John was still on the phone with his own succession of contacts as she hung up. Unfortunately, nearly all of his conversations had been in Urdu or Arabic.
She had no idea what had been said.
John wrapped up his final call as he parked outside the Shifa. There'd been no point in asking him to let her out at the entrance. He would've refused on the grounds of her safety, and she needed his translation skills inside, anyway.
Since she'd visited mere hours earlier, she led the way.
Instead of finding a tearstained, but solemn Inaya Sadat in the waiting room, sheer chaos greeted them. As for Inaya, the veiled mother was sobbing uncontrollably and even more inconsolably just outside the door of the pediatric ICU. No less than three nurses and a doctor were trying to calm her.
Regan turned to John. "What happened?"
"Something's wrong with the boy. As near as I can make out, his temperature is dangerously high, and…" John cocked his head as if trying to concentrate on a single stream of rapid Urdu out of the many. "Convulsions. The baby just had a seizure."
Oh, Jesus. She possessed nearly as much knowledge of medicine as Urdu, but even she knew that was bad. The boy was barely two months, and—
"Why?"
John glanced down at her. "Why, what?"
"The baby's supposed to be here for diabetes. I don't know a lot about the condition, but there was a girl in one of my foster homes who had it. Seizures can occur. But that shouldn't be happening here in an ICU, while they're monitoring him."
Chills rippled in as Regan recalled the rest. Namely, the girl's insulin. The vials had been refrigerated.
Another vial flashed through her brain. This one had been stored in a locked refrigerator in the pharmacy at the Joint Craig Theatre Hospital on Bagram Airbase. Only that vial had been tampered with before John and Captain Mendoza's A-Team had returned to Bagram, leaving the vial with its original anthrax booster contents and—
"Rae, what—"
She sprinted for the door of the ICU. Not only was she certain John would follow, there was no time to explain. Nor did she have time for the heated stream of Urdu that came out of one nurse's mouth or the Arabic that came out of the doctor's, as she blew past both and straight into the ICU room, right up to the clear-plastic medical bassinet with "Sadat" written in Urdu and English on a card slotted in at the end.
Regan ignored everything but that sweet, innocent face as she leaned all the way over the side of the bassinet, until she was an inch away from those cherubic lips.
She inhaled deeply.
Her foster sister's breath had smelled sweet when her blood sugar levels were in the red. The boy's breath didn't smell sweet.
The air was distinctly…fetid.
"Fuck." The expletive had come from John. He was standing right beside her, leaning over the crib too.
She didn't have to ask if John had recognized that odor; the curse had confirmed it. Whoever they were after wasn't just a traitor, he was an utter monster.
One who'd deliberately infected an innocent baby with that psycho-toxin.
22
Regan caught John's tortured stare as she straightened and stepped back from the ICU bassinet to grip his arm. "You've got to convince the doctor that there's more going on here than just diabetes." Though she'd wager that the stress of the little guy's condition had activated that damned chimeral psycho-toxin. "Give him Gil's number. Gil speaks Arabic, too. Make sure the doc calls him—before you leave his side. Then meet me in the waiting room. I still need your help with the mother."
More so than ever.
As for Gil, he would need to arrange for an emergency shipment of his makeshift chimeral cure to be flown to Islamabad before the hour was out.
Even then, there was no telling if the boy would receive it in time.
They were dealing with a baby for Christ's sake. Who knew how that would affect the treatment? If that tiny, innocent body could even handle it.
Leaving John to his task, Regan spun around and headed into the waiting room to make sure Inaya Sadat didn't pull the same disappearing stunt that her husband had before John had a chance to assist her in grilling the woman.
She paused just inside the door to the ICU and retrieved a pair of sterile, purple nitrile gloves from the box atop a stainless-steel rolling table, then kept moving out to the nurses' station. There—with Inaya's eggshell-blue shalwar kameez and veil firmly in her sights—she stopped as she pocketed the gloves. Listened.
Studied.
The devastated woman was still sobbing amid the trio of nurses, but she was quieter now, calmer. And unquestionably not faking her grief.
Good. As much as it pained Regan to use that profound anguish against a young mother, she absolutely would. She had no choice. There was an excellent chance that whoever Inaya was sleeping with had infected that boy—including her husband.
Especially if Brandt was the father.
If Aamer Sadat was their traitor, he could've blackmailed Brandt into murdering Hachemi to prevent his name from crossing the translator's lips and then chosen to clean up his own life—and extracted the revenge of the cuckolded in the process—by taking out the child that wasn't his, as well as the boy's biological father.
Either way, she wouldn't rest until she caught the bastard capable of sentencing a baby to the hell she and John's men had endured weeks earlier. Most of those men were now dead. Of the lucky four who'd survived a full facing-off with that chimera, she'd been left with a dominant gun hand she could no longer trust to do her bidding. Staff Sergeant Hudson and Sergeant Welch were also dealing with issues surrounding fine motor coordination, as well as memory in Welch's case. Sergeant Gutierrez was the only one who'd come through his bout relatively unscathed.
Even if the boy survived, what handicap would
