fashion of one who is brain dead before they fall.
Without a pause, Jericho rushed for the doors.
Dr. Suleiman met him in a head-on attack, crashing into him with the full weight of his body. The veterinarian was well groomed, but he knew how to fight. He smashed down with both fists in a well-delivered haymaker that sent the pistol skittering across the dimly lit room and out of reach.
Jericho crouched, springing forward like a lineman, using the strength of his legs to drive the Arab backward with the point of his shoulder toward a white marble support column. Flailing out with both hands, Suleiman dragged a tapestry off the wall, bringing the heavy woolen rug down on top of both men. Quinn rolled away, struggling to push free from the tangle of thick cloth. When he got to his feet, he saw a smiling Suleiman holding the thick dowel that had been used to support the tapestry. Five feet long and an inch in diameter, the wooden staff made a formidable weapon in the hands of someone who knew how to use it.
“I do not know who you are,” Suleiman panted, a fleck of spittle forming at the corners of his twisted mouth. “But I think you are no Kuwaiti horse buyer…”
Quinn stood facing him, slightly bent at the waist, arms loose at his sides, body quartered away. “I am a messenger,” he said in Arabic.
Suleiman raised an eyebrow, dropping his shoulder slightly. “What sort of messenger?”
Feinting with his left hand, Quinn drew Suleiman into a rushed attack. Rolling past the first blow, he caught the doctor on the point of his chin with a brutal upward strike from his elbow. Stunned, Suleiman let go of the staff with one hand but kept a death grip with the other, letting the end hit the ground. Quinn grabbed the man’s fist, and stomped hard on the angled wood, snapping the staff in the middle. The jarring shock caused Suleiman to release his hold on what was left of the weapon.
Quinn grabbed the wooden shard before it could hit the ground. It was two feet long and incredibly sharp on the broken end. Spinning, he drove the splintered point through the startled man’s neck so it came out each side like the handlebars on a motorcycle.
“That sort of messenger,” Quinn said.
Suleiman no longer a threat, Quinn was met by an empty marble room. Somewhere to his left, he could just make out the soft, eerie whirring of exhaust fans.
Where the building entrance had been sparse and utilitarian, the inner portion was palatial, complete with marble floors and stone pillars. More heavy Arab tapestries of rich maroon and gold draped stucco walls. A long, low table of rich mahogany surrounded by ornate brocade throw pillows occupied the middle of the vacant chamber. Quinn’s footsteps echoed off the arched ceiling, twenty feet above his head. A chessboard sat at the end of the low table. Squat pieces, testaments to Islam’s prohibition against statues of living creatures, sat lined up on the board and ready for play.
Quinn retrieved the Beretta from the floor and held it in tight against his waist. He scanned the room, searching for any sign of Farooq or his operation. It was a lonely but familiar feeling to be in such a hostile environment thousands of miles from home… wherever that was.
The whirring of the fans suddenly grew louder, as if a compressor had kicked on. One of the heavy, floor-to- ceiling plum-colored drapes directly across from the low table rustled slightly, jostled by an unseen wind as if a door had opened on the other side. Quinn prepared himself for an attack, but the movement turned out to be caused by an air intake located in the marble tile behind it.
Closer inspection revealed a glass window on the other side of the curtain. When he drew the heavy cloth to one side, his breath froze in his chest. His free hand slid into the pocket of his dishdasha.
CHAPTER 30
Mahoney pursed her lips. She’d never met this Jericho Quinn but could tell from Thibodaux’s demeanor he was a good man in serious danger.
The baby-faced staff sergeant spoke into the phone for a quick moment, then pressed the hands-free button on the device.
“Damo’s got you on a shadow relay, sir-running your voice in encrypted laser bursts,” Guttman explained over the line. “The Saudis won’t even know we’re talking unless they happen to walk in on you.”
There was silence on the speaker. Guttman turned back to the phone. “You still there, sir?”
“I’m here.” The voice was surprisingly clear considering the fact that it had to travel from a cell phone no bigger than a pack of playing cards to a drone twenty-seven miles above the earth before being rebroadcast back to Langley. “How do you read me?”
“You’re comin’ in slurred and stupid, as usual, beb,” Thibodaux laughed, breathing an audible sigh of relief to hear his friend’s voice.
“Glad to hear it,” Quinn came back. “Listen, has the boss gotten hold of that plague doctor yet?”
“She’s sittin’ right beside me,” Thibodaux said.
Megan leaned toward the phone out of habit, as if closing the gap another few inches might make it a little easier for her voice to travel thousands of miles. “Megan Mahoney with the CDC.”
“I’m looking at some pretty bad stuff here, Doctor.”
“Can you describe it?”
“Roger that,” the voice said. “I’ve got what looks like two airtight rooms behind glass observation windows. The rooms are divided down the middle… That wall looks to be airtight as well, but I can’t be sure from where I’m at. They’re set up like hospital wards but-” Quinn’s voice stopped abruptly.
Mahoney opened her mouth to say something, but the big Cajun held up his hand to shush her.
“He could be handling… a problem,” Thibodaux whispered. “He stops talking, we stop talking.
There was a muffled pop on the line that reminded Megan of a large metal pan being dropped to the ground. Garbled voices followed, and then two more pops in quick succession.
Quinn came back on the line, calm as if he’d just gone to answer the door. “Had a couple of visitors,” he said simply. “I could sure use your help, Jacques. They keep popping up every time I try to get the job done.”
“I wish I was there, l’ami,” Thibodaux said. “I hate sittin’ on my thumbs stateside while you get to play World of Warcraft with the bad guys.”
“Dr. Mahoney.” Quinn’s voice was somber again. “I’m thinking this is some kind of a test facility where they could watch their experiments with the disease progress. No one has tended to the people in these rooms for quite a while. It looks like a horror movie in there. The sheets are filthy… blood everywhere.”
“How many?” Mahoney heard herself ask. She had seen Ebola wards firsthand in Africa and could imagine what the rooms looked like.
“Five,” Quinn said. “It’s hard to say, but I’m pretty sure three are Americans… some of our missing soldiers. I think one of them is dead already…” The unmistakable sound of a sniff came across the line. “There’s a little girl in there… maybe seven years old. She’s still moving, but I think the woman next to her is dead… Anything I can do to help her, Doc? Could I put on a mask or something and go in there?”
There was an earnest goodness in the voice that stopped Mahoney’s heart in her chest. To be sent on this sort of mission, he had to be a capable and dangerous man. She hadn’t expected any semblance of mercy.
She looked helplessly at Thibodaux.
“He’s got a little daughter of his own,” the Cajun whispered. “He’d never say it, but it kills him to be away from her.”
Mahoney nodded, understanding. Her jaw set in a firm line. “Listen to me,” she said. “This is going to be hard…” Her voice caught as she imagined this man, this father, standing on one side of a filthy glass window, separating him by mere inches from a child in unimaginable agony. She took a deliberate breath and plowed ahead, staring at the floor, unable to look Thibodaux in the eye. “It’s a horrible thing… but you’ve got to leave her in there. From what we know so far, these poor souls are infected with a highly contagious, airborne variant of a hemorrhagic virus. If it were to get out, thousands… hundreds of thousands would die. You must not go anywhere near them, mask or no mask.”
Mahoney’s eyes welled with tears. She hated to cry in front of people, fearing they might see it as a sign of
