Reckless Creed Read online

  “Excuse me, ma’am, is there something you needed?”

  What she needed was to find her voice. She needed to remember the message she had wanted to get to Rief. She had her on the phone. She was speaking to her directly. This was even better. If only she could speak.

  “Look, unless you tell me what this is about, I’m hanging up now.”

  “No, please, don’t do that.” Panic pushed aside her confidence.

  Oh God! She didn’t mean to sound desperate, and yet that was exactly how she was sounding.

  “I need your help. Only you. No one else. Please just listen. I’m sick. They infected me.” She swallowed hard and felt a coughing fit coming on.

  No, please not now.

  She ripped the wrapper off a lozenge and popped it into her mouth.

  “What’s your name?”

  “My name? That’s . . . that’s not important.”

  “Yes, it is. If you expect me to listen to you, to trust you, I need your name.”

  She hesitated. Was it a trap? No, she had chosen to trust this woman. She couldn’t stop now.

  “It’s Christina. Christina Lomax.”

  “Why do you believe someone infected you, Christina?”

  “Because they told me they did.” Suddenly she realized she hadn’t checked outside. Had it been seconds or a minute? Her eyes darted over the top of the booth. She couldn’t see the soldier. In a whisper, she said, “They’re paying me to walk around New York and give it to others.”

  “Who exactly do you think infected you?” Rief asked, and Christina couldn’t help thinking that the biologist sounded skeptical.

  “Whoever infected those birds in Nebraska.”

  There was silence on the other end.

  Christina’s eyes darted from the street to the door and back again.

  “Please just listen. I’m not crazy. I don’t have much time.”

  Then she tried to explain about the flash drive. About the man giving it to her and telling her to make sure it would be found on her body. She was interrupted by another coughing fit and once by a waiter. No one else seemed interested in her conversation, but she continued in bouts of whispers and a low voice.

  Finally she told the biologist that she would give the flash drive to her, but only her.

  Then she told her that it had to be today. It had to be this evening, because tomorrow at this time she might already be dead.

  45

  FLORIDA PANHANDLE

  Creed had sent Charlie Wurth and Benjamin Platt a list of what he needed along with instructions on how to collect samples. He based it on the same process he had used for collecting cancer and C. diff samples.

  Now with Hannah and Dr. Avelyn, he paced Hannah’s kitchen while the three of them figured out if what he had just promised the DHS deputy director was even possible.

  “I told them what plastic tubes to use,” Creed said.

  “With the polypropylene wool inside,” Hannah reminded him.

  “Yes.”

  Looking to Dr. Avelyn, Creed asked, “Do we know for sure that the bird flu smells any different than ordinary flu virus?”

  “I believe so. I’ve been doing some research. No matter what strain of bird flu, it causes an intense response from the body’s immune system. The dogs will be able to detect those changes. There’s a release of proteins to fight the virus, but at the same time those proteins trigger inflammation. I also read that the virus tends to stick around the nose and throat, unlike the regular flu, which invades the gastrointestinal tract. If we get enough strong samples of the infection, we shouldn’t have a problem training the dogs. But will we? Get enough samples? Are they going to be able to provide the quantity we need?”

  “They claim they will. They’re getting them from victims in the Chicago area who are already pretty sick, so they’ll be strong samples.”

  “But how many different people?” Hannah asked. “We had over twenty-five samples from twenty-five different people when we started training for C. diff.”

  “I told them that. They said it shouldn’t be a problem. There’re already over two hundred known victims just in Chicago.”

  “Oh Lord have mercy.” Hannah shook her head.

  The more difficult task would be training the dogs in such a short time span. Training of any sort was a series of repetitions. Overstimulation and fatigue could muck up the process. Plus, this was still new territory for Creed. And he was learning alongside the dogs.

  With explosives and narcotics detection, it was easy to isolate the single target odor for the dogs. Same was true for cadaver search. A dead body gave off certain gases during decomposition. Those smells were the same no matter how old the victim was and no matter what other ailments they had before death. But with disease and illnesses it was the opposite.

  One inhaled breath condensation sample included thousands of organic compounds, gases, and scents. Dogs could smell all of them, including those that related specifically to that person, just as Creed had told Platt and Wurth. A dog could smell what toothpaste was used, or the contents of the last meal that was eaten.

  Other variables contributed to different breath smells, like a person’s age and even ethnicity. So the scent that cancer or diabetes or C. diff or even the flu gave off was only a part of the whole mixture that created that individual person’s scent.

  The best way to train was to have a large library of samples of that particular virus. He’d need to train the dogs on so many different people with the virus until the only common denominator was the virus scent itself.

  “We’ll also need as many healthy samples as we can get to use as controls,” Creed told Dr. Avelyn.

  “I’ll start with all the staff.”

  “I can get some volunteers at Segway House,” Hannah offered.

  “Penelope will be bringing some dogs later today. Maybe she can drum up some volunteers, too.”

  Creed felt a dog pawing at his feet and looked down to find Jason’s black Lab puppy. He picked him up and scratched behind his ears.

  “What’s Scout doing here?”

  “Jason asked me to watch him,” Hannah said.

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know. I guess until he gets back.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Did he tell you how long he’d be?”

  “No, he did not. What’s with you, Rye?”

  Creed was feeling a panic knotting up in his gut. He was worried about Jason ever since he found out about Tony, and after Wylie . . . There was something wrong about this. He knew the kid would never hurt himself if he knew Scout would be left alone, but leaving the dog with Hannah instead of just putting him out in the kennel with the other dogs—

  “Do we have a key to his trailer?”

  “Yes.”

  “You need to get it for me.”

  “What in the world? Rye, we can’t go into his trailer. It’s his home.”

  “Hannah, please. Just get me the key.”

  46

  NEW YORK CITY

  Christina was exhausted. More than anything in the world she just wanted to go back to her hotel room and crawl back into bed. She had swallowed half a bottle of cough syrup and was popping more Tylenol than she knew was safe. The ache in her chest was now a knotted fist pressing against her lungs. She didn’t look anymore when she spit mucus into a tissue. She didn’t need to. She knew it was bloody.

  She had given Amee Rief the phone number to her other burner phone. When she left the café she dropped the one she had used into a trash can, wadded up in a bunch of used tissues. If Rief didn’t keep her word and somehow tried to track her by using that phone, she’d be in for a surprise and a dead end.

  But before Christina could even hope to connect with Rief, there was something els
e she needed to do. She needed to shake this soldier.

  Again, he had disappeared for almost an hour, and Christina was hoping the watchers had thought it a waste of their time to keep such close tabs on her. She had meandered through shop after shop, trying to think of somewhere she would be safe. She anticipated that she’d need twenty to thirty uninterrupted minutes. But every restroom she canvassed was too small and too busy.

  She even thought about taking a cab to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where certainly she would have plenty of space. She doubted the soldier would even come in. But she knew there would be security . . . and cameras. So she discounted the idea.

  She was walking up Third Avenue, trying to convince herself to not turn around and go back to the hotel. Then she spotted the familiar orange-and-white sign. The Home Depot wasn’t anything like the one she was used to back in her hometown. There was no huge parking lot. It was squeezed between a bank and another business. If nothing else, maybe there wouldn’t be anyone in the women’s restroom.

  The store actually had quite a few customers. Christina busied herself pretending to be interested in a display by the window. The soldier kept walking up the street. He was probably wondering why she hadn’t chosen Bloomingdale’s instead.

  She waited a few minutes, then casually made her way to the back of the store. The restrooms were in the far corner, women’s on one side and men’s on the other. And at the back of the hallway she saw another door marked FAMILY RESTROOM.

  She couldn’t believe her good luck. It was large. Wheelchair accessible with a diaper-changing table attached to the wall. And a lock on the door.

  Quickly she started pulling out everything she would need. She took the Krazy Glue and the X-Acto knife from the artist kit, making sure that the blade was razor-sharp. She uncapped the iodine and rubbing alcohol. She brought out a stack of tissues and several of the large Band-Aids.

  Yesterday one of her purchases was a cheap watch, and now she noted the exact time. She couldn’t take more than twenty minutes or the soldier might come in looking for her. And lately the fever blurred her mind so much that everything seemed to take long minutes, but in reality it actually might be only seconds.

  When she had all the items lined up on the sink, she took off the sweatshirt and T-shirt.

  She stopped to take a long look at herself. Her cheeks were gaunt. There were dark circles under her eyes. Sweaty strings of hair had escaped the ball cap. But still she was relieved that she didn’t look like the zombie she felt had taken over her body.

  The microchip implant was just under the skin on her upper arm. Despite her current memory lapses she had remembered where they put it early last fall. She had no idea what it even looked like. They had used a syringelike instrument with a needle that poked under the skin. She was told that it was about the size of a piece of long-grain rice. It would act as a personal database, storing valuable information, not only her identification but also her medical history, medications, allergies, and contact information.

  She remembered that the scientist who had done the actual injection had told her that it was the wave of the future. Never did she once consider that it might be used to track her and make sure that she didn’t survive one of their experiments.

  Her hand trembled as she picked up the X-Acto knife. She met her eyes in the mirror.

  “You can do this. You have to do this.”

  She dabbed iodine on the bump where she knew the implant was located. She poured alcohol over the blade of the X-Acto. Then she started cutting her own skin.

  47

  FLORIDA PANHANDLE

  Creed tried to slow himself down, not just because Hannah and Dr. Avelyn were trailing behind him. He knew he needed to get control over his emotions.

  “What in the world are you doing, Rye?”

  “Listening to my gut,” he told her.

  He knocked on the trailer door but gave very little time for a response before he shoved the key in the lock. He realized he was holding his breath when he opened the door, bracing himself for what he might find.

  Jason had said a couple of times that he never saw Tony’s suicide coming. Had Creed been blind to Jason’s depression? On the drive home last night Creed had been thinking about Wylie. He’d been fighting memories of his father’s suicide.

  “Jason!” he yelled.

  Nothing in the main living area. No metallic scent of blood. But what had Jason said about suicide? Something about not leaving a bloody mess for his mother to see.

  “Rye, please stop and tell me what’s going on,” Hannah said from the doorway.

  Creed headed to the bedrooms, taking a breath before opening each door. In the bigger bedroom he noticed the bed neatly made, but a sleeping bag and pillow were on the floor. He marched on to the bathroom. The trailer had only one. The place was clean. There was nothing until Creed opened the cabinet under the sink and found the trash can.

  He pulled it out and spilled the contents in the sink. Alongside a couple of used disposable razors, there was a pile of pill containers, each with a prescription label. He started opening them before he realized all of them were empty.

  “Are you thinking he took those?” Dr. Avelyn asked.

  “I’m sure he takes medication, Rye,” Hannah said, standing at his elbow.

  “All of these?” He started handing them to Dr. Avelyn, one at a time.

  “Are you worried about an addiction?” The veterinarian was still confused. She had no reason to think Jason might hurt himself.

  “Hey, what’s going on?”

  It was Jason.

  Hannah and Dr. Avelyn backed out of the small bathroom.

  “Can you give us a minute?” Creed asked them, and both seemed more than anxious to leave the trailer.

  Then Creed waited.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Jason asked when he saw the containers in the sink.

  “Why do you have all of these and what happened to them?”

  “That’s none of your damned business.”

  “Do you have them stashed somewhere? Did you take a bunch of them?”

  “Is that the way this is? I have no privacy? You can ram your way in here anytime you want?”

  “No, of course not.” Creed scooped up the containers and razors and threw them back into the trash can. “I was worried when I saw that you left Scout with Hannah.”

  “What?”

  “I had a bad feeling,” he tried to explain. “A gut instinct. After Tony . . . after Wylie. Thinking about my dad.” He looked up at Jason. “I’m sorry. I made a mistake.”

  He followed Jason into the living room. Out the window he saw that Hannah and Dr. Avelyn had headed back to the house. Jason noticed, too.

  Creed was about to follow them when Jason said, “Your gut was right.”

  Jason’s eyes met his and held him as he added, “I’ve collected and hoarded that stash since I was in the hospital. Doctors kept prescribing stuff, but none of it helped. I figured together they’d make a pretty effective cocktail. You know, if I decided to do something. I guess it was kind of comforting knowing that I had all of them.”

  “But you didn’t take them?”

  Jason shook his head. “I was going to the other night. Scout almost got a couple and it scared me. I flushed all of them—every single one—down the toilet.”

  Creed rubbed at his eyes, then his jaw, relief sweeping over him. Then he stopped.

  “Promise me that if you ever think about it again, you’ll come talk to me first.”

  Jason looked surprised and opened his mouth to protest but then changed his mind. “Only if you do the same.”

  It hit Creed hard that the kid was smart enough, intuitive enough to know that Creed had thought about it, too. But it was a long time ago. Before he had Hannah and the dogs. Instead of telling Jason that, he simply nodded.<
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  48

  HARTSFIELD-JACKSON ATLANTA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

  GEORGIA

  The first flight O’Dell could get from Omaha to Pensacola had a two-hour layover in Atlanta. She found a quiet area—not an easy task—and decided to use her time wisely.

  She and Agent Alonzo had been missing each other’s calls. This time they finally connected.

  “There’s no Lawrence Tabor with the FBI,” he told her.

  “Maybe he’s retired?”

  “No, I would have found him. There is a Lawrence Tabor who’s a federal employee but he works for one of the other alphabets.”

  “Which agency?”

  “DARPA.”

  O’Dell’s stomach slipped to her knees. She told herself that it might not be the same guy, and yet she still let the words slip—“Son of a bitch.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Not your favorite alphabet?”

  “Currently, no,” she admitted. “It’s not. But maybe this isn’t the same guy.”

  “Oh, I beg to differ,” Agent Alonzo said. “Now, I can’t tell you exactly what methodology I used to find this information, but the Mr. Lawrence Tabor who’s employed by DARPA spent five days in Pensacola.”

  “How can you be sure of that?”

  “I know which hotel he stayed at.”

  O’Dell smiled. Alonzo was good. From past experience she knew there wasn’t anyone or any agency that could keep their travel expense records secret from him.

  “He worked for DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office,” Alonzo continued. “That was up until last summer, when he transferred to the Defense Sciences Office. He’s still with DARPA, but now he’s listed as being on special assignment. And that’s where my magic ends. No one was authorized to tell me what that special assignment was or where he might be today.”

  “He’s no longer in Pensacola?”

  “Checked out of his hotel yesterday. He hasn’t checked into another. If and when he does, I’ll be able to tell you.”