatively gradual. This fact, in the case of the Accelerant, caused two things to occur. The net,
dropped by Wilson from above, ensnared him just long enough for Elias' bullets to hit home. The last
of Boehn's rapid assassins dropped to the floor. And like everything else that he had done in his adult
life, he died quickly.

Elias stood and walked to one of the dead security team, unhooking a pair of handcuffs from his
belt and tossing them to Tillie, who was still guarding Boehn. She caught them one-handed and slapped
one of the cuffs on Boehn's wrist, then attached the other to a long steel strut which was part of the
tangled mess outside the exit. Finishing this, she walked to where Elias was busy steadying the bottom
of the rope so that Wilson could climb down from the plenum.

Elias looked up at their descending ally and remarked, "Quick thinking, my friend."

Panting slightly, Wilson answered as he reached the floor, "You two exiled me to old-man heaven
up there. I was glad to be able to contribute."

 As the three of them walked back to the group which had been left unattended by Boehn's men,
Tillie punched Elias on the arm and told him, "Between taking out two men with only a pipe, and then
diving into the hallway and blasting the rest of them away, I'd say you've earned it."

He stopped and looked at her. "Earned what?"

With a broad smile crinkling her freckled face, she answered, "Your new name. From now on, you
are Bruce!"

"I think I'd prefer the…."

He stopped in mid-sentence, quickening his stride.

"Elias, what is it?"

He ignored Wilson's question and plunged into the middle of the civilians. He recognized the
mind-reading girl who had caused his close call during his meeting with Kreitzmann. He saw the Asian
woman with the amazing verbal abilities. Apparently, Boehn had skimmed the crop of the
behaviorally-modified, planning on taking the cream with him as he left. But it was none of
Kreitzmann's subjects who had his attention. A figure standing in the middle of the crowd, head bowed,
blindfolded, and handcuffed, was his focus.

Breaking through to her, he grabbed her shoulders and, his voice breaking, gasped, "Leah!"

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

With the rest of the group released to return to their quarters, and Boehn's two wounded men
stabilized and handcuffed next to Killeen, Elias was sitting on the hallway floor with his back against
the wall, next to his wife. Tillie had found the keys to the handcuffs in the pockets of one of the dead
men and unshackled her. Elias had removed her blindfold. She sat nestled against him, with his arm
draped over her shoulder.

Since finding her, he had not let her out of his reach or sight for a moment. He could not stop
staring at her face as she slowly sipped from the canteen provided by Wilson, who hovered over them
like a mother hen. She had been beaten badly, her face covered with old bruises and poorly healed cuts
that should have been stitched. Her hair was matted to her head from the clotted blood.

"You look beautiful."

She made a soft snorting sound that might have been an attempt at a laugh, but Elias could not be
certain.

Capping the canteen, she placed it on the floor between her sprawled legs and turned to look at
him. Her voice barely audible, she whimpered, "I missed you, Elias."

He put his other arm around her and pulled her closer. "I missed you, baby."

Wilson also had pulled a protein bar from one of their packs and had given it to Leah as she first
sat down. She removed it from her pocket and unwrapped it, biting off more than half.

As she chewed, Elias asked, "How did you manage to stay alive all this time?"

Between chews, she answered, "By not giving them what they wanted."

"What was that?"

"Exactly how much I knew and the names of people I told."

"You hadn't told anyone, had you?"

"No. But they didn't know that."

"Not that I'm not glad you're here, but it seems as though they would have given up on that after
a while."

She responded in short bursts. "Not that simple. Khalid had me first. He was obsessed with the
possibility that I told the Mossad. Refused to accept that I hadn't. I have no idea how long he had me.
Days, weeks, months, kind of blurred. He finally lost interest."

Elias' mind involuntarily conjured up images of what her ordeal had been like at the hands of that
monster. He consciously pushed them out. "Then what?"

Leah stopped chewing and forced a lopsided grin onto her face. "You haven't seen me all this time
and you're debriefing me?"

"You're right! I'm sorry. I was…."

She kissed Elias to stop him from talking. "I'm kidding. We're obviously still in the middle of
something, so you should know. Besides, if no one else has found out about what I know, it's critical
that we get the word out. By the way, what happened to Eric?"

"Dead."

"Good. You killed him."

"I didn't...she did." He pointed at Tillie, who was trying very hard to maintain a respectful distance
across the hallway.

"She did it?"

He nodded.

"I like her!"

"I thought you would. You'd better tell me what you know. What was the big secret?"

Elias watched his wife's face as she struggled to answer. He could tell by her tortured expressions
that she was wrestling with a phenomenon well known in the intelligence community: If you hold a
piece of knowledge and the other side wants it, if you are truly going to succeed at never giving it up,
you have to build an impenetrable wall around it. The bad guys will initially dispense pain –
mind-numbing, unimaginable pain. If that does not work, they resort to drugs, trickery, humiliation, and
deceit, coupled with a regimen that keeps you barely alive, constantly exhausted, confused, disoriented,
continuously starving, and thirsty. They attempt every possible ploy to get you to slip up, let down your
guard, believe that you are talking to a trusted friend. Whatever it takes. If you are able to conceal your
knowledge through all of that, it is only because you have locked it away in a place that even you cannot
access anymore, at least not without a tremendous effort. Leah was going through that effort now.

She had forgotten about the last bite of the protein bar, dropping it down to the dusty floor. Her
hands came up and she rubbed her temples, hard. Elias even thought he heard a shallow groan coming
from her as she leaned forward. He knew there was nothing he could do to help her, so he waited.

More minutes passed before she suddenly leaned back, resting her head against the wall, and stared
intently at his face, studying the smallest details. Not satisfied with what her eyes were telling her, she
reached up and less than gently probed the skin around his eyes, his ears, and the base of his neck. He
knew that she had to convince herself that all of this was not merely another trick and that she really was
sitting beside her husband. Next, she leaned forward, putting her nose under his chin and inhaled
deeply, pulling in his scent.

After a moment, she sat back against the wall.

"Satisfied?"

She shook her head briefly, then nodded. "I guess so. Either that or I'm just too damn worn out
to care anymore."

She looked around at her surroundings, studying Wilson, who had backed away from them and was
talking to Tillie as she guarded Boehn across the hall. "Who are they?"

"Friends."

Leah crinkled her mouth and rolled her eyes. "Friends? Come on, Elias."

"I don't think we have enough time for me to tell you the whole story. Let's just say that they've
saved my butt more than once, and if they are leading me down a path, they're better at it than anyone
I've ever met before."

She expanded the range of her visual examination. "By the way, where are we?"

"We're in Aegis."

"Aegis!"

"As I said, it's a long story. You need to decide whether you are going to tell me or not, because
we should probably get moving. Once we get out of here, I'll take you wherever you choose so you can
pass it on – the White House, the Pentagon, the Capitol. You pick."

"The problem, Elias, is that none of those will work."

Her comment stopped him dead in his tracks. "What are you saying?"

"What I'm saying is that it's big. It's ugly. And I have no idea where it stops."

He stared at her. "Leah, what is it?"

She took a long, deep breath, letting it out slowly. "A lab, Elias. They were working on a biological
weapon."

"I already know that."

His comment surprised her. "You do?"

He filled her in on the information obtained by Benjamin.

She nodded. "He obviously only knows a small part of it."

"This wouldn't be the first time that a government, even our government, was working on a
bio-weapon."

"Those were all different." Her tone was dismissive.

Before Elias could comment, she hurriedly continued. "Elias, honey, they were working on a
doomsday bug. Something fast-acting, deadly, and unbelievably contagious."

"It's been tried before. It always kills the hosts too quickly to be widely contagious, like Ebola, or
it mutates into some ineffective strain."

She shook her head. "No. They've done it. They've got it already. It works. They've had it since
before I was picked up."

"How did you find out about it? Your assignment was a Taliban training camp."

"Khalid was providing some of the funding for the research. He was in the loop and he was sloppy.
I found the reports he was getting. This stuff is terrifying."

"I don't get it. Countries develop bio-weapons for tactical reasons. They use them to take out
populations, like Saddam, or to kill opposing armies, as the Germans did in World War I. But a
doomsday bug, by definition, kills everybody, including the side who uses it. What's the point?"

"The point is to clean house."

The voice came from the "T" intersection with the adjacent corridor. Elias whirled around to see
Faulk, standing at the corner, and started to spring up when he heard the unmistakable sound of the bolt
being pulled back on an automatic weapon. He had so focused on Faulk that he had not initially noticed
the four other men, all carrying assault rifles, flanking the object of his hatred.

Tillie jumped for the shotgun, which she had leaned against a nearby wall. One of the men brought
his rifle to bear on her, clearly intending to open fire. Faulk shouted, "DON'T MOVE!"

At the same moment Elias barked, "TILLIE, DON'T!"

She froze, her hand inches from the weapon, and slowly dropped her arm back to her side, an
expression of restrained fury on her face.

Elias slowly stood and faced the man for whom he had nurtured a burning hatred for more than
two years. He took two steps, placing himself between the gunmen and his wife. Wilson, who had been
near Tillie at the time Faulk arrived, raised his hands slowly over his head and moved away to a point
halfway between her and Elias.

There was a rapid triple-beep tone, and Faulk pulled out his cell phone, answering it in the
walkie-talkie mode. "Faulk."

"Communications blanket is deactivated, sir."

"Good. You've placed the charges?"

"Yes, sir. Two are missing. One of them is the primary."

"I believe we've solved that problem. Bring your men and join us at the exit corridor. On the
double."

"Yes, sir."

Faulk put the phone back in his pocket, and turned to one of his agents, instructing him to release
Boehn. To Elias, he said, "I presume you have a key for the handcuffs."