mouth and he made feeble efforts to dislodge himself. It was useless-he was dying. Gordon looked at the man, into his eyes, and felt sick. The stare was vacant, almost as though his spirit had already left his body and the physical part of his being had yet to expire. He had just severely maimed one man and killed another. He took one last look and ran down the hall, toward Jennifer and the cab.
The driver was exactly where they had asked him to wait. Jennifer was already sitting in the backseat, and she broke into a smile when he came running out the fire door. He sprinted to the cab and jumped in.
“Get us out of here without anyone else seeing us and there’s an extra thousand in it for you,” he said as he collapsed into the seat.
“That would be a good thing,” the driver shot back.“I’m sure that if anyone sees me leaving and gets my plate number, I’m going to be in some serious shit. Another thousand bucks is just a little more incentive to do something that was already on my mind.” He steered the car back into the parking lot, switched off his headlights, and took the back roads until he reached the main access to the I-64. He turned his headlights back on once he was on the ramp to the freeway. He accelerated up to the posted speed limit and blended in with the night traffic.
“You okay?” Jennifer asked Gordon.
“Sort of,” he said, thinking of the look in the dying man’s eyes. “I’ll be all right. How about you?”
“Scared,” she said. “Scared shitless.”
“Well, at least we’ve got proof of what Andrews was up to.”
“And this,” she said, pulling out of her pocket the small package that she had stripped off the underside of the lab table. She opened it and showed him. It was a CD with Chinese markings on the top. “It’s a trick lots of researchers use. We hide disks near our computers with confidential information on them. That way, if someone hacks into your computer or steals it, they don’t get your latest research. It seems Dr. Wai thinks the same as I do. This was hidden under the desk.”
“What do you think is on it?” Gordon asked.
“I’m not sure. Probably something to do with the work he was doing for Andrews in the lab. It could be another nail in Andrews’s coffin.”
“Then let’s get somewhere with a computer and find out what’s on it.”
“Slight problem,” she said, pointing to the writing. “You speak Mandarin or Cantonese?”
He was quiet for a minute. “No, but I’m getting hungry. How about Chinese?”
She took a good look at his leg. “After we get something to bandage that and get you some painkillers.”
“It’s a flesh wound,” Gordon said, putting some pressure on it and wincing. He saw the look on her face and grimaced. “Okay, first the leg, then dinner.”
65
The cabdriver, whose name was Eric, found an ATM on the southeast outskirts of Richmond and Gordon withdrew three thousand dollars. He counted out fifty twenties and handed them across the front seat. Eric slipped them into his pocket with a nod of his head and a grin.
“They already know where we are, so this is probably a good time to stock up on cash,” he said to Jennifer.
He had the cabbie stop in front of a pharmacy, and Jennifer ran in and stocked up on extra-strength Tylenol and some compresses and white tape. She carefully bandaged his leg in the backseat of the cab and he took two of the pills. She had a close look at his wound while applying the gauze. Gordon was right-the damage was mostly superficial. The bullet had gone right through and the muscle was damaged, but the bones were intact. When they were finished, Gordon asked Eric, “You know where we could get some authentic Chinese food?”
“Hey, I live on Chinese. I know the best places. You care which part of the city we end up in?”
“Get us away from the ATM I just used,” Gordon said. “Other than that, I don’t care.”
“What happened to the guys chasing us?” she asked.
“You don’t want to know.”
They lapsed into silence and watched the darkened city flash by. Everything so normal: cars stopping for red lights, couples out walking their dogs. But for them things were far from normal. They both knew that this fight had become a fight for their life. And Bruce Andrews was not going to stop. Somehow they had to take him down. But the question that was running through both their minds as Eric pulled up in front of a restaurant was
Eric told them he preferred to sit in his car and ordered some takeout while they were in the restaurant. They sat in a booth tucked away in a corner, and when the server came around with Chinese tea, Gordon asked her, “Is there anyone here who speaks and reads Mandarin?”
She gave him a strange look.“This is a Chinese restaurant. We all speak Mandarin, and a couple of the cooks speak Cantonese.”
“Okay, is there anyone on your staff with a technical background? Medical, sciences, that sort of thing?”
“Sure, that would be Kelly, one of our waiters. He’s in his third year at university, majoring in biology. Want me to send him over?”
“Yes, please.”
A few minutes later, a young Chinese man approached with a puzzled look on his face. “You were asking for someone who speaks Mandarin and knows something about biology?” he asked.
Jennifer slipped the CD from her pocket and held it up. “We need to know what’s on this disk. We’ll pay you to translate it.”
“I’m working right now,” he said. “I can do it tomorrow.”
Gordon pulled out the remainder of the cash from the ATM withdrawal. “Three hundred dollars says you plug that into your computer and do it now.” He set the money on the table and placed a saltshaker on it.
Starving university students love cash. Kelly smiled and said, “Give me a minute. My computer’s in the back.” He returned a minute later with a Sony laptop and set it up on the table adjacent to Gordon and Jennifer’s. He took the disk and slipped it into the CD drive.
“This goes nowhere but between us and you,” Gordon cautioned him.
“For three hundred bucks, I don’t have a problem with that. I’ll even get them to throw a few extra shrimp in your chop suey,” he said, a huge grin pasted across his face. Fifteen minutes later, he joined them at their table. He wasn’t smiling. “Do you know what’s on here?” he asked.
“We have our suspicions,” Jennifer said, setting down her chopsticks. “What did you find?”
Kelly ran his hand through his hair and shook his head. “This is really serious stuff. Really serious.” He looked upset and his hands were shaking.
“We suspect that there are research notes on that disk for a hemorrhagic virus,” Jennifer said. “A lethal virus that was developed by a Chinese research scientist for a local pharmaceutical company. Is that fairly close?”
Kelly swallowed, his hands shaking so badly he set the disk on the table.“Yes.That’swhat is on the disk. How did you know that?”
“It’s a long story. But you can trust me when I say we’re the good guys here. We’re trying to nail the people who created this bug.”
“Is there anything else on the disk?” Gordon asked.
“Just a footnote at the end.” He dug into his shirt pocket and pulled out a napkin with some writing on it. “I jotted down the translation.” He handed it to Jennifer, who was closest to him.
“ ‘He has someone of great influence and power working with him. I am convinced it is one of the four.’ ” She read it one more time and asked Kelly, “The reference to ‘one of the four’- does that mean anything in Chinese?”
Kelly, who had stopped shaking, thought for a minute, then said, “No. There’s nothing in Chinese culture that emphasizes anything about ‘the four.’ I don’t think it’s on the disk simply because the author was Chinese.”
“Okay, thanks,” Gordon said, retrieving the disk from the table and handing the money to the young man. As an afterthought, he said, “Here,” and handed him another two hundred dollars. “Don’t say anything about this.
