prison.”
“Hey dude, malum prohibitum not malum in se. ” Bo hooked a thumb toward his chest, showing off his Latin. “The things I choose to do are wrong, only because The Man says they are. Nothing I do is inherently bad.” He raised a brow, looking directly at Megan with a sly grin. “Well, almost nothing.”
Megan bit her bottom lip. The notion of taking some time away from work with the rough-and-tumble Bo Quinn was an interesting proposition. After spending the past few days getting to know men like Jericho and Jacques, she just couldn’t come to grips with going back to the plain-vanilla types she’d dated in her previous life.
Though the idea of being alone with Bo the biker terrified her as much as the thought of getting a tattoo, it beckoned to the same sense of exploration that had pulled her into field research in the first place. She’d heard of women who married soldiers, police officers, or firefighters and when they divorced or found themselves alone for whatever reason, always went back to someone from the same adventurous ilk. Such men were what they knew- and in the end, she supposed, the very thing they craved.
Justin steadfastly refused to leave the BSL, making up reason after reason he should stay. Once they’d all come in and shared his air, he was committed and had to stay for the duration. Now he plodded along a few steps behind Megan wherever she went, his shoulders stooped, his face hangdog. Completely intimidated by the muscular biker with a tattoo of a black octopus on his forearm, the poor kid’s chin quivered when he spoke. His eyes fluttered as if he might break into tears at any moment. Megan knew it was cruel, but she had to stifle a giggle every time she saw him.
Thibodaux walked a few yards ahead talking on his cell phone, waving his free arm as he spoke in animated Italian to his Delta-Whiskey. He suddenly spun to face the others, blocking any further progress down the hall. Moving his head slowly from side to side like a disbelieving buffalo, a huge grin smeared across his face. “It must have happened before my last deployment to Iraq…”
“What?” Mahoney asked, though the answer was written all over the big Marine’s face.
Thibodaux grabbed Jericho by both shoulders with his huge paws, dancing him around in a tight circle. “Yet once again, l’ami. Yours truly is gonna be a papa…”
“Good grief, Jacques.” Mahoney’s mouth fell open. “How many will this make?”
“Seven,” Thibodaux said, lost in the idea of having another child.
“As a trained epidemiologist, I think I need to have a talk with your wife,” Mahoney said. “There must be something in the air at your house.”
“Oh there was, beb.” The big Cajun winked a glistening eye. “Her feet.”
“You think we got it all?” Mahoney asked Jericho, after everyone else was asleep and the two of them sat in the chow hall. A carton of butter pecan ice cream sat on the table between them.
Quinn sighed. He was exhausted down to the marrow of his bones, but his mind raced with thoughts of a dozen scenarios, none of them good.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But we can account for the martyrs because of the photographs. I only found three vials missing from the case in Al-Hofuf. If we assume that each martyr brought a vial of toxin to commit suicide, we got them all. There could be another lab, but my guess is Zafir would have been a little more on the smug side had there been others with the virus walking around somewhere out there.”
Mahoney stuck her spoon in the ice cream and leaned forward on the table, resting her chin on folded arms. “It’s almost too overwhelming…”
“I guess most things are,” Quinn said, “if you think about them too long. You’re the one who decided to name this particular virus Pandora.”
“It fit,” Mahoney said.
“In the Pandora myth,” Jericho said, resting his hand on top of hers, “do you remember what was left in the box after our girl opened it and let all the evil stuff out to torment the world?”
“Ah.” Mahoney smiled. “ Hope.”
“That’s right. Hope,” Quinn said. “I have to hope for the best, or I’d go crazy doing this kind of work.”
“Yeah, about that.” Mahoney sat up again. She took another bite of ice cream before pointing at him with her spoon. “I wanted to talk to you about this job of yours.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well.” Mahoney shook her head, leaning back in her chair to look him up and down. “I’ve been following you for less than a week and I feel as though I’ve been beaten half to death. I can’t imagine doing this sort of work all the time. I think my head would explode.”
Jericho chuckled. “You don’t give yourself enough credit, Doc. You stayed icy calm out there, through all of this. It’s not so hard, what I do. Win Palmer is right. I’m a hammer. Someone gives me a nail to hit and I hit it. Simple really, especially when the world is full of so many nails.”
“But it’s so taxing,” Mahoney said. “On you and your family.”
“That it is.”
“Then why?” she asked. “Why do you keep doing it?”
Jericho thought for a long moment, tapping his icecream spoon on the edge of the carton. His mind drifted back to when he was fourteen and happened on the college bullies on the Coastal Trail in Anchorage. He scooped another bite of ice cream and grinned.
“It’s my job.”
EPILOGUE
Northeastern Afghanistan
Sheikh Husseini al Farooq used an olive wood walking stick to negotiate the rock-strewn trail in the mountainous region near the Khyber Pass, southwest of Jalalabad. The evening was cool, the shadows barren of the air he so desperately needed. The wizened old coffee bean of a village headman moved down the path with the dexterity of a mountain ibex. His barrel chest swayed back and forth as he waddled swiftly on short, crooked legs toward the dark entrance of a stone hut built into the side of the cliff.
The sheikh stopped, resting on the stick to catch his breath. He knew where they were going now so it didn’t matter that the headman outpaced him. Another man might have been embarrassed that the old man was faster considering the fact that he carried the sheikh’s two heavy bags. But Farooq was used to others doing the work for him. He was accustomed to opulence, fine silks-and getting exactly what he wanted.
All that had changed because of an infidel named Jericho.
Two days after the unthinkable capture of his servant Zafir Jawad, a source from Baghdad sent word to Farooq’s safe site in the mountains of Northern Pakistan. He was now the most wanted fugitive in the Global War on Terror. The messenger had flaunted the news, as if it was something of which to be proud. But Farooq knew better. His friends in the Saudi government had turned against him at once. With a bounty of five million U.S. dollars on his head, he didn’t know whom to trust. Government spies in Pakistan could be purchased for a cup of strong coffee. Iraq was out of the question, and the Saudis had made it clear they would be happy to have him beheaded and collect the easy reward. He had embarrassed them, and for that, there would be no forgiveness. From the time he’d heard the news, he’d been constantly on the run.
At length, he hiked up the hem of his long woolen coat and started after the headman, panting at each treacherous step until he collapsed inside the filthy little hut.
Farooq spoke only rudimentary Pashto, but like many of these unlearned border people, the headman spoke smatterings of at least four languages-his native Pashto, Persian Dari, Pakistani Urdu, and thankfully, Arabic. They all came in handy in his opium-smuggling trade. If pressed, he probably spoke enough Russian and English to ingratiate himself with military patrols.
Once they were seated on threadbare, lice-ridden cushions, the headman’s stooped wife brought in a wooden tray of butter tea and flat bread. Small dots of indigo dye tattooed her forehead, cheeks, and chin. The more dangerous of the two, the old woman made no effort to conceal the scowl in the jade of her flint hard eyes. Farooq
