The Solomon Effect

75

Jax stared through the wavy plastic barrier at the young woman in a hospital gown on the inside of the isolation bubble.

“How is she?” he asked.

Beside him, the young Latino doctor in green scrubs glanced down at his chart. “She’s doing great. It’s basically like a bad cold. But she’ll need to stay in there until they’re sure she’s no longer contagious.”

“Can I talk to her?”

The doctor tapped the microphone beside him. “Through the intercom system.”

Jax cleared his throat. “Hey, October. You look like shit.”

“Thank you.” She blew her nose. “They haven’t told me anything. What’s going on?”

“You did it, Tobie; you stopped Walker before he’d managed to break the seal on the HVAC system. They’re monitoring everyone who was in the hotel, just to be safe, but so far the only two people showing any signs of exposure to the pathogen are you and Walker. Not that anyone knows what really happened. The official line is they’re worried about an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease.”

“So how’s Walker?”

“Not good, actually. The arrogant SOB obviously never thought to check his own DNA. They’ve had him on life support for the past twelve hours, but they’re about ready to pull the plug. How’s that for poetic justice?”

She sniffed. “What about Boyd?”

“Well, according to the press, the General died a hero, saving a young Naval ensign from an unknown assailant. That’s you, by the way. The ensign, I mean-not the assailant.”

She stared at him with wide, red-rimmed eyes. “That’s not poetic justice.”

“No. That’s the government covering its ass.”

“And the guy in the elevator?”

“Boyd’s aide, Captain Syd Phillips. He’s downstairs in the ICU, too, but he’s expected to make it. Says he thought the entire operation was a legitimate, authorized black op.”

“You believe him?”

“Actually, yes. That’s one of the problems with black ops. They’re all dirty, and they’re all secret. So how was he supposed to know this one wasn’t actually authorized?”

“What’ll happen to him?”

“He can kiss his military career-and his pension-good-bye.”

“That doesn’t seem fair.”

Jax rubbed the side of his nose with his knuckles. “He was up to his captain’s bars in a plan to kill millions-including you and me. And his defense is, ‘I was just following orders’? Excuse me while I don’t feel sorry for him.”

October blew her nose again. “How’d those two ever get together in the first place?”

“You mean Boyd and Walker?” Jax shrugged. “Who knows? They probably met at some political fund-raiser for the neofascistly inclined. I suspect Boyd said something like-” Jax pitched his voice into a gravelly Texas drawl. “‘You know what we need? Some new plague that’ll wipe out all these damned A-rabs, and maybe take out the Jews, too.’ And Walker probably said”-Jax switched to a Boston twang-“‘Funny you should mention that. I had this old professor at MIT who told me once about a nasty little pathogen he used to play with back when he was a Nazi…’”

She laughed softly, then shook her head, her smile fading. “It’s terrifying to realize how close a handful of men can come to killing tens of millions of people.”

“That’s exactly what makes bioweapons so scary. All it takes is one nut case with a mission-or even a careless mistake-and half the people on this planet could die. Look at the anthrax scare of 2001. And anthrax is actually pretty hard to weaponize. There are plenty of nasties in the world’s laboratories that would be a lot easier to disperse. And a hell of a lot more deadly.”

She stared at him through the wavy plastic, her face pale.

He said, “You doing okay in there, October?”“

She rubbed her forehead. “Yeah. The isolation is just starting to get to me, that’s all.”

“How about if I send you some books? What would you like?”

She thought about it a minute, then smiled. “Got anything on the French Revolution?”