Lincoln Town Cars, a UPS delivery van, a Range Rover, a battered Volkswagen Jetta, and a little school bus — what the kids in Montana called a short bus. The bus was empty except for the driver, but it was riding low on its wheels, like it was carrying a heavy load.
Wells looked at it and knew. Khadri. The ironist. Of course. And no one would look twice at a school bus.
The Yellow was second at the light, on the west side of Seventh Avenue, behind a Lincoln. Maybe sixty feet away. Three seconds if he ran. Ten if he walked. Wells tucked the cap down on his head and began to walk east, toward Seventh Avenue. Khadri was half right, he thought; they were meeting again, but not in paradise. In Times Square.
“Hey, buddy,” the cop said. Wells kept walking, crossing behind the police cruiser and through the taxis that were moving slowly across Forty-seventh.
Forty feet. He coughed, a vicious rib-shaking eruption he didn’t try to cover. If he didn’t get to the bus, the people around him would have bigger problems than plague.
“Hey. I’m talking to you.” The cop wasn’t yelling, not yet.
Wells reached the north side of Forty-seventh and turned right, cutting between clots of men in suits who were scurrying west toward the Morgan Stanley headquarters. Thirty feet. Not close enough, not yet. Khadri would surely have the detonator in his lap. Wells slipped a hand into his waist and grabbed his gun, holding it under his jacket.
He peeked back and saw that the cops were getting out of their cruiser. He began to trot toward the bus.
Twenty feet. “Stop!” he heard the cops yell, but an enormous honk from a UPS truck drowned them out. He could see Khadri now behind the driver’s seat of the otherwise empty bus, sitting straight up, head held high, as if he could already see paradise.
Ten feet.
A FEW SECONDS, Khadri told himself. This light would turn green, he would drive two blocks, and in the heart of the square, at Forty-fifth Street…he would be complete. A few seconds. Two blocks. The detonator was still at his feet. He wasn’t allowing himself to touch it, so he wouldn’t have the temptation to blow it too early. He wanted this to be perfect.
And then he saw the man in the Red Sox cap, running toward the bus, a gun in his hands.
Khadri screamed, pure animal rage. He reached for the detonator—
Wells’s first shot ripped through his chest, knocked him back toward the window. Khadri felt no pain, just enormous anger. He wouldn’t let the
Wells leaned over Khadri, his hot feverish filthy breath in Khadri’s face, and Khadri knew. Wells was the angel of death. He tried to stay angry, but the black wind came for him and he closed his eyes. A dribble of blood spilled from the corner of his mouth. A final agonal breath rattled his chest. He died.
WELLS FELT THE shot even before he heard it. The muscles in his back seemed to explode. He twisted and fell forward. Onto Khadri. The cops. Doing their jobs. Getting the bad guy. So they thought. No. He had to live. He had come too far to die. He’d done his job too. All those years in the wilderness. He tried to lift his hands, but the effort overwhelmed him.
Wells could feel his blood, his hot dirty blood, pumping slowly down his back. As he closed his eyes and the world went black his last thought was Exley.
EPILOGUE
EXLEY WOKE. HER left knee burned as if a shark had bitten off half her leg. But when she opened her eyes she saw her foot in the air. A sling held her leg in place. A hospital bed. Two women stood beside her, one wearing a white doctor’s coat, the other a nurse’s uniform. Surgical masks hid their mouths.
As consciousness found her, the pain in her leg turned to agony. The electrical fire inside her burned endlessly, every nerve in her knee sending an individual message of grief to her brain. “Hurts,” she choked.
Beyond her leg, the rest of her body ached terribly. And though she’d just woken she felt enormous fatigue, as if she’d been running for days on end. Exley clenched her fists against the pain and the nurse ran a hand down her arm, carefully avoiding the intravenous line plugged into her elbow.
The doctor stepped forward. “You were shot,” she said. “Do you remember?”
Now Exley did. “In the hall.”
“Would you like some ice?”
Exley nodded. Even talking was an enormous effort; her mouth seemed to lack any moisture. With her gloved hand, the nurse slipped a chip of ice into Exley’s mouth. Exley sucked on it, a cold piece of paradise. She began to remember more, her hours in the van, Wells shouting her name—
“What happened?” Panic rose in her, under the pain. Wells. Where was he? Her last memory of him, leaning over her in the dirty yellow hallway.
“Can you tell me your name?” the doctor said.
“Jen. Exley.”
The doctor nodded. “I’m Dr. Thompson. Julie. I have some good news for you, Ms. Exley. Your children are here.”
“Where’s here?” She licked her lips, dry again.
“The infectious disease unit at Bellevue. New York. You’ve been here about sixteen hours. But we want to be sure you’re not contagious before we bring David and Jessica in.”
At the doctor’s second mention of her children Exley felt a strange sorrow overtake her. They shouldn’t see her like this. She had come so close to dying, giving them up. She had been absent from them for too long. The drugs and the pain and the shame melded in her mind and she felt hot tears running down her cheeks. The doctor — Exley had forgotten her name already — pulled off her glove and put a cool hand on Exley’s forehead.
“There’s no reason to worry,” she said. “You were infected with some nasty stuff, but it looks like we caught it in time. You can probably see them tomorrow.”
Exley thought again of Wells. “Where’s John?”
The doctor glanced at the nurse. “Also here. He’s very sick.”
“I know you’re in a lot of pain,” the doctor said. “We need to be careful about how much medication we give you, but if it hurts too much, tell us. When you feel better there are a lot of people who want to talk to you. To thank you. In the meantime try to sleep. Please.”
THE NEXT DAY passed in a haze, Exley slipping in and out of consciousness as the nurses adjusted her medication. The doctors briefly brought in her kids and her mother, and Exley’s joy at seeing them overcame her shame. Still, she was glad when they left. She saw in their faces that they were shocked by the way she looked. The effort of trying to smile for them exhausted her. She passed out almost as soon as the door closed behind them.
When she woke again Shafer was crouched beside her bed. “Ellis,” she croaked. For the first time she felt a trace of energy returning, although her knee burned as if it were being torn apart from the inside out.
“Jennifer.” For once he seemed at a loss for words. He wrung his hands together and hopped around the room on his spindly legs.
“What happened out there?” she said. “They won’t tell me.”
“It was close, but you did it, Jennifer,” he said. “You and Wells.”
“What did they mean when they said I might be contagious?”
