AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
Ricci feels a cold tack push into his heart. While no medical expert, he’s done his homework in preparation for the raid, and knows that BSL-4 is the highest level of safeguard for personnel working with dangerous pathogens. It occurs to him that this may well be the birthplace of the mutant virus that is turning Gordian’s internal organs to bloody sludge in a San Jose hospital bed. He also realizes that the killer, who Rollie Thibodeau — Ricci’s co-supervisor of field security operations — calls the Wildcat, is likely one of the authorized. Ricci detests the name Thibodeau has attached to him, thinks it sounds too much like a badge of honor. But then, he and Thibodeau are on very different pages about almost everything.
Ricci lets these thoughts have their unpleasant moment, then he looks at Rosander and Simmons.
“We have to separate,” he says. “Somebody could come up this elevator, surprise us from the rear. It’s got to be watched while I scope out the rest of the hall.”
The two men accept his orders in silence. Then a thumbs-up from Rosander, his eyes fastened on Ricci’s.
“Good luck,” he says. “Chief.”
There is pride and respect in Rosander’s voice as he addresses Ricci with that informal designation of rank. Chief. Even if there were time, Ricci knows he could never express how much it means to him. He is not the share-and-bare-it-all type. Not by a hobbled man’s mile.
He nods, claps Rosander’s shoulder, shifts his gaze to Nichols, who is young, green, and has made mistakes in training that might have gotten someone else dismissed from the team. In fact, the kid had been prepared to lay his head on the chopping block afterward. But Ricci had seen some of his own fire in Nichols’s eyes — only a cleaner, brighter, untainted flame — and convinced him to stay on.
“Ready?”
“Yes, sir.”
Ricci nods again.
“Come on, it’s you and me,” he says, and they hurry on along the corridor, leaving the other two men behind to guard their rear.
Though Ricci cannot know it, the next time he sees them they will be dead on the floor near the elevator, Simmons bleeding out from multiple bullet wounds to the side of his rib cage, Rosander with a crushed windpipe, and his brains oozing from a point-blank gunshot to the head meant to finish him off like an animal in a slaughterhouse pen.
And that will not be the worst of it. Unbelievably, unbearably, not the worst…
Ricci heard the flat, electronically baffled report of his gun through his earmuffs — a sound that tugged him from the sinkhole of memory with his finger still tight on the trigger. He took in the present like a drowning man starved for air as the third firing-range badguy went down, caught by a single clean shot. The Five-Seven raised level with his chest, Ricci stood waiting, ready, wanting to stay fluid as the tac sequence progressed. To keep his mind on the controllable here and now, and resist the desirous undertow of the past.
A second ticked by. Ricci breathed, exhaled. Ready. Steady. A crouched figure appeared from the right side of the course, the computerized lights dimming around it for a little added mischief and chaos. Go! Ricci swiveled his extended arms, sighted over the nub of his gun barrel, and bang. Crouching badguy was no more.
Ricci held a motionless shooter’s stance. Took another breath. Kept trying not to think but to be. Here, now. In the moment, as the movie stars liked to say. Then a fifth badguy sprang out at him, standing at full height, facing Ricci from the middle of the corridor—
No, no. The firing lane.
Ricci swore to himself. Just what moment had he been in?
He got that biting, bitter taste in his mouth again, his gun swinging into position, his finger starting its deadly squeeze… and stopping.
Another figure had sprung up out of nowhere directly in front of the badguy. A woman, her painted-on eyes wide, her painted-on mouth gaping in a silent scream, the expression a cartoon facsimile of terror. Ricci held his fire. This was goddamned unexpected. Sure, why not? Unexpected was the whole point of this exercise.
Clever fucking software.
Practice badguy, practice hostage.
Ricci hesitated. Tick-tick-tick. Decision time. Now thought had to reenter the process. And with thought came a backslide into the choking memories of Ontario, and his dash through that final passage with Nichols, deep in the hornet’s nest, desperate to find what he needed to save Gordian’s life, uncertain whether he’d even know how to recognize it, or the place where it would be stored. Ricci’s helmet gear had provided wireless audiovisual contact with Eric Oh, an epidemiologist who was coaching him from three time zones away in California, and who Ricci had been told might know if they were very lucky—
On his right, behind a thick plate-glass inset, Ricci sees a large room filled with equipment that seems to indicate he’s getting hot. Tanks, ducting, air feed, and intake pumps.
“Doc? You with me?” he says into his helmet mike.
“Yes. You’re looking at the microencapsulation lab. This can’t be far from where they’d keep the cure.”
“Right. Assuming there is one.”
Silence to that remark.
Ricci looks at the solid concrete wall ahead of him with a stitch of apprehension, hustles along at a trot. The problem is he’s running out of hallway. Three, four more office doors on either side, and that’s it. Dead end. If he doesn’t find what he needs here, it’s doubtful he can shift the hunt to another part of the facility without turning all his men into casualties. He can almost feel the weight of their lives on his shoulders.
“Ricci, wait, slow down!” Eric’s voice is loud, excited in his comlink’s earpiece. “Over on your left, that door!”
He stops, turns, scans the sign above it:
POLYMERASE ACTIVATORS/ANTIVIRALS
“Tom, listen—”
“You don’t have to translate,” Ricci says. “We’re going in.”
He quickly moves to the left of the door, waves Nichols to the opposite side, tries the knob. Locked. Stepping back, Ricci aims his weapon — it is a compact variable velocity rifle system subgun with adjustable lethal or nonlethal settings — at the spot below the knob, squeezes off a staccato burst, then kicks out at the door. It flings inward without resistance, the lock mechanism in fragments from his shots.
They scramble into the room, Ricci fanning his outthrust gun to the left, Nichols buttonhooking to the right of the doorway, looking sharp, his technique perfect.
The office is unoccupied, its lights off. Ricci finds the wall switch and they come on.
He is seconds from a decision that he will always wish he could unmake.
The mid-size room is windowless, partitioned into four central soundproof cubicles that enclose counters and computer workstations. The double-depth multimedia filing /storage units built into the walls are six feet high, with slide-out drawers and rotating shelves in steel housings. Quick access systems, no doors, no locks. It doesn’t surprise Ricci. The staffers allowed into this office, this entire wing of the building, would have wide clearance anyway.
He moves deeper into the room, turns to Nichols.
“You better stand outside in the hall, watch my back,” he says, forking two fingers at his own eyes. “Keep alert.”
It seems a fundamentally obvious and sensible call for Ricci. He does not know how long he will be in the room. He doesn’t even know exactly what he’s looking for. But he does know he’ll be vulnerable and
