Immortal

64

Doug Jarvis awoke as pain ripped across his skull. Bright light seared his eyeballs as a voice spoke in his ear.

‘Just lie still, sir, you’re going to be fine.’

Jarvis struggled to focus against the pain, and saw a man leaning over him, smiling encouragingly.

‘Where am I?’ Jarvis rasped.

‘You’re going to be fine, just relax. You’ve had quite a bash.’

Jarvis saw that he was in a small room, a first-aid box hanging from the wall nearby. A sudden flurry of memories bolted through his brain and he fought to sit upright. The sound of metal on metal clanked in his ears, and he realized that he was cuffed to a gurney.

‘What the hell?’

‘Please stay still, sir,’ the man beside him said.

‘Why the hell am I cuffed? Where’s Donald Wolfe? He’s trying to poison the General Assembly and—’

‘There’s no need to worry about that,’ said the doctor softly.

Jarvis peered at him and saw the kindly smile on his face, the look of a man tending to a child.

‘Have you got my identification?’ Jarvis demanded.

‘You didn’t have any,’ the doctor said, dabbing gently with a crimson-stained cloth at Jarvis’s head. ‘You were found slumped in an elevator. You must have taken quite a fall. It’s a wonder how you got into the Conference Building at all.’

Jarvis felt a sudden impending doom descend upon him as he looked up at the doctor.

‘Sir, I’ve been stripped of my identification by Colonel Donald Wolfe. The man is armed. He intends to infect the water within the General Assembly Hall with a strain of Spanish Flu that is highly lethal. You know what Spanish Flu is, I take it?’

The doctor looked down at Jarvis.

‘Yes, I do. But I can assure you that there is no danger. Colonel Wolfe was the man who found you and called the medical team. He seemed quite concerned.’

‘He was the one who hit me!’ Jarvis shouted, pain barraging his weary brain with salvos of agony. ‘Get on the phone to the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lieutenant-General Abraham Mitchell. He’ll confirm who I am!’

‘I’m sure he will,’ the doctor nodded patronizingly, and continued to dab at the head wound.

Jarvis mustered every last ounce of his patience.

‘Doctor, if you don’t make that call and get me out of this goddamned gurney, a lot of people are going to die. Do you understand? If I’m lying, you’ll have wasted two minutes on a call. If I’m not, you’ll have wasted millions of lives. What’s it going to be? A hundred second phone call or a hundred million lives?’ He leveled the doctor with a steady gaze. ‘Your call.’

‘All vehicles: suspects armed and considered dangerous, proceed with caution.’

Lieutenant Zamora keyed off his microphone and glanced in his rear-view mirror at the line of four patrol cars following him in convoy down the I-285, their lights flashing.

Alongside him sat Butch Cutler, while in the rear seat of his car, cuffed and silent, sat Saffron Oppenheimer.

‘I’m taking a hell of a goddamned risk bringing you out here,’ he said, keeping one eye on the road ahead. ‘You try to make a break for it, I’ll hand your case over to US Marshalls and have them hunt you down day and night.’

‘Story of my life,’ Saffron replied without concern. ‘How much further?’

‘We’re ten minutes away from the caverns.’

‘Stay north of the hills,’ Saffron said. ‘I’ve never seen those old men head south of them.’

Lieutenant Zamora shook his head in confusion.

‘What the hell is it with those people? If they even exist, why the hell would they stay in the state at all? If SkinGen and people like Jeb Oppenheimer are hunting for them, surely they’d be better hidden in rural Wyoming or something?’

‘I don’t know,’ Saffron replied. ‘Maybe they have people here in New Mexico who help them, keep them supplied with food and water and such like. Whatever the reason, it’s enough to keep them here. We wouldn’t have seen them in the deserts as much as we did if they were roaming the entire continent.’

Cutler stared thoughtfully at the road ahead for a moment before speaking. ‘What makes you so sure that Nicola Lopez will betray Ethan Warner? Near as I could see, they’re pretty tight together.’

‘I know what I saw,’ Saffron insisted. ‘Lopez met with my grandfather and there’s only one reason that he would do that — to buy her off. Did you get the warrant to access her bank accounts?’

Cutler looked at Zamora, who said nothing. Saffron smiled coldly.

‘So you did get them,’ she purred. ‘Incriminating, were they?’

‘Money is money,’ Zamora said. ‘There was an anomalous sum deposited in one of her accounts yesterday, yes, but we haven’t traced its source yet. It could be anything.’

‘Yeah,’ Saffron uttered, ‘course it could.’