mouth. “If one single person gets out of this room we’ll have a worldwide plague on our hands. There is no cure.” I said that slowly, punctuating each word. “Believe it.”
Brierly’s face twisted into a mask of such utter horror that I thought he was going to scream. Then he ducked as bullets struck the plastic walls around the Liberty Bell. I turned and saw someone dressed like a Philly cop pointing his pistol at us. He fired again and I pushed Brierly out of the way and returned fire. The fake cop pitched back.
I said, “Contact your men outside. Nobody leaves this building. Nobody! We’re going to need troops and a class-A biohazard team.”
He licked his lips, blinking several times as the devastating news sank in, and then I saw the man behind the bureaucrat take over. “Christ, I hope you’re wrong about this, Ledger.”
“I wish I was,” I said. “But I’m not.”
Brierly tapped his mike and began rapping out a series of curt commands. He ordered that all teams seal and defend every exit in the building, and he reinforced that to include exits that led off from the offices and rooms beyond the STAFF ONLY. “Hummingbird is to be located and secured.” Hummingbird was the code name for the First Lady. Junebug was the VP’s wife. When he got confirmations he turned to me.
“Okay, the First Lady is in the safe room. The VP’s wife is being guarded by one of your men and three of my agents. We’ll move her to the safe room in a bit.” He looked marginally relieved.
“Brierly, you need to make sure everyone understands that we can’t let anyone out of here. Not even the President’s wife.”
He stared at me, torn by his responsibility to protect his charges and the greater reality of the plague. Finally he nodded and keyed his mike. “This is Director Linden Brierly. This is an all-stations alert. On presidential orders no one is to leave this building. No exceptions. Repeat and confirm.” All posts confirmed, but I could imagine a lot of them were either scratching their heads or getting really spooked. “You’d better be right about this.”
I left him to his job and went to try and find O’Brien but I couldn’t see him anywhere. The gunfire was dwindling now, just sporadic shots interspersed with yells and screams.
Movement to my right made me turn and Grace was there, with Top right behind her, both with guns drawn. Grace had blood on her clothes but when she saw my expression she glanced down at her clothes then met my eyes. She shook her head. “There was a young woman standing right in front of me,” she said, and left it there.
The gunfire stopped but the crowd was still surging back and forth like frightened animals in a pen.
“Grace we have to calm these people down!”
“I’m on it,” she said and spun off, calling to Top and Dietrich and soon they were moving like bulls through the crowd, shoving people back, yelling orders to everyone, grabbing Secret Service agents and putting them to work. Skip Tyler was near the back wall, reloading his gun.
“Skip,” I said as I rushed over, “help me find O’Brien.”
“The red-haired guy? He went through there a second ago.” He pointed to the STAFF ONLY door that was tucked into a corner. We raced over but the door was locked from the other side.
“You sure he went this way?”
“Yeah, him and Ollie followed a whole bunch of Secret Service agents who were hustling the First Lady into the safe room.” He looked confused. “That was the protocol, right?”
“Son of a bitch,” I snarled and kicked the door in. “Skip, guard this door. Get Grace or Top to give me some backup, but nobody else gets in. You hear me? Nobody. I’m counting on you to hold this line.”
The young sailor gave me a serious nod and took up a defensive stance. “You got it, Captain.”
I ran through the doorway.
Chapter One Hundred Eight
Gault and Amirah / The Bunker
GAULT OPENED A slit in a wall panel and peered through it and almost gasped. Amirah was not five feet from him. Below her the nurses had nearly completed the injections.
He steeled himself and aimed his pistol through the gap and put the red dot of his laser, light as a whisper, on Amirah’s back, right between her shoulders. One shot from this distance would punch through her spine, tear through her heart, and burst from between her breasts to leave a gaping red hole the size of a golf ball. One flex of his finger and the traitorous bitch would be dead. He could do it. He knew he could.
Damn you, Amirah, he said, and without meaning to he mentally added, my love.
Tears jeweled his vision, warping her with prismatic distortion. The barrel of the pistol wavered. His assault team would be entering the cave any moment and Toys would lead them here. Gault shivered, partly at the thought of the firestorm Captain Zeller would be unleashing here in the Bunker, and partly at the thought of Toys’s transformation. Had his assistant actually changed that much or had Gault been blind all these years to the scorpion he kept by his side?
The seconds ticked away. Soon the whole Bunker would be a hell of bullets and blood. Soon everyone would be dead. Amirah, too, whether he killed her himself or not. His orders to Zeller had been specific. Kill everyone, no exceptions.
Amirah.
God.
Tears broke and rolled down his cheeks and before he could stop it a single, heartbroken sob escaped his throat. He saw Amirah stiffen, but she did not turn, and Gault forced his hands to steady, to hold the red pinprick of the laser sight on her back. Be a fucking man, he snarled inwardly.
Amirah.
And then she spoke.
“Sebastian,” she said.
Amirah turned without haste to face him. Her head was bowed, looking down to see the red laser dot on her chest, wavering right over her heart. She raised her head slowly.
Gault felt a cold hand reach into his own chest and squeeze his heart to a tiny block of ice. Amirah’s eyes were wide and glassy, bright with fever. She reached a hand up to the front of her chadri, gathered the black cloth in her fingers, and slowly pulled the scarf down to reveal her smiling mouth. Her lovely olive skin had paled to a sickly sand color, almost gray, and her full lips were stained with fresh blood.
“Sebastian,” she said softly as her lips peeled back from her teeth in a snarl of vicious animal hunger.
“My God.” Gault recoiled in horror. “What have you done?”
Amirah advanced toward the wall and even through the narrow opening of the observation slit he could smell her. A fetid, rotting-meat stink that rolled off her like the perfume of hell.
“Seif al Din,” she whispered, leaning to peer in through the slit.
“You’re infected!” His gun hand was shaking so bad that he almost dropped the weapon. Sweat burst from his pores and his pulse snapped like firecrackers. “What have you done?” he asked again in a terrified whisper.
She shook her head, still smiling. “No, Sebastian, I’m not infected. I’m reborn. I’m more alive now than I ever imagined.”
“This will kill you!”
She shook her head again. “The pathogen is no longer fatal I’ve perfected it. You only saw Generation Seven.” She giggled. “That one scared you, Sebastian. You almost screamed like a woman.” Amirah wiped drool from her lips. “By now my lovely El Mujahid should have launched Generation Ten on the American people. They will be dying soon, Sebastian. All of them. Seif al Din is so quick.” She snapped her fingers in front of the slot and Gault jumped.
“Generation Ten? You’re insane!”
“I’m immortal,” she countered. “You see we had a breakthrough, Sebastian. We’ve been working so hard for so long, and you thought we were plodding along with Generation Three. But, oh Generation Ten is immediate. The body reanimates immediately. No lag time, no time to quarantine the infected. Generation Ten is the perfect plague.”
“Perfect?” The word was like bile in his mouth.
