struggled for a moment, raising his hand. For a heart-stopping moment Carter thought he was holding a detonator. That was impossible; their security sweeps would never have missed anything explosive.
He was right. The waiter held only a palm-sized glass vial. He hurled it to the ground at the feet of the two world leaders. Security agents instinctively threw their bodies over the bodies of Barnes and Xu, but it didn’t matter. The glass vial shattered, and for a fraction of a second everyone flinched. But nothing dramatic happened. Glass shards sprayed, and a tiny puff of white gas drifted up in the air and dissipated quickly. The Plexiglas shields closed down on the floor with a soft but definitive click. There was a split second of pure silence.
The next second was complete pandemonium. The two agents put the waiter facedown on the ground. The other two agents, handling Barnes, reached the Plexiglas barricade on the far side of the room and kicked at it angrily. Agent Carter leveled his pistol at the shield, then, thinking of the ricochet, lowered the muzzle. The Chinese agents were screaming in Mandarin.
Outside the gallery, Mercy, along with a crowd of other agents and staff, looked on in sheer amazement. The room must have been sealed airtight because they could hear nothing that Carter or the others were saying, but they could see them moving frantically. A moment later Carter spoke into his radio, and an agent near Mercy responded.
“Yes, sir,” the agent said. “We’ll get the glass lifted immediately.”
“No!” Mercy yelled. The agent scowled at her. “Let me talk to him.”
The agent consulted with Carter, then pulled the bud from his ear. Mercy leaned in close to him, located the speaker, and grabbed the agent’s hand like it was a microphone. “Carter, it’s Detective Bennet. If I’m right, that entire room is now contaminated with the virus. You can’t open the doors.”
“Bullshit,” Carter said. He had approached the Plexiglas near her and stood there, his face red with anger. “This is the President of the United States in here and I’ll blow the side of the goddamned building away to get him out, virus or no virus!”
“Then you risk spreading the thing all over the city,” Mercy said.
President Barnes appeared at Carter’s side. It was a surreal moment for Mercy — an LAPD cop suddenly finding herself talking to the leader of the free world through a sheet of Plexiglas. He looked exactly as he did on television, except that his face was turning pink and a vein had started to pulse in his forehead.
“What the hell is this?” he demanded. “Who are you?”
Carter listed her credentials succinctly.
“There’s a virus, sir,” Mercy said.
Barnes blanched. “Are you sure—?” he started to ask, but discarded the question. Of course she was sure. She wouldn’t be there if she weren’t sure. “How bad?”
“Fatal,” she replied. “But not for a few hours at least. And I think there’s an antidote. But if we open these doors it will spread—”
Barnes was nothing if not decisive. He turned to Carter. “Get rid of anyone nonessential. Seal off the whole complex. Get National Health Services on the line, tell them to prepare some kind of contained transportation for all of us to a safer location. Keep these doors sealed until we know the entire building is evacuated.”
“But, sir—” Carter protested.
One of the other Secret Service agents shouted something to Carter, who turned to see the man holding up a small device. As Carter’s had earlier, Mercy’s heart stopped for a moment as she thought
“The guy who did this is a political activist, not an outright murderer,” Mercy said to Carter. “I’m guessing there’s a message there for you.”
Carter activated the DVD player, and an image came on the screen. Mercy could just see it between Carter and President Barnes, and Carter’s mike carried the message to her ears.
The image was little more than a silhouette, but Mercy recognized it as Copeland. “Hello,” he said in a gentrified voice. “You can call me Seldom Seen Smith and, if you’re watching this, Mr. President, you’ve just been infected with a deadly virus. You have approximately twelve hours to live.”
Carter glanced at Mercy with a damn-you-were-right look on his face.
The DVD continued. “Our purpose here is simple. To save the rain forests of the Amazon. Your first question, of course, will be to wonder what the connection is between our cause and your infection. Let me assure you that the connection is very direct. The virus that is now replicating in your system is called Cat’s Claw. It exists naturally in the Amazon. Of course, I have to confess, I’ve done a little tinkering with the virus. In its natural state, it kills human beings in about twenty-four hours. The strain that I have developed for you kills in half that time. I discovered it by lucky accident, but rest assured that loggers and developers will stumble upon it and carry it back to civilization soon enough. More importantly, there is an antidote…and the antidote also grows naturally in the Amazon. To date, I am the only person who knows from what plant the vaccine can be synthesized, and how to do it.
“My proposition to you is very simple. Go on television right now and announce that the rain forests must be secured immediately, and that all development and logging must halt. I will give you the antidote, and you will live.
“If you don’t, you’ll never hear from me again, and you will die. I would like you to note that I have gone to a great deal of trouble to keep the virus contained. Your location is isolated. The security system acts as a sort of quarantine zone. I have no wish to kill people unnecessarily. But you are destroying the planet, and I have to stop you. So if it comes down to it, I will spread the virus into the population, forcing them to preserve the Amazon until they can discover the vaccine for themselves. I expect my associate to be released unharmed. He knows how to contact me.”
The screen went blank.
The moment the alarms sounded from the complex below, Jack shifted from his slow and steady pace to a sprint. He was through the living room in a flash. He opened the sliding glass doors to the backyard as quickly and quietly as he could, and then he was out onto the patio of the backyard.
If there were lights in the backyard, they’d been killed. A line of tall shrubs along the perimeter shielded the yard from the city lights below, so the yard was almost completely in shadow. Jack crouched down, waiting for his eyes to adjust, scanning the deep pools of darkness along the edge of the yard. Finally he saw what he was looking for — a hunched figure almost invisible against the tree line. Jack didn’t bother with warnings. He leveled the SigSauer and exhaled as he squeezed off three rounds. Noise and fire shattered the silence and darkness, mixed with a startled cry of surprise and pain. Jack fired again. This muzzle flash left an afterimage seared on to his eyes, an image of Ayman al-Libbi on one knee, his face contorted in pain, an RPG pointing straight at Jack.
Jack dived to the side as he heard the familiar hiss and whistle of the launching rocket. The rocket-propelled grenade smoked across the short distance and exploded into the house behind Jack. The CTU agent felt himself lifted off the ground by tongues of fire and glass fragments glittering like a starburst as the sharp, short thunder of the ordinance enveloped him. He landed in the grass, barely keeping his hands on the SigSauer. Jack forced himself up to his knees, shaking his head and ignoring the roaring echo in his ears. Something in the house was on fire, casting uneven light out onto the yard. It was enough to see by. Jack raised his weapon one-handed and found Ayman al-Libbi on the far side of his sights. Before he could squeeze the trigger, someone body-slammed him from the side and Jack went over, landing heavily in the grass. This time he lost the SigSauer completely. The person on top of him was unskilled, but an animal, throwing violent knees into his body and tearing at his face. Jack caught the assailant’s arm, hooked his leg around the man’s leg, and bucked his hips, rolling over and ending on top. Without looking he threw a head butt downward and felt the hard bone of his forehead smash through lips and teeth. He raised his head back and slammed his elbow down onto the same spot. Only then did he look and see Muhammad Abbas’s face, now all blood and pulp.
Jack’s eyes were intent on Abbas but his senses were alert, aware of his surroundings. The movement was three-quarters behind him but he saw it nearly in time, rolling away as the shovel swung at his head. The shovel head glanced off his skull, making his head ring again. There were two accomplices with al-Libbi. Where the hell was Sharpton?
Jack rolled in the semi-darkness, groping for his weapon, but then he heard someone else tap and rack the SigSauer and he knew his attackers had found it first.
“Stop,” said a male voice. Abbas. Jack looked up. Abbas was on his feet, half his face illuminated by a half-
