Chapter Thirty-One
3:10 p.m.
Something cold slithered down Ava’s arm toward her shoulder. She opened her eyes…when had she closed them?
Who put the IV in her arm? As her gaze followed the tubing up to a bag of saline solution and two much smaller bags, someone said, “Go back to sleep.”
“Henry,” Ava frowned and lifted her chilly arm. “What…?”
“Ampicillin.” He touched one of the small IV bags. “Beta-lactamase inhibitor.” He pointed at the other small bag.
She looked at her watch. “I only slept for thirty minutes. Dr. Rodrigues must have scared the crap out of the FDA to get permission to use an inhibitor so fast.”
He grunted, but didn’t look at her as he fiddled with the IV bags and made notes in the small notebook he always kept in his pocket. He closed the notebook, tucked it away, then turned and headed for the door, all without making eye contact. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“Henry?”
He stopped, but didn’t turn around. “What?”
“Dr. Rodrigues did get permission, right?”
He stood motionless for exactly two seconds, then left the room without answering.
Which was another kind of answer.
His departure must have been a signal to those who’d been waiting outside, because several people came inside to update the whiteboard with new numbers for both the sick and dead.
Talking on a cell phone, Dr. Rodrigues entered to sort through some of the papers on the table. She glanced at Ava, then mouthed, “FDA.”
Oh no. Dr. Rodrigues didn’t even know about the inhibitor being transfused into her. Was this the favor River had asked of Henry?
Idiots.
She had to fight the urge to cry, scream, and pummel someone. But, if she kicked up a fuss, others might notice there were more IV bags hanging above her head than there should have been.
Her boss ended her call and smiled at Ava. “The FDA is willing to consider the extreme situation. We should have an answer in a couple of hours.” Dr. Rodrigues’s cell phone rang again. “I have to take this,” she said as she turned away.
Searing hot anger cleared away any lingering drowsiness. Ava was going to strangle River when she saw him. Well, maybe not actually strangle. Perhaps yell at him for a bit and step on his feet a couple of times. Her hands shook with the need to do something, anything, that might take the edge off her anger, fear, and frustration with a man who, despite being brilliant and more than a little dangerous, didn’t know how to listen.
Why wait?
She dug around in her belted tool kit for her cell phone and texted River. You are an idiot, and Henry is an idiot for listening to you.
His response only took a few seconds. I’d rather be an idiot than see you dead.
Her thumbs flew across her screen. Henry could lose his job. His career.
No, he won’t. Exigent circumstances.
If she wasn’t careful, she was going to crack her phone’s screen with one of her thumbs. You ass. This isn’t some remote battlefield in another country. This is the USA. You don’t get to interpret the rules any way you want. We have LAWS!
His reply came much faster than she expected. What he said made her insides go cold. We’re in a state of emergency. The rules have changed.
The rules have changed. Those four words tumbled around in her head.
Was he right? Had the rules changed?
How had the rules changed?
“What special powers does a state of emergency give decision makers?” she asked out loud.
The FEMA director answered her. “The right to commandeer personal property, if deemed necessary. The right to detain people, if deemed a danger without charges for a limited amount of time. The right to call in additional help in the form of the National Guard, military, medical, or other entities that are deemed useful.”
“So, essentially, in a state of emergency, help is called in, and all of that can be done quickly without all the bureaucratic nonsense?”
“Yeah,” he said with a nod. “That’s about right.”
She felt no joy in his confirmation of her understanding. Terror was a better word to describe the emotion that constricted her airway.
She tapped the screen on her phone, and wondered if she’d missed something.
They’d missed something.
The terrorist attacks had started with an outbreak and evolved into suicide bombings and planned explosions in several high-value targets.
But, their last bomb only succeeded in blowing up their own people. They didn’t stream it live, nor did they make any last demands, making it meaningless.
It didn’t make sense.
Unless, something had changed. She’d been in the chemistry lab with the last of the terrorists. River and Mr. Sturgis had harassed and captured four of the students and wounded Sam, who’d told her…too much?
What had he said?
She was going to be famous. Blah, blah, blah. They knew what the government and every law-enforcement agency in the country was doing. Blah, blah, blah. They were going to change the world. Blah, blah, blah.
He’d named all those law-enforcement agencies. Even the CDC.
River believed there was someone inside the investigation who was the real cell leader. If that person blew up his own people so they couldn’t talk, what wouldn’t he do to stop River and the team of men with him from questioning the surviving terrorists?
Nothing.
Who was this person?
Someone close enough to the investigation to have reasonably up-to-date information, but not stand out. It wouldn’t be any of the Homeland agents, who were obvious in their distaste in accepting her orders. That left the FBI, police, CDC, and military.
Not the CDC. If someone from the CDC was the leader, they’d have chosen something much worse than Neisseria. The military hadn’t gotten involved until after the bombing at their front gate, and the FBI agents had been working in tandem with Homeland—she never saw one without the other. That left the El Paso police. Their officers had been everywhere, involved in every level of the emergency, because this was their city and they knew it best.
Who was it?
Someone who’d been everywhere that damned ringtone had gone off. Starting with the coffee shop.
Her hands shook as she opened the camera app on her phone and looked through the pictures she’d taken of the crowd a couple minutes before the explosion. She’d been focused on the agitated member of the crowd who’d been particularly persistent in harassing River, but she hadn’t looked at the police officers.
All she could see were their backs as they guarded the police line, until she got to the first picture she’d taken. In that photo, one of the officers had turned his head and was looking at River with an angry glare.
Officer Palmer.
No, he couldn’t be…but he’d been with them at the campus dorm, at the microbiology lab, and he’d have been in a position to overhear Dozer or Dr. Rodrigues talking about River storming the chemistry lab.
Had anyone else been present at, or had knowledge of, all the bombing locations?
She flipped through the photos again, studying them to find another possibility, but none emerged. Her breathing became labored and choppy as an invisible band tightened around her lungs. Palmer was with River, Dozer, and their team now. They were in a building he knew as well as his own home. A building with any number of firearms, explosives, and other weapons inside it.
He wasn’t going to let those four boys tell anyone anything.
He wasn’t going to allow anyone to leave that building alive.
The room dimmed and her vision narrowed, until all she could see was Palmer’s face on the screen of her phone. A buzzing ring got louder and louder in her ears.
No, there wasn’t any time to pass out. She closed her eyes and focused on breathing, opening up her chest to take in more air.
She could be wrong, but what if she was right?
Ava texted River, a simple one-word message: Palmer. She attached the picture and hit send.
If she was right, River was in more danger now than ever. The building they were in was Palmer’s second home.
River needed help, and it had to be the kind of help that wouldn’t alert Palmer.
A few seconds later, she opened her eyes and said to the person closest to her, the FEMA director, “Can you get Dr. Rodrigues for me? I just remembered something important.”
He looked at her, glanced at her hands clutching her cell phone so tight her knuckles were white, then studied her face. Whatever he saw there made him nod. “Will do.”
He moved across the room to tap her boss on the shoulder. In the middle of a phone conversation, she tried to wave him away, but he pointed at Ava and said something into her boss’s ear.
Dr. Rodrigues strode across the room, ending her call. She crouched next to Ava’s cot. “What is it?”
“I think I know who the cell leader is.” Before Dr. Rodrigues or the FEMA director could comment, she continued quickly with, “It has to be someone with access to information, someone aware of what River and I were doing. Someone able to remote detonate or start a remote detonator on all of the explosives within the correct time frames.” She turned the phone around to show them the photo. “He’s the only one who checks off all the boxes.”
Ava watched Dr. Rodrigues’s face pale. “If he’s the cell leader, I don’t think he’s going to want anyone to survive it.”
“Suicide vest?” Ava asked. “Roger Squires wore one.”
“Very likely.”
“How do we stop him?” Ava asked.
“We don’t,” her boss said. “We can’t.”
The FEMA director let out a short bark of a laugh. “That’s why Sgt. River wanted to interrogate them in a different, controlled location. So, he could draw out the leader, but does he know who that is? Or will this guy”—he gestured at the phone—“blow himself and all of them up anyway?”
Oh, that was helpful.
Ava took hold of her frayed temper and managed to ask again in an even tone, “How do we stop him?”
Dr. Rodrigues gave her a tired, despondent look. “We have to warn River and Dozer, but Palmer has an ECC. What we say to them, Palmer is going to hear.”
“I texted River, so he knows, but if all their personal phones start going off, Palmer is going to figure out that something is up.”
Think, think.
“Mr. Sturgis,” Ava said. “Palmer doesn’t know anything about him. He’s a retired drill sergeant. He helped River get me away from the student terrorists.”
A deep furrow etched its way between the FEMA director’s eyes. “You both failed to mention that.”
If he was looking for an apology, he was going to be disappointed. “We didn’t know the identity of the cell leader, so we left Mr. Sturgis out of our report.”
“Dozer told me about him,” Dr. Rodrigues said. “But I wasn’t clear on how much help he was going to be.”
“His voice should be a registered weapon,” Ava said drily. “In just a few minutes, he wound up those college students so tight, they lost control of themselves and the situation.”
Rodrigues looked at the FEMA director.
“Do it,” he said.
Dr. Rodrigues nodded her agreement.
Ava typed a quick message to the retired drill sergeant. The head bad guy is El Paso police officer Palmer. He’s one of the men with River. River knows, but Palmer will be watching him. Can you pull off “feeble old man” long enough to grab him or something?
Mr. Sturgis’s reply was as cryptic as River’s had been. Or something.
For a moment, her stomach went weightless, and nausea threatened to hijack her body. There were so many ways this could go wrong.
She sucked in a breath through her mouth, staving off the urge to vomit. “Done.” She looked up at her boss and the FEMA director. “Now what?”
“We get back to work and pray the good guys are successful,” the FEMA director said.
What about her? “But—”
“Ava.” Dr. Rodrigues cut her off with a smile Ava recognized as the one she wore when explaining things to civilians. “You’ve done all you can. Your job now is to rest and wait for a reply.” She smiled and patted Ava on the shoulder. “I think you’ve been blown up enough today, don’t you?”
Ava wanted to argue, to insist that she be involved in the rescue of River and their people from a deranged maniac, but she also recognized the expression on her boss’s face.
Permission would not be granted.
She made her body relax and sagged back onto the cot. “Yes, ma’am.”
That earned her another pat. “As soon as you get a reply, let us know.”
Ava nodded and managed to smile. It was a weak effort, but enough that her boss and the FEMA director were satisfied enough to return to other concerns.
The room ebbed and flowed with people in hazmat suits, respirators, hospital scrubs, military uniforms, and three-piece suits. They came and went like a tide, sweeping in information and questions and retreating with far too few answers.
The phone in her hand buzzed. Thanks.
She stared at the screen. Thanks. That’s it?
She typed a reply. What are you going to do?
Take care of the problem.
Fingers shaking with frustration, she typed: HOW?
The Army way.
Well, she wanted an answer. Unfortunately, it didn’t tell her anything.
Out of all the people available to her right now, Henry was the only one who might reasonably know what constituted the Army way.
She texted Henry, copying her conversation with River and sending it to him. She ended her text with: What does Army way mean?
Henry responded almost immediately. I’ll be right over.
Ava glanced up. The antibiotic and its helper were both finished infusing. She didn’t feel appreciably better, but she also didn’t feel any worse.
A hazmat-suited Henry walked in, looked at her, looked at Dr. Rodrigues, and said, “Do you mind if I steal her? She’ll get more rest in the tent by my lab.”
“Yes,” their boss answered. “We could use the space.” She smiled apologetically at Ava. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Ava replied, getting off the cot. “I’m feeling very superfluous here.”
Henry grabbed her IV bags and her belt tool kit and practically galloped out of the room.
“Slow down, before you pull my IV out.”
Henry winced and reduced his giant strides to something she could keep up with.
They dodged people and gurneys and managed to emerge outside without incident. He didn’t slow down, however, until they reached the decontamination area.
He made her put on a respirator, gloves, and safety glasses, then ushered her inside his tiny lab.
There were two rolling stools in the cramped space. He pushed her onto one and took the other.
“So,” he said as he crossed his arms over his chest. “What the fuck?”
“Yeah, that’s about where I’m at, too.” She wasn’t going to cry. She wasn’t. “Palmer is the cell leader.”
“Palmer is the fox? Palmer?”
She pulled out her phone and showed him the picture of Palmer she’d taken prior to the coffee shop explosion. “What does the Army way mean?”
“Basically, whatever force is necessary to achieve the mission goals.”
“Guns, grenades, guts, and gore. Is that what you mean?”
“Pretty much.”
“But, he’s probably wearing a suicide vest. Shooting him could set it off; then they’re all dead.”
“They can’t shoot him until they know he’s a genuine threat. If they shoot him before making sure he really is the bad guy, it’s called murder.”
“Even though we’re in a state of emergency?”
“Yeah.”
“How do we prove he’s the bad guy without him blowing himself up?”
“What’s the connection between Palmer and that Sam dude you thought was the leader at first?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know if anyone has done a check on Sam’s background.”
“Send me that picture.”
Ava did as ordered.
Henry sent what seemed like a long text message to someone. “I’ve asked an old friend to look into Palmer’s background. Hopefully, he’ll get back to me in time.”
“But, River needs help now,” she insisted.
“He knew the moment he left the hospital that he was on his own with whoever was with him.”
She wanted to cry. “But—”
Henry put his hand on her shoulder. “I think you’re forgetting something. He’s a Special Forces soldier. He knows how to hide in plain sight better than anyone else there.”