Calypso Directive (46 page)

“Weapon!” VanCleave yelled, but it was too late.

A single shot reverberated like a thunderclap inside the church.

Will buckled.

Julie screamed.

She looked from Will to Raimond, expecting him to fire another shot. Raimond's eyes twitched; he had a strange vapid smile on his face. Then, he collapsed prone onto the marble floor: his shooting arm extended, the barrel of the Glock still smoldering.

Kalen knelt and withdrew a small dagger from the base of the bounty hunter's skull. He could not bring himself to look at Julie; his were eyes lowered in shame. He had failed, delivering the death strike a split second after the impulse from Raimond's brain had traveled to his trigger finger. The 9mm round had found its target and pierced Will's chest.

Julie ran to Will and knelt at his side. His face was already going pale. She cradled his head in her hands, tears streaming from her eyes.

He reached up and touched her cheek.

“I never betrayed you,” she said.

“I know,” he whispered.

“Can you hear those sirens? Help is coming. You've just got to hang on until they get here,” she pleaded, stroking his forehead.

He managed a fragile, tentative smile. “My legs are cold.”

“Don't you leave me, William Foster. Do you hear me? Please, please don't leave me.”

“I love you, Julie.”

She held him tight against her chest as she wept. “I love you too.”

Boston, Massachusetts

“
W
HAT I
'
M SAYING
is that I don't fucking believe you, Robért,” Meredith hissed.

“Believe what you want, Meredith. It is what it is,” Nicolora said.

She glowered at him from across the table.

“I'm not Jesus; I can't raise Foster from the dead,” he added, and then casually stuffed a whole piece of spicy tuna roll, dripping in wasabi-infused soy sauce, into his mouth with a pair of chopsticks.

A waiter approached the couple and asked if they would like another bottle of sake for the table. She ignored him. He shook his head no, and the waiter skittered away with prudent haste.

“Failure is the last thing I expected from your organization on this assignment. I've seen your teams negotiate impossible situations, solve intractable problems, some beyond mortal comprehension. But this? This was easy. A simple search and rescue, and you couldn't pull it off. I don't understand,” she ranted.

“Meredith, what you fail to recognize is that this outcome is entirely your fault. If you want to blame someone, then blame yourself.”

“My fault! My fault? I hardly see how this is my—”

“You were lazy and cheap. You hired amateurs, when you should have hired professionals from the beginning,” he interrupted.

He thrust a scolding finger at her and continued.

“Haven't you learned anything from me? The most efficient way to solve a problem is to eliminate as many variables from the equation as possible—not introduce new ones, for God's sake. Especially independent variables over which you have limited or no control. The Zurn brothers were absolute wild cards. You set a brush fire to try to catch your rabbit, but ended up burning down the entire forest. If anyone should be disappointed, it should be me.”

She bit her lower lip. Abruptly, her expression softened. She blinked coyly, flashing him her best bedroom eyes.

“No,” he reprimanded.

“Tell me where he is,” she begged.

“I said no.”

“What did you do with him?”

“I didn't do anything with him. After he was shot by your man Zurn, the Austrians intervened. I had no choice; I pulled my team.”

“You must know something.”

He shrugged. “My sources tell me that Foster died and was discreetly laid to rest. That's all I know.”

“Where? I'd like to pay my respects.”

“No, you don't. You want to dig him up!”

“Robért! How could you think such a thing?”

Nicolora stuffed another piece of sushi into his mouth, a rainbow roll this time. “This place is brilliant. Best sushi in Boston.”

“You're really not going to tell me, are you?” She pouted.

“No.”

“I could still salvage things if you just—”

He cut her off. “Enough, Meredith! There's nothing left to salvage.”

She looked down at her lap. “This will ruin me, you realize.”

Nicolora wiped his mouth with the cloth napkin from his lap. His thoughts drifted to the sample vial Kalen had lifted from Foster's pocket in the Karlskirche that fateful night. Contrary to the charade he was now playing with his ex-client and ex-lover, all had not been lost. At this very moment, AJ was working late in his lab at The Tank trying to replicate Vyrogen's work. And while it had never been Nicolora's intent to pirate Meredith's research, circumstances had left him no choice. The real FBI had since fixed its spotlight squarely on Vyrogen and Meredith, and he would not permit the greatest medical discovery of the twenty-first century to be confiscated away into some government black hole. No. He would be the secret's custodian. Both the Nicolora Foundation and The Think Tank could reap great rewards from this golden seed. He would leverage phil-anthropic and commercial opportunities to bring his public and private faces esteem and wealth. He was confident his new RS:Bio would succeed where Meredith's team had failed. In his experience, any problem could be solved with enough time, resources, and money … all of which he possessed in abundance.

After a painfully long pause Nicolora finally said, “Let's leave this dirty business behind us for the rest of evening, shall we?” Then, staring brazenly across the table at her stark cleavage framed by the plunging “V” neckline of her emerald-colored dress, he added, “Let's talk about something more stimulating. You look ravishing. Is that a new dress?”

Eyam, England
Four months later

J
ULIE WIPED A
stream of tears from her cheeks. “I miss you, Will,” she whispered.

Huddled under her umbrella, she watched raindrops stream down the hewn granite headstone. Today was the third time she had come to Eyam to visit Will's grave since his death. It was also the third time she had been unable to fight back the tears. Losing him had been harder on her than she ever imagined it would be. She was taking life one day at time.

She had moved to London and taken a new job with a small bio-technology consulting firm, hoping to make a fresh start. She had not tendered a written resignation to Wien Bioscience, nor did she receive a termination letter. Apparently, the terms of her departure were mutually implicit. Her final direct deposit payment was prorated to the date she had taken Will's blood sample to the lab and had it analyzed by Bart Bennett. She wondered whatever became of Bart.

She had not heard from Meredith Morley again, although sometimes she had nightmares of picking up the phone to make a call, but instead of a dial tone being greeted by Meredith's bone-chilling voice. Because of the dreams, she had changed her mobile number. Whether it was prudent or paranoid she didn't care; it made her feel safer.

The enigmatic crew who had orchestrated her rescue at the Karlskirche had vanished from her life as suddenly and mysteriously as they had appeared. The events of that night were so surreal and disjointed; she still had trouble stitching her memories together into a cogent narrative. One minute she was cradling Will in her arms, surrounded by the American agents who had just risked their lives to save her. The next, she was alone, arguing with a cadre of Viennese police officers and paramedics. The officer in charge at the scene had refused to let her accompany Will on the life-flight helicopter that fateful night. Instead, he had ordered her taken to a nearby precinct for questioning. After twelve hours of intense interrogation at the hands of the Austrian police, she had been abruptly discharged, with no charges filed against her.

For the next three days, Julie had stormed the city, trying to learn what had become of Will. But no one could—or would—answer her questions. She had checked every hospital in a sixty kilometer radius from the Karlskirche, but found no record of a man matching Will's description being admitted with a gunshot wound to the chest. Most upsetting, however, was when she was told by a senior official that there was no record of a life-flight helicopter pickup at the Karlskirche on the night Will was shot. At every turn, her crusade was stymied.

The final rebuke came four days later, when she returned to the police precinct where she had been interrogated, only to learn that the OIC from the scene had been transferred to another division in Strasbourg. When she asked to speak with the precinct chief, the reception attendant said the chief was “prohibited” from discussing the details of the case with anyone and that her request for an audience was denied.

Fourteen days passed, with no news about Will. Then, on the fifteenth day, she received a most unexpected visitor at her apartment: Xavier Pope. Her initial reaction had been to slam the door in his face. Through the closed door, he'd politely and persistently pressed her—saying repeatedly that he refused to leave until she gave him a chance to “say his piece.” But it was the urn he held that swayed her, not the begging. To her astonishment, they talked for over an hour. Pope freely corroborated certain elements of Will's story and adamantly denied others. She had scrutinized Pope's every word and asked him the tough questions, but he never balked. After they had dispensed with the past, she opened the door to the present. Where had the life-flight helicopter taken Will? Why could she find no record of his hospital admittance in all of Vienna? Why was nobody talking about the events of that night? Pope took all her questions in stride. He explained that because of the perceived biosafety risks associated with the case, the Austrian Armed Forces had been tasked with locating and securing Foster. From what he had learned, Will had not been loaded into a life-flight helicopter that night, but rather into an Austrian military helicopter. He had been transported to a military hospital for emergency medical care, but, regrettably, had died en route. Pope went on to say that the Austrian military unilaterally made the decision to cremate Will's body … for biosafety reasons.

The details and emotion in Pope's story seemed genuine, and this left her confounded. On the one hand, she wanted to hate Pope, hold him responsible for all the pain she was feeling, all the pain he had caused Will. But on the other hand, Pope was the only person from Vyrogen who had reached out to her, apologized, and offered her closure.

Before leaving that night, Pope made a last and final gesture of goodwill. He explained that even though he had resigned from Vyrogen, he felt personally accountable for Will's death. As such, he insisted that he pay for all of Will's funeral expenses. An act of contrition, he had called it. Catatonic with grief and shock, she had graciously accepted. She instructed that Will's ashes be buried in Eyam, in the same cemetery as his ancestors. Something told her he would have wanted it that way. What remained of Will's legacy she decided to leave in Professor Johansen's capable hands. She informed Johansen of Will's decision to publish his genome, and instructed him to post Will's immunity mutation on the Internet as “open source code” so all the world could benefit from his gift. During their last conversation, Johansen had told Julie that Will's dream was still very much alive, and that he had recently obtained grant money from the university to sequence Will's entire genome. Will's sacrifice would not be in vain, he had promised her.

Of this fact, she was certain.

Meandering out of her daydream, she became aware that she was gently running her hand along her stomach, feeling the bump beneath the fabric of her raincoat. She was showing now. She'd already completed her first trimester and had her first ultrasound. Everything was normal. The baby was perfect. Beautiful. Watching the monitor that day had been the saddest, happiest moment of her life.