In Death's Shadow Read online

  He scowled.

  “Look, I just need to get out of town till those men stop looking for me. I haven’t done anything.”

  A while later, he realized she had answered his question, and he had not responded. They passed the exit to Southlake Mall. “Then where do you want to go?”

  “Where would you like to take me?”

  He turned and looked at her. The wide smile she used at the strip club was flattened on her face. She looked absurd. He glanced back at the road and slammed on his brakes to miss hitting some fool doing the speed limit. Why had she reverted to being seductive when he was already doing what she wanted? He rubbed his chin and stared at the traffic. Something bad had happened to her.

  She wasn’t just hiding out now. She was running. Whatever the story had been, it had progressed. Maybe, in someplace where she was not frightened, she might tell him. He could call it in to Bill—special to the Atlanta paper. Or was his head too foggy to think straight? “How about Savannah? We could stay on the riverfront. That’s nice.”

  “Sure. Wherever you want to go.”

  He drove. The sun blinded him on the way to Macon. Turning off on 16, shadows raced in front of the car. Several times Ree poked him in the arm when his head started to droop. It was dark before they’d even reached Dublin, the exit oasis before the miles of pine trees and nothing.

  His lights illuminated the sign for the exit. He decided to stop and get some coffee. He had to wake up.

  In the distance, he saw headlights coming toward him. It looked like they were on the same side of the road as he was. Must be his eyes playing tricks on him.

  The exit was only a quarter of a mile up the road.

  “Ree?” he said. He looked over and saw her eyes closed. “Ree?” he said louder. He looked back at the road. The lights now aimed directly at him and were growing bigger every second. He felt a cold chill run down his back. He let off on the accelerator.

  “What?” Ree said.

  Harry’s breath started to race. “Look at those lights. Don’t they look like they’re on the same—shit, they are.”

  “My God, stop!” Ree screamed.

  He clenched his fingers on the steering wheel, his heart pounding. He could not move. The twin orbs of the headlights grew huge in front him. Left? Right? Which way should he go? A pickup truck headed straight at him. He slammed the brakes.

  They locked. The breath froze in his chest. Ree screamed. The car slid sideways.

  Not far enough. The oncoming lights blinded him. Right ahead. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. He let off the brake, jerked the wheel over, hit the accelerator. The pickup roared past. The Chevy shook and started to spin. Dark shapes raced past them. Harry froze, his hands nailed to the wheel. The world spun around him and then stopped.

  They headed straight toward a bridge abutment. He jerked the wheel in the direction of the spin. Metal shrieked. They bounced off the concrete, just grazing it. The force threw him into the seatbelt. Pain blazed through him. The car straightened out, going forward.

  The shrieking continued. He realized it was Ree. Her eyes were wide, her face contorted with terror. Racing so fast the car vibrated. He drove the Chevy up the GA 441 exit. In the rearview mirror, he saw one red taillight disappear over the top of a hill. Harry slammed on the brakes. The Chevy came to a halt.

  “Jesus,” he said, his pulse a loud rumble in his ears.

  Ree leaned over and buried her head into his shoulder. Her hands gripped his arm tight. He could feel her shaking. Gingerly, he stroked her hair as his own pulse slowed.

  “They tried to kill us,” she said.

  He put the car in gear and headed southeast on the four-lane state road: too easy to be found on an interstate. The darkened scenery changed from rolling hills to swamp. His fingers stayed glued to the wheel; the knuckles, white.

  Andrews slipped the tape into the player. Progress had been made in intercepting phone calls. The first voice was clearly Ferenzi’s. The second sounded distant.

  “They almost got creamed by some drunk in a pickup. Then they took off down 441, speeding. Just lucky they didn’t get killed or stopped by the police.”

  “Any indication of why she’s running?” It was Ferenzi’s voice again.

  “I managed to find their trail last night. The reporter was seen in an emergency room. Somebody beat him up. The girl was with him. She checked them into a motel, but he used a credit card in the morning to keep the room. That’s where I found him and marked the car. Later, he picked her up at Georgia State. Got her on the run, not even stopping. Looked like she thought someone was after her. After they took off, I saw a couple of men running through the parking lot. I’ve got pictures. I’ll get them developed and have Jerry stay here till he can fax them to you.”

  “Good, get them up here first thing in the morning.”

  “Soon’s I can. There isn’t anything open in Jesup this late. No place to get them developed at least. We’ll have to wait till the morning.”

  “All right, just hurry it.”

  “Will do. I’ll keep them under observation. I’ve got the room next to theirs. The walls are concrete. No problem for audio. Send somebody to pick Jerry up and bring him down tomorrow. It would be helpful to have two cars.”

  “Fine. Call me the next stop.”

  The phone went dead. Andrews pushed stop on the tape player and sat back in the chair. Outside, the gleaming IBM tower shone against the darkness. Here and there other high-rises strutted up against the cloudy sky. The hotel room looked north over downtown Atlanta.

  He picked up the file on Harry Adams. That was the way of it these days. Agents sat in rooms and studied computer-generated reports. Everything you wanted to know. Harry was divorced. He went to a bookstore once a week and spent around ten dollars. He used to buy clothes at a fancy mall lingerie store every Valentine’s Day but had stopped the year before the divorce. He ate at restaurants. He worked for a weekly newspaper as a reporter.

  Why was this ordinary individual with Abu? Andrews scribbled a big “why?” on the page under the information about Adams.

  Nothing in the file explained it. There were no charges at dance clubs ever in the man’s history, yet he had been seen leaving the club with Abu on the night the other dancer died. Then they’d stayed in a motel together. Now they were together and on the run.

  From what? Was Ferenzi right and the girl a contact for a terrorist group? If so, who was chasing her?

  He put the file down on the table and stared at the cityscape. The lights from cars snaked through the streets. A triangular-shaped building stuck out from a series of square buildings. He wondered why anyone would construct a building that shape and then decided it must at one time have been flanked on all sides by streets. Now it faced parking lots. The street to one side of it was gone, consumed. His own notes from his conversation with the other agent in DC were sitting next to Harry Adams’s file. Andrews picked them up and stared at them. Martin had not told all he knew.

  “No sign of Middle Eastern terrorists in Atlanta,” Andrews said, reading out loud from the notes. “No evidence the terrorist groups had gotten into biological weapons in any actionable way here at least. And, no, there was no viral bomb that caused heart attacks.”

  Andrews thought back to the conversation. He’d asked Martin if the Middle Eastern groups were known to have a viral weapon that caused heart attacks. For a brief moment, the line had gone silent. Martin finally said: “Not that I know of.” Then Andrews had asked Martin if the United States had such a weapon. Again there’d been a pause, this time longer, and then denial and then a new subject. That had been the lie, Andrews judged. Martin had paused too long and then gone on too quick. There was such a weapon, or at least there might be. Why would Martin lie about it? Was it government property? Was the agency protecting something? Or was Andrews just being paranoid and rea
ding too much into too little?

  The telephone rang, and he went over to the bed, sat down, and picked up the receiver. It was his contact with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

  “They’re putting a warrant out for Abu.”

  Andrews pressed the phone to his ear. “Why?”

  “The Dekalb police had one of their men over at the dancer’s apartment. The cop was found dead this evening. He’d been supposed to report in at six. The murder weapon had fingerprints on it. Very small fingerprints. They matched Abu’s prints. The gun was registered to her.”

  “Let me know if they find her,” Andrews said and hung up the phone.

  Ferenzi had the reporter’s car locked. There was no way the two would get away. Nor, if Ferenzi was right, was this the time to pick them up. Too much to lose if she was a contact to terrorists. Why else would Abu kill a cop?

  Andrews rubbed at his chin, stood, and started pacing. Simple answers were often wrong. Had she surprised the cop, panicked, fired, and run? Or was it that someone else was there and just used her gun? The search Ferenzi had done of the apartment had turned up a weapon registered to the girl. Anyone could have used it.

  Or was she a terrorist with much to hide?

  He put on his coat and walked out of the room. Too many questions. He needed to go outside, feel the cool air, see the sky, let it all sort out in the back of his mind. The elevator dropped to the motor lobby, and he walked to and fro, waiting for the valet to bring his car.

  When the rented car was brought up, he got in and started driving through downtown, hoping to find answers in the twisting, one-way streets and overlong traffic lights.

  South America: huge rain forest trees and thick undergrowth formed dense walls on each side of the clearing. The huts gathered together against the darkness; the thatched roofs, half lit by the morning sun. Maria Santos stared at the man and woman walking the path to her house. Behind them sauntered a policeman from the city. Maria sat on the earth in front of the house, pounding meal. The man spoke in English. He was from America. The woman translated in a clipped dialect.

  “Mrs. Santos?”

  Maria nodded.

  “We’d like you to answer a few questions.”

  She felt a sudden clenching in the back of her neck. “What is it you want?”

  “Your husband. The people in town said he just came in to some money. Is that right?”

  She spat on the ground. “If he did, I did not see it.”

  “How would he have gotten money, if he did?” the woman asked.

  “Rob some tourist.”

  “But he did not tell you anything, maybe that he had gone into the forest?”

  “No,” Maria said.

  It took many nos to make them go away. After they left Maria waited awhile and then went into her house. She looked proudly at the dress she had bought the day before. It was red with large print flowers. Jorge had finally done well. Even better, the bastard was dead. He collapsed when he was fighting in a bar. Not a mark on him. Now Maria and their daughter would go to the city. Maria could find a job. They could live, instead of starving in a mud-caked village. She glanced down at the little girl beside her, at the hollowed cheeks, the ribs that seemed to stick out even through the tattered and dirty blouse. Next would be new clothes for the girl.

  Where the money came from, Maria didn’t know. One day Jorge had ran off upriver into the rain forest with a bunch of his drunkard friends. He’d been in a drunken rage. A week later, he was back with new clothes and American money. Two weeks later he was dead, never to beat her again. She had found where he hid the rest of the money. She found his rifle. It had been fired. She told no one of her sudden riches.

  Several days after the interview, she left the village, taking her child with her and not looking back. A new life for herself and the little girl she loved more than the world had begun. She asked no questions and answered none. She didn’t see the people who followed her.

  Seven

  A day passed. No one died.

  Good news and bad news. Rendon rolled up his sleeves. He brushed beads of perspiration from his forehead. Health departments always seemed to be either too hot or too cold—few were the happy mediums in government.

  Rendon looked up when Cougher came in the meeting room. The senior man took a seat at the head of the table, the chair squeaking from the sudden weight. A deep frown creased his normally round, friendly face. It was nine in the evening, and both men had been working since early morning.

  “So where are we, Thomas?” the senior investigator said and rubbed his eyes.

  “The case at Saint Joe’s ended up on the balloon pump this morn—”

  “The what?” Cougher interrupted.

  Rendon raised his eyebrows. Cougher had been out of clinical practice for some time. Working to keep any sound of superiority from his voice, Rendon answered. “Uh, you know, the machine that inflates and deflates a balloon in the aorta with each heart beat to assist the forward blood flow.”

  “Uh-huh. That thing.” Cougher dismissed the clinical innovation with a snort. “Will he live?”

  “There’s a chance.”

  “Any unusual antibodies?”

  “No,” Rendon answered and scowled. “There’s no point. The guy had positive blood cultures for pseudomonas. He’s got bacterial endocarditis, not viral myocarditis and…”

  “Damn.”

  Rendon sagged back into his chair. “The condition’s most likely a result of IV drug use. I didn’t suspect it at first because both the mitral valve on the left and tricuspid valve on the right are eaten away. And I guess I wasn’t looking for it. The guy’s a professional with money—not the type you’d be looking for to use IV drugs. I think his doctor wanted to play it tight to the vest, protect the man. The bottom line is we still have no living case.”

  Cougher sighed. “Still, no one else has died either. We’ve kept after every ER and all of the cardiac docs. Nothing. The other investigators have been rechecking the records for the twelve-hour period when the fatalities occurred, and they haven’t found anybody else either. A single-point-of-contact theory sounds awfully good right now, given that twelve-hour period.”

  “Yes, it does.” Rendon nodded. He had felt depressed ever since hearing his single live case wasn’t a case after all. They had seemed so close. Now there was still no way to establish a screening test, and without a screening test, prevention was nigh near impossible. They needed a live one.

  Cougher twisted his head around and sighed again. “Look, I know you hate the thought, but I don’t think we can presume this is the end of the outbreak. We’re going to need to bite the bullet, institute the control measures the team’s been talking about.”

  Rendon passively nodded his agreement though inwardly tensing at the words. He could feel sweat dripping down his sides. This wouldn’t be necessary if they’d found a live case and been able to isolate antibodies. “I’ve been thinking about that ever since the last meeting. I guess it’s needed, but we’re talking EKGs and chest films. That’s a lot of money for somebody who comes in with a chief complaint of the flu, even with shortness of breath. We could be talking hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of bills.”

  “Yeah,” Cougher agreed. “But what else can we do? If we start now, we might be able to catch someone before they die, if there’s going to be another wave. If we wait, we could end up with an epidemic and no diagnosis, no treatment, and no screening test.”

  “OK,” Rendon said, not quite able to keep the reluctance from his voice. He felt it a failure on his part, and it was going to be an expensive failure. “I’ll draft some guidelines tonight.”

  “Get it to me first thing tomorrow morning. I’ll touch it up and take it for clearance.” Cougher’s face took on an exaggerated glare. His voice turned to a stage whisper. “I can see it now. It’ll take me an hour
to get a meeting, and then, they’ll say they have to get it OK’d by Strenger, and he’ll have a heart attack. ‘Cause mass hysteria,’ he’ll say. Great.”

  Rendon forced a smile at his supervisor’s attempted humor. “Glad it’s you. But, I mean, he’d have a point. You go telling all the docs in Atlanta to do chest X-rays and EKGs on every patient with the flu, they’ll know something’s up.”

  “Right. But what else is there to do? We can’t wait.”

  “No, we can’t.” Rendon clenched his jaw tight. Each morning the newspaper printed the number of days left until the games, and each morning he felt a noose tightening around his neck.

  Cougher shuffled papers around in front of him. “By the way, what did you think of that Ferenzi character? He looked right out of a book.”

  “Yeah, he did. And you have to think about it. How many viruses kill people like this one does? And with a single-point-exposure-type situation, a terrorist attack can’t be ruled out as a possibility.”

  “Oh? I can’t see the terrorists coming all the way over here to kill a lawyer, an advertising exec, and a stripper.”

  “Guess you’re right.” Rendon laughed sincerely this time and shook his head. “I did interview the people at the ad agency, you know.”

  “Anything?”

  “Nah. I’ve spoken to the closest people in all but one of the cases and come up with nothing. None of the dead are known to have been acquainted with each other, been at the same places, or anything else that would confirm a single source of exposure. Nor has anybody been out of the country within the last six months, or even the city for that matter. The one I’m missing is the stripper. Haven’t been able to get to the roommate.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “Disappeared. Up and vanished and apparently killed a cop on the way. Makes you begin to wonder about Ferenzi.”

  Cougher stroked the lowest of his double chins.

  Later that night and finally at home, Rendon put his notebook on the desk and stared at the dog-eared pages. More than half of the notebook was full. The rest of the pages lined up neatly together. He took off his shoes and groaned. His feet hadn’t hurt so much since his residency years. He got in the shower and turned the water to near burning hot. The muscles in his neck stayed corded tight.