My new friend wiped the lens clean with a soft cloth and snapped it on.
“What do you do with them?” I said and nodded at the camera.
“The photos? I take them for myself. Sometimes, I’ll sell a shot to the papers.”
“Nice.”
“History,” the man said. “Every bit of this is history. The most underreported event in the annals of modern journalism. Very few pictures. No video I know of that wasn’t shot by the government. No one to bear witness.”
“Just the people who lived through it.”
“That’s right. And who believes that shit?”
The man popped off a couple shots of a news chopper drifting overhead, then returned to the fence line. I watched for another ten minutes, not sure why I was there and knowing I needed to be somewhere else. Then I shook the photographer’s hand. He offered to send me some prints if I was interested. I told him I was and gave him my card.
CHAPTER 62
“How far out are you?”
“Ten, fifteen minutes.” I curled past Buckingham Fountain onto Columbus Drive and took a sip of black coffee.
“Where were you?”
“Just wanted to take a look at the West Side. They’re pulling down the fences.”
“Don’t trust Doll on this, Kelly.”
“He’ll do his part.”
“Right up until the time he shoots you in the back.”
“It’s the only way. Besides, I got a backup plan.” I merged onto Lake Shore Drive. Soldier Field loomed on my left.
“You don’t want me to come down?”
“I told you. We’re better off this way.”
“Call me when it’s done.” Vince Rodriguez cut the line. I flipped my cell shut and turned up the radio. I didn’t recognize the song, but it sounded about right. I exited the Drive at Fifty-third Street.
CDA’s parking lot had three cars in it. The lobby was empty, an elevator waiting. I hit a button for the third floor. They were working together in one of the facility’s labs. I walked in a little after eight.
“Michael?” A nervous smile fluttered around Molly Carrolton’s lips but couldn’t find a place to settle.
“Did you think Gilmore had killed me?” I said. “Maybe we killed each other and some Good Samaritan came along and cleaned up the mess? Or maybe I just packed up and left town after I’d finished?”
“How did you get in here?” The face of the man who spoke graced the cover of the current issue of Newsweek. The magazine had dubbed Jon Stoddard “America’s Leading ‘BioWarrior.’ ”
“Name’s Michael Kelly.”
“I know who you are. And I know you’re trespassing on a private laboratory facility.”
“Piss off, Jon.”
Stoddard stood up and motioned to Molly. “Security.”
Molly flashed me a final, pleading look and reached for a phone on the wall. I knocked it out of her hand. Stoddard surprised me by taking a swing. I put him down easy with a right. Molly was moving. I let her make it to the door before I showed her the gun.
“It’s locked, Molly. And I’ve taken care of security. Now, why don’t we all sit down? And maybe you can come out of this in one piece.”
She sat. They both did.
“Peter Gilmore was greedy,” I said. “That was your first mistake. He was running a hospital supply scam you knew nothing about. When he realized what you had planned for the West Side, he decided to make a quick buck. Ordered up a few thousand body bags to sell on the black market. That left a trail for me to follow.”
“Are you suggesting this lab was somehow involved in the pathogen release?” Stoddard’s voice was strained through a handkerchief, pressed against his mouth and wet with blood.
“I’m suggesting this lab orchestrated the entire event.”
“That’s insane,” Stoddard said and ran his tongue across a swelling lip. “Anyone who did that would risk a global pandemic.”
“You engineered the bug with a kill switch, Jon.” Stoddard’s eye jerked in its socket, and I knew I’d hit a nerve. “Ellen Brazile told me every lab has its own signature. Including yours. She dug out the switch, recognized the genetic string for what it was, and thought she knew where the architecture came from. That’s why she disappeared from your lab. She was scared.”
Molly jumped back in. “Michael, if you killed Gilmore, those are circumstances that can be explained. And we’re certainly in a position to help.”
I ignored her. “The bug was a knockoff of Minor Roar. You tweaked its virulence and designed it to be active for three to five days. After that, the thing shut itself down. The release was always controlled. It’s just that no one realized it. No one except the people in this room.” I turned back to Molly. “You should have killed Gilmore before I did. That was your second mistake.”
I took a pack of cigarettes from my pocket and pushed them over.
“I don’t smoke, Michael.”
“And there’s no smoking allowed anywhere in this building,” Stoddard said.
“The cigarette I gave you. The one you extracted Gilmore’s DNA from.”
“What about it?” Molly said.
“I pulled it from this pack and smoked it myself. Gilmore never touched it.”
Molly’s face shone with a pale intensity that seemed to suck the rest of the light from the room. Stoddard’s voice, when it came, rattled like a tin roof in the wind.
“I think we’re done here, Mr. Kelly.”
“You never ran any tests,” I said. “Instead, you saw an opportunity to set me up. So you fed me Gilmore’s name. Fed me information that positioned him as a buddy of Danielson. Then you fed me the address. And Gilmore was waiting to kill me. What you didn’t count on was this.”
I tossed the shirt Ellen had given me onto the table. Stoddard picked it up.
“For what it’s worth, the thing worked pretty well. I was grazed in the shoulder, but the big one, the chest shot, never got through. I got the drop on Gilmore. And then I had his computer.”
I pulled out the laptop and slipped it onto the counter. They both ignored it.
“I ran the DNA on your cigarette,” Molly said. “The data is in our files.”
“You phonied it up.”
“You really believe that?”
“After you were hit by a sniper on the train, I wondered if you might not be legit. The truth is, Gilmore was trying to kill me. He just blew the shot. Even with the vest on, it took some guts to sit there and set me up. I’ll give you that. But the more I dug, the more I was convinced. The bug came from CDA. From you or Ellen. The only ones with the know-how and opportunity. The problem, of course, was which one.”
“So you gave me the cigarette?”
“Think of it as a line in the water.”
“And I bit.”
“Yeah, you did.” I pointed to the laptop no one wanted to take a look at. “Gilmore documented his end of things. Insurance, in case things went sour with his client.”
Molly idly touched a couple of keys on a keyboard. “And who’s gonna believe anything Mr. Gilmore has to say? Or the man who killed him?”
I gestured with the gun. “Good point.”
“We definitely want a lawyer,” Stoddard said, appealing to whoever wasn’t in the room.
