under the rug. Even if the agency believed him, it would have no choice but to lock him up. Or just make him disappear. No, he could never redeem himself unless he brought in Khadri, dead or alive. Nothing less would save him from the agency. Nothing less would save him from himself. All this killing had to take him somewhere.
Get the bad guy, save the country, get the girl. Simple, really. “Yeah, I’m right on track,” he said aloud to the empty room.
THE GOOD NEWS was that the cops and the FBI would have a hard time figuring out what had happened tonight, Wells thought. Plus they would keep the details of the killings out of the media. No sense in ruining West’s reputation.
So Khadri would know only that Qais and Sami had died alongside West and the bodyguard. Khadri wouldn’t trust Wells more than he had before tonight, but he wouldn’t trust Wells any less either. Wells figured he would hear from Khadri soon or not at all. And his next mission, if there was a next mission, wouldn’t be a test run. In the park earlier today Khadri had looked like he was running short on time.
Wells knew just how Khadri felt.
13
THE CAT WAS in pitiful shape.
When Tarik picked her up from the animal shelter a week before, she had been runty but healthy, an energetic tabby whose fur was a mottled blend of black, brown, and white. Unlike most strays, she showed no fear of humans. She swiped playfully at him on the drive home. Even when he locked her in the cage in the bubble in the basement, she didn’t fight.
“You’ll really like her,” the woman at the SPCA had told him. “She’s a great choice.”
AND THE WOMAN was right, though not for the reasons she would have liked. Three days after being exposed to an aerosolized mist of
Enough, Tarik thought. He sank a syringe into a vial of sodium pentobarbital solution and carefully measured out two milliliters of the liquid. He grabbed the cat’s back left leg and looked for a vein on her stomach. Under normal circumstances, she would have fought. Instead she waved her paws feebly in the air and closed her eyes. Tarik found a vein and jabbed the needle into it. The cat went limp a few seconds later.
“Poor cat,” Tarik said. “I’m sorry.”
He did not enjoy making animals suffer, especially cats. He would have preferred to experiment on a dog, but dogs were naturally immune to plague. So he had no choice. And despite his sorrow at the cat’s awful death, he could not deny the pride he felt at the speed of his progress with the plague. He had stopped all his work on his other germs, even anthrax, to concentrate on
Tarik would have liked to credit hard work for his success. But the truth was that the bacteria he had received from Tanzania appeared to be an especially virulent strain of plague. The germs grew quickly in brain-heart infusion broth and stayed alive for hours after he strained them into a weak solution of soy agar that flowed easily through his nebulizer. The bacteria were also more temperature-resistant than Tarik had expected.
Without a column chromatograph and a polymerase chain reaction assay he couldn’t be sure, but he suspected that this
Looking at the cat’s bloody carcass, he was glad he was taking the medicine. He carefully plucked her body from the cage and slipped it into a large glass jar of hydrochloric acid, where it would dissolve. He would go by the shelter for another cat tomorrow. Though maybe he’d be better off at a pet store. They’d have fewer questions. He had been surprised when the woman at the shelter had asked him what name he had picked out for the cat.
“I’m not sure yet,” he’d finally stammered.
Yes, a pet store was the way to go, Tarik thought. But if his success continued, he would soon be done with cats. His next subjects would be monkeys, whose respiratory systems had more in common with humans’. Unfortunately, monkeys weren’t easy to come by; biological supply companies would sell them only to licensed research centers, and very few people bred them for sale as pets. He had seen Internet ads from breeders in the United States, but he wasn’t sure he could get across the border by himself, much less with a monkey in tow. And he strongly suspected that customs agents — maybe even the police — would pay his house a visit if he tried to order one online.
Still, even without the monkeys Tarik believed he now had enough skill with the nebulizer to infect people in an unventilated room — if he could figure out a way to release the mist without anyone noticing. Of course, that didn’t mean he could cause a widespread outbreak. He had months to go before he could figure out how to stockpile enough
But he couldn’t deny his progress. He had been spending six, eight, sometimes ten hours a day down here, sleeping only in short snatches as his excitement grew. He knew he should pace himself — he was surprised by how tired and disheveled he appeared when he saw himself in the bathroom mirror — but the plague filled his mind. The plague and Fatima.
As he thought of her his excitement faded. Fatima had grown even more distant from him in the last month, coming home late from work, hardly smiling when he tried to talk to her, pushing off his fumbling advances in their bed. The week before, he’d emerged from his work in the basement and again found her whispering on the phone in the kitchen.
“What do you care?” she’d said. “You’re down there all the time anyway.”
At that he had hit her, just a couple of times.
“Please, Tarik,” she’d said. “What’s happening to you?”
You and your wicked ways are what’s happening, Tarik mentally answered her. He wished he could talk to someone about her, but Khadri was the only person he trusted enough to ask, and Khadri’s advice was always the same: focus on your work. “It’s your problem,” Khadri had said the last time they spoke. “Deal with it.”
Fine. I’ll deal with it, Tarik thought. I’ll deal with it tonight.
THE OXYGEN GAUGES on Tarik’s regulator dipped toward empty. He headed back into the airlock and stripped, then hung up his respirator and wiped down the tanks with bleach. When the tanks were clean he dragged them outside of the bubble into the open area of the basement. There he hooked them up to an oxygen pump to refill them.
He showered and dressed slowly, savoring the rush of power that came from handling
Finally he headed upstairs. A strange trembling rose in him as he walked up the steps to face his wife. Fatima needed to support him, support his work, not disrespect him by coming home late. She had given herself to him as a good Muslim woman, a daughter of the Prophet, and she would keep her word to him and to Allah. He almost didn’t care at this moment if she loved him, as long as she respected him.
He felt a mix of anger and relief when he opened the top door of the stairs and found her sitting at the kitchen table, writing on a yellow legal pad. His lovely wife. Still, his temper rose as he saw that she was wearing a skirt that showed her legs. When had she bought that? She looked like a
