“Trust me, you don’t want to go anywhere right now,” he said. “There’s a little trouble outside.”
“Then let me call my mom,” Kim said. “She’s got to be freaking.”
“You have a cell phone?”
“The battery died.”
The cop looked harried. “Come here.” He led her out into the main control room, which was bustling with activity. “Here.” The man handed her a land line and then hurried off.
Kim dialed her home number quickly. Her mother picked up on the first ring.
“Mom, it’s me, don’t freak—”
“Kim! Thank god! Where the hell are you! You know there’s a riot—”
“I’m safe, Mom. Dad got me into the building before it all started.”
“He should never have let you go down there in the first place.” She sounded stressed out, and Kim knew that she’d been worrying all this time. She was sure that, once her phone was charged, she’d find a dozen frantic messages.
“There was no way he knew this was going to happen, Mom. You’re too hard on him.”
“They all knew, Kim!” her mother snapped. “Your father always knows more than he tells, trust me. Let me talk to him.”
“He’s not here. He…went out.”
Her mom said something she would have gotten in trouble for saying. “I’m coming to get you.”
“I don’t think you can, Mom. I think there’s a lot going on outside.” She looked at the wounded security officer. “I’m okay in here. You should probably wait until it calms down.” She told her mother that her phone was dead and promised to call her again in thirty minutes. She hung up the phone and rubbed her arm where the doctor had drawn blood.
Celia Alexis rubbed her eyes before looking into the microscope. It had been a long day, and news of the riots at the Federal Building had not helped her concentration. She knew Jean could take care of himself, but she also knew that if he saw people in trouble, he would ignore any danger to help them. She’d seen that back in Haiti when they were kids, and she’d seen him act recklessly as an adult. He always laughed and told her that an L.A. Sheriff ’s deputy was
Of course, she was self-aware enough to know that she suffered from a similar disease herself. First in her under-grad class at Stanford, top of her medical school class at UCLA. She didn’t have to be first, but anything less felt like failure. She had left her barefoot childhood back in Haiti, but somehow she’d managed to bring the burden of Haiti itself with her, like that hint of accent she could never seem to silence. Her friends liked it; the men in her life loved its singsong quality, but to Celia the slow roundness of her vowels evoked no images of Calypso and sun- drenched beaches, but only the dirty streets and poverty of Port-au-Prince.
Celia pressed her eyes to the microscope and studied the slide. Someone had marked this urgent — a blood sample from a teenage girl. The researcher blinked, rubbed her eyes again, and adjusted herself at the scope. But when she looked at the blood sample, the image hadn’t changed.
“Ken?” she called, sitting back. There was another researcher, Ken Diebold, working at the other end of the lab counter. Like her, he was wearing a sterile suit and mask. Researchers in the laboratory wore them as a matter of habit, although Celia felt with sudden dread that in this case, the sterile environment might be necessary. “Can you come look at this?”
Diebold was decent enough, but he suffered from a deep appreciation of his own sense of humor. “What’s this? The Caribbean Queen asking for help?” he said dryly.
“Just look,” she insisted.
Ken walked over and, without sitting down, looked into the scope. He straightened and looked at Celia, then sat down as she moved out of the way, and looked again. “Where did this come from?” he said at last.
“CTU Los Angeles just brought it in,” Celia replied.
“CTU Los Angeles?” Ken said in shock, his voice rising an octave. “This patient is inside the United States?”
Celia nodded.
“You know what this is?” he said.
Celia nodded again. “It’s a filovirus. It looks like it’s related to Ebola—”
“—or Marburg,” the other doctor said.
“But it’s not Marburg,” Celia pointed out. “The shepherd’s crook shape isn’t the same.”
“Is the patient isolated? When did exposure happen?”
“We’d better find out,” Celia said, “before half of Los Angeles dies from hemorrhagic fever.”
The door of the overturned police wagon flew open. Hands reached in and pulled the prisoners out one at a time. Jack, who had positioned himself near the door, was one of the first. There was a small mob around the fallen van, cheering as each one of the prisoners was helped out. Beyond the mob, the street was empty for nearly a block, but farther down Jack saw a line of rioters pushing against a line of policemen with shields and batons. The rioters had abandoned all reason, and were ignoring the blows of batons.
“We managed to get through,” one of the protestors said to Jack, like one soldier briefing another. “Those bastards did a good job holding us back, especially with those god-damned horses. But we got to you. Here.” The man, who spoke with a slight Spanish accent, held up a pair of wire cutters. He stepped behind Jack and severed the flex cuffs.
“Hey!” yelled a rioter, bending down to look into the wagon. “One of these guys is hurt. His leg looks really bad.” Jack glanced down. It was the man in the blue shirt. He screamed as they pulled him out of the wagon. His left leg was broken at the shin, snapped at such an acute angle that his leg appeared to have a second knee.
“Look what we found!” someone yelled from the front end of the vehicle. Jack leaned around the corner to see three rioters pulling a half-conscious policeman from the cab. Jack recognized him as the same cop who said he’d try to call CTU. His face was covered in blood from a cut on his forehead and his eyes weren’t focused. He was as limp as a rag doll and no threat to anyone. But he was wearing a police uniform, and in the rioters’ maddened state, that’s all it took. One of them stomped on his head.
Jack snatched the wire cutters from his rescuer’s hand and shoved him out of the way. He reached the injured cop before the three rioters and, as another one raised his foot to stomp down, Jack kicked his base leg. The rioter screamed and toppled over. The other two looked at him in surprise. Jack punched one of them in the stomach with the hand holding the wire cutters. The beak of the cutters jabbed into the man’s stomach and he crumpled to the floor. The third one grabbed Jack by the shirt, so Jack head-butted him in the nose and shoved him backward.
“What the hell are you doing!” shouted the man who’d brought the wire cutters.
“He’s not one of us!” It was the blond kid, who’d just been pulled out of the van. “He’s a cop!”
But by now Jack was a cop with a gun, having taken the policeman’s sidearm. He held the 9mm Beretta level and steady at the center mass of the man who had held the wire cutters. “You’re done here. All except for him.” He nodded at the man in the blue shirt, who was lying on the ground. “Everyone else go. Now.”
The man under Jack’s gun said, “Bullshit. You don’t get to—”
Jack squeezed the trigger and put a round past the man’s ear. Everyone cringed away from the sound of the gunshot. Only Jack held steady. “Now.”
The crowd scattered. Jack watched them until they were too far away to pose any sort of threat. Hastily he knelt down beside the cop, who managed to focus on Jack. “You okay?” Jack said.
“H-hell, no,” the cop said. “Thanks. You…saved…”
“Later,” Jack said. “Looks like they forgot about you and me.” He looked over toward the Federal Building, but there were no cops in sight. Everyone was either inside the building or out chasing rioters. He snatched the radio off the man’s collar. “Dispatch, this is—” He looked around for the man’s name, but his riot gear was blank.
“Agastonetti,” the man said weakly.
“This is Officer Agastonetti,” Jack said. “Officer down at Federal and Wilshire. Just outside the Federal Building. Officer down.” He cut off as someone squawked back. The less detail they got, the faster they’d
