John Krygelski - The Aegis Solution

He put his other arm around her and pulled her closer. “I missed you, baby.”

Wilson also had pulled a protein bar from one of their packs and had given it to Leah as she first sat down. She removed it from her pocket and unwrapped it, biting off more than half.

As she chewed, Elias asked, “How did you manage to stay alive all this time?”

Between chews, she answered, “By not giving them what they wanted.”

“What was that?”

“Exactly how much I knew and the names of people I told.”

“You hadn’t told anyone, had you?”

“No. But they didn’t know that.”

“Not that I’m not glad you’re here, but it seems as though they would have given up on that after a while.”

She responded in short bursts. “Not that simple. Khalid had me first. He was obsessed with the possibility that I told the Mossad. Refused to accept that I hadn’t. I have no idea how long he had me. Days, weeks, months, kind of blurred. He finally lost interest.”

Elias’ mind involuntarily conjured up images of what her ordeal had been like at the hands of that monster. He consciously pushed them out. “Then what?”

Leah stopped chewing and forced a lopsided grin onto her face. “You haven’t seen me all this time and you’re debriefing me?”

“You’re right! I’m sorry. I was….”

She kissed Elias to stop him from talking. “I’m kidding. We’re obviously still in the middle of something, so you should know. Besides, if no one else has found out about what I know, it’s critical that we get the word out. By the way, what happened to Eric?”

“Dead.”

“Good. You killed him.”

“I didn’t…she did.” He pointed at Tillie, who was trying very hard to maintain a respectful distance across the hallway.

“She did it?”

He nodded.

“I like her!”

“I thought you would. You’d better tell me what you know. What was the big secret?”

Elias watched his wife’s face as she struggled to answer. He could tell by her tortured expressions that she was wrestling with a phenomenon well known in the intelligence community: If you hold a piece of knowledge and the other side wants it, if you are truly going to succeed at never giving it up, you have to build an impenetrable wall around it. The bad guys will initially dispense pain — mind-numbing, unimaginable pain. If that does not work, they resort to drugs, trickery, humiliation, and deceit, coupled with a regimen that keeps you barely alive, constantly exhausted, confused, disoriented, continuously starving, and thirsty. They attempt every possible ploy to get you to slip up, let down your guard, believe that you are talking to a trusted friend. Whatever it takes. If you are able to conceal your knowledge through all of that, it is only because you have locked it away in a place that even you cannot access anymore, at least not without a tremendous effort. Leah was going through that effort now.

She had forgotten about the last bite of the protein bar, dropping it down to the dusty floor. Her hands came up and she rubbed her temples, hard. Elias even thought he heard a shallow groan coming from her as she leaned forward. He knew there was nothing he could do to help her, so he waited.

More minutes passed before she suddenly leaned back, resting her head against the wall, and stared intently at his face, studying the smallest details. Not satisfied with what her eyes were telling her, she reached up and less than gently probed the skin around his eyes, his ears, and the base of his neck. He knew that she had to convince herself that all of this was not merely another trick and that she really was sitting beside her husband. Next, she leaned forward, putting her nose under his chin and inhaled deeply, pulling in his scent.

After a moment, she sat back against the wall.

“Satisfied?”

She shook her head briefly, then nodded. “I guess so. Either that or I’m just too damn worn out to care anymore.”

She looked around at her surroundings, studying Wilson, who had backed away from them and was talking to Tillie as she guarded Boehn across the hall. “Who are they?”

“Friends.”

Leah crinkled her mouth and rolled her eyes. “Friends? Come on, Elias.”

“I don’t think we have enough time for me to tell you the whole story. Let’s just say that they’ve saved my butt more than once, and if they are leading me down a path, they’re better at it than anyone I’ve ever met before.”

She expanded the range of her visual examination. “By the way, where are we?”

“We’re in Aegis.”

“Aegis!”

“As I said, it’s a long story. You need to decide whether you are going to tell me or not, because we should probably get moving. Once we get out of here, I’ll take you wherever you choose so you can pass it on — the White House, the Pentagon, the Capitol. You pick.”

“The problem, Elias, is that none of those will work.”

Her comment stopped him dead in his tracks. “What are you saying?”

“What I’m saying is that it’s big. It’s ugly. And I have no idea where it stops.”

He stared at her. “Leah, what is it?”

She took a long, deep breath, letting it out slowly. “A lab, Elias. They were working on a biological weapon.”

“I already know that.”

His comment surprised her. “You do?”

He filled her in on the information obtained by Benjamin.

She nodded. “He obviously only knows a small part of it.”

“This wouldn’t be the first time that a government, even our government, was working on a bio-weapon.”

“Those were all different.” Her tone was dismissive.

Before Elias could comment, she hurriedly continued. “Elias, honey, they were working on a doomsday bug. Something fast-acting, deadly, and unbelievably contagious.”

“It’s been tried before. It always kills the hosts too quickly to be widely contagious, like Ebola, or it mutates into some ineffective strain.”

She shook her head. “No. They’ve done it. They’ve got it already. It works. They’ve had it since before I was picked up.”

“How did you find out about it? Your assignment was a Taliban training camp.”

“Khalid was providing some of the funding for the research. He was in the loop and he was sloppy. I found the reports he was getting. This stuff is terrifying.”

“I don’t get it. Countries develop bio-weapons for tactical reasons. They use them to take out populations, like Saddam, or to kill opposing armies, as the Germans did in World War I. But a doomsday bug, by definition, kills everybody, including the side who uses it. What’s the point?”

“The point is to clean house.”

The voice came from the “T” intersection with the adjacent corridor. Elias whirled around to see Faulk, standing at the corner, and started to spring up when he heard the unmistakable sound of the bolt being pulled back on an automatic weapon. He had so focused on Faulk that he had not initially noticed the four other men, all carrying assault rifles, flanking the object of his hatred.

Tillie jumped for the shotgun, which she had leaned against a nearby wall. One of the men brought his rifle to bear on her, clearly intending to open fire. Faulk shouted, “DON’T MOVE!”

At the same moment Elias barked, “TILLIE, DON’T!”

She froze, her hand inches from the weapon, and slowly dropped her arm back to her side, an expression of restrained fury on her face.

Elias slowly stood and faced the man for whom he had nurtured a burning hatred for more than two years. He took two steps, placing himself between the gunmen and his wife. Wilson, who had been near Tillie at the time Faulk arrived, raised his hands slowly over his head and moved away to a point halfway between her and Elias.