Marc Cameron - National Security

“Very well.” Quinn began to lower his hands. “I apologize for my stupidity and will be on my way.”

The older guard motioned with his shiny Beretta, shoving it forward to make a point. “Keep your hands raised.” A radio at his side broke squelch. He looked at his partner. “Answer that,” he said, apparently not trusting the younger man or his rusty revolver to cover the intruder.

The young guard took the radio from his own belt and checked in. “ Shako mako?” It was the Arabic equivalent of What’s up?

“Apologize and bring him inside,” a disembodied voice said. “I would like to see his letter.”

The guards looked at each other and shrugged. They started to put away their weapons, but the radios squawked again. “Apologize, but do not trust him!”

The older guard frowned at the chiding. He pointed his pistol toward the sunlit opening at the end of the barn’s alley. Quinn smiled faintly to himself. Guns or no guns, these men had solved his number-one problem. They were taking him past any security systems and inside the building-right where he wanted to be.

Past the double steel doors, a lone security guard kept watch at a simple wooden desk. He was middle-aged with a neatly trimmed goatee and dressed in the same khaki pants and open-collared white shirt as the two others. Quinn could see no weapon, but assumed he had one tucked away somewhere.

The desk guard glanced up from a crumpled copy of an Al Jazeera newspaper and acknowledged the other men with a grunt. Dark eyes played over Quinn with unconcealed disgust. As Saudis, it was a good bet these men all harbored decades-old tribal grudges against Kuwaitis. Fortunately, they didn’t know who Quinn really was. Their grudges against Irish American Apaches were sure to run even deeper.

Fluorescent lights threw a strident glare on the waxed white tile of the hallway. Twenty feet beyond the guard was another set of heavy doors, ornately carved from fine, polished wood. They had no handles and appeared to swing freely.

Other than these and the way he’d come in, the only other exit off the wide hallway was a gray metal door to the left, just past the desk guard. To find out what was on the other side of the blank wall to the right, Quinn would have to make it through the double wooden doors.

“In there.” The older, jumpy guard prodded Quinn over the kidney with the muzzle of his pistol, shoving him toward the left.

Quinn took a deep breath to keep from smiling. This one was truly an amateur. No real operator would get close enough to touch him with a weapon.

The professional arrived a moment later as Quinn’s captors prodded him into the vacant concrete-block room. Quinn recognized him for what he was immediately-not the top boss, but someone with the authority to make decisions on the spot. He was mature, but not old-maybe in his late thirties-with the confident air that made him keep his chin tilted slightly toward the ceiling and hung a constant half grin on his angular face. His dazzling white cotton robe blended with the whitewashed walls. A red checked ghutra only half hid a thick head of curly black hair. A gold Rolex Explorer hung from his bronze wrist.

The man looked down his nose at Quinn with the kind of bored indifference he might reserve for a stray dog.

“Hello, Mr. Al Dashi-”

“Al Dashti,” Quinn corrected.

“Yes,” the man said. “Of course, Mr. Al Dashti. I am Dr. Suleiman, the chief veterinarian here.” He held out a manicured right hand, all but snapping his fingers. “Please, the letter of which you spoke.”

Quinn reached in the fold of his dishdasha, wishing he had the Masamune blade Mrs. Miyagi had given him. Whatever was going on in this lab, the chief veterinarian had to be up to his neck in it. He handed over the letter.

Suleiman read it, then paused a moment, letting his eyes slide up and down Quinn. He handed back the letter, then turned without asking a single question. At the door, he paused to speak for a moment in hushed tones to the two guards. The expressions of both men tensed. The jumpy one’s shoulders bobbed noticeably at Dr. Suleiman’s words. His hand slid almost imperceptibly toward the butt of his pistol.

Quinn’s eyes shot around the room, taking quick stock of his situation. The heavy door, whitewashed walls, sealed concrete floor with a drain set in a depressed center-a length of hose coiled on a wall hook like a black snake.

He was in a killing cell.

Quinn was already in motion as Dr. Suleiman stepped from the room into the hallway, timing his first strike with the snick of the door snapping shut. He’d crumpled the introduction letter into a tight ball and tossed it at the older guard’s face. The paper was worthless as a weapon, but the man didn’t know that. He flinched instinctively jerking his gun hand up to ward off the incoming missile.

Quinn used this split-second diversion to drive the flat of his hand into the younger guard’s face, shattering his nose and slamming the back of his head against the concrete wall with a sickening thwack. He slid to the ground leaving a pink smear of blood behind him. Swelling at the back of his brain would soon stop his heart for good.

As the jumpy guard regained his composure and brought the pistol back to bear, Quinn ran at him with the weight of his entire body. He wrenched the man’s wrist and the gun along with it inward toward the startled Saudi’s soft belly. Tendons stretched past the breaking point; fragile wrist bones snapped with a sickening pop. His finger convulsed on the trigger. The guard’s eyes flew wide as the cold reality of what had happened washed across his face.

“Killed…” He coughed, a tinge of blood coating his cracked lips. “Killed by… a stinking… Kuwaiti…”

The man died before Quinn could set him straight.

His two immediate threats neutralized, Quinn stuffed the old revolver in the folds of his dishdasha with his cell phone. The other pocket contained the glass jar of iodine crystals. He had to keep from breaking the glass jar at all costs. He checked the Beretta for ammunition. The magazine still held ten rounds. Years of habit and mistrust of machines made him press-check the slide to be certain there was a cartridge in the chamber. Neither guard carried any reloads. That left him with seventeen rounds including the six iffy shots in the rusty wheel gun.

Quinn stood at the door for a moment, hand on the knob, concentrating to slow his breathing. He would have to make every shot count. The two men now dead on the floor had been the easy ones. Now he had to deal with the guard at the table, unknown other personnel, and Suleiman, the real professional of the group-and he’d have to do it all on camera.

Langley Air Force Base Virgina

Megan Mahoney had never considered herself a worrywart. Working nose to nose with deadly diseases took ice-cold nerves not to mention a certain amount of stoic detachment-but, lately, it seemed that worrying was all she ever did. Gory images of four hundred Ebola-infected airline passengers haunted her dreams. Nagging thoughts of a virus capable of wiping out half the continent kept her stomach in knots, and she found herself eating nothing but junk food. Justin, for all his idiotic flirtation, didn’t deserve to be stuck in the Slammer. But he was, and now the poor kid sat with nothing to do but wait and wonder if the tiny needle stick had been enough to infect him with an unknown strain of hemorrhagic fever-enough to kill him.

The Ebola blood variant had jumped almost immediately from one macaque to another breathing the same air. Both had crashed in a matter of hours. It had been two days since she’d had to put down C-45 and injected C-06 with the virus strain contained in the optic jelly. Though the monkey’s blood teamed with spaghettilike filovirus it had yet to show a single symptom. Tests on C-12, the macaque she’d put in the adjoining cage, breathing the same air as C-06, remained virus free.