The Pursuit (19 page)

“Yeah, yeah, I'm unlocking it,” Joe said and began typing furiously on the keyboard.

The air lock door opened and Nick stepped inside. Only his face was visible through the porthole window. Joe switched the image on the monitor to a view from a camera inside the lab.

Nick stepped out of the air lock and, still whistling, made his merry way across the lab to the freezer that contained the deadly virus.

“That, ladies and gentlemen, is a natural thespian in action,” Boyd said, pointing at the TV. Willie and Tom were in the storefront with him. They were a floor above the lab set, sitting in folding chairs and watching the con unfold on their screen. Chet was down in the basement, outside the set with his tool belt on, ready to spring into action if there was a technical problem.

“Notice how effortlessly Nick expresses his relaxation as well as the joy he derives from his work,” Boyd continued. “That is body-language acting. His entire character comes through.”

Nick looked up at the camera, pointed to the keypad on the freezer, and whistled some more while he waited for Joe to release the locking mechanism.

“That is Nick being Nick,” Willie said. “He's just having fun.”

“People thought the same thing about James Garner, Jimmy Stewart, and Spencer Tracy,” Boyd said. “The great actors make acting look easy, as if they are just playing themselves. You're forgetting that this is not a real robbery. That's Nick acting like a thief who is enjoying himself.”

“But it is a real con,” Tom said. “I think he likes that even more than stealing stuff.”

“Because it involves acting,” Boyd said.

The keypad of the refrigerator flashed green and Nick opened the fridge door. A fog of frost escaped, dissipated, and revealed the rows of vials inside, each presumably containing a deadly virus.

“Look, he's stopped whistling,” Boyd said. “That's because he's staring into the gaping maw of rampant pestilence, misery, and doom. The chill he's feeling on his face might as well be the fingers of Death stroking his cheek. He's learned so much from me.”

Nick set his box down on a nearby counter, opened it up, then slowly reached into the refrigerator for a vial.

S
omething on the monitor caught Litija's eye. She nudged Joe and pointed to Nick.

“What is that on his back?”

“Dirt,” Joe said.

“No, no, the black thing,” she said. “I think it's moving.”

Joe tapped his mouse and the camera zoomed in on the black dot. It was a big, black spider and it was crawling between Nick's shoulder blades toward his neck.

“That's a spider,” she said. “We've got to warn him.”

“How?” Joe said, knowing that Nick could hear every word they were saying. “Besides, what harm could it do?”

Litija picked up the phone. But it was too late.

As Nick turned to place the smallpox vial in the container, the spider went over his collar and down his bare neck. And bit him.

Nick winced at the sting and reflexively reached for his back with both hands, dropping the vial of smallpox.

The vial hit the floor and shattered.

Everyone in the utility tunnel stared in horror at the screen. Nick was still reaching for the spider, and hadn't realized yet what had happened.

“The spider just killed him,” Vinko said, the edges of his mouth curling into a smile.

Nick will live, Kate thought, but the con, and all the work they'd put into it, was dead. She swore, ducked into the opening, and started crawling for the lab.

Vinko looked at the others. “What's she going to do? Read him his last rites?”

Litija couldn't believe what she was seeing and, at that same instant, neither could Nick, who spotted the broken vial on the floor. The full impact of what it obviously meant slammed him. He was infected with smallpox. Nick staggered back from the broken vial, shaking his head, seemingly unwilling to accept the inescapable truth—that he was a dead man.

This changed everything for Litija. All of the plans she'd made would die with him. She couldn't let this happen. There had to be a way to salvage this for herself.

And then, as if Nick were reading her thoughts, he looked up into the camera and right at her. She could almost see his mind working, desperately searching for a way out of this.

Save yourself, Litija thought. Save me.

She saw Kate crawl out of the hole into the control room. Her first thought was that Kate was crazy to expose herself to the virus, then Litija remembered that the lab had an independent air system and there was an air lock between the two rooms.

Kate knocked on the control room window to get Nick's attention.

In the few seconds that it had taken Kate to crawl from the utility corridor to the control room, she'd figured it out. Nick was a world-class thief and a master con man. And yet, he'd been foiled by a spider…a very photogenic spider, one with a Boyd Capwell sense of drama and a Hitchcockian sense of timing.

Nick approached the window with an appropriately shell-shocked expression on his face.

Kate got close to the glass and whispered, “You jerk. You changed the game plan and you didn't tell me.”

Kate knew he could hear her through the earbuds they were both wearing, and she wanted to be quiet in case anybody else came through the opening behind her.

“That's cruel,” Nick said. “You're not showing a lot of sympathy for my dire predicament.”

“The spider was no accident,” Kate said. “It's not even a real spider, is it?”

“It's a tiny robot Chet made for me,” Nick said. “I put it on my back in the air lock and he operated it by remote control from outside the set.”

“You did this so Dragan will have to take you to his lab to harvest the virus. You've made yourself the smallpox sample,” Kate said.

“I'm also the tracking device. I swallowed it as I was crawling in. There's another one in my biohazard suit.” He tipped his head to the three emergency protective suits hanging on the wall behind Kate. “It's like one of those.”

She didn't look behind her. “So you also had Chet create a working bioprotection suit for you, too. Very thorough. You planned to do this from the start and hid it from me. I really thought you trusted me.”

“I do.”

“You have a strange way of showing it.”

“There wasn't time to tell you. I couldn't shake the feeling that you, me, Gaëlle, and Huck weren't going to make it out of the sewers alive. The broken vial was a last-minute decision that will ensure we all make it to the street, where there is protection,” Nick said.

“Once Dragan realizes that you're not really infected, he'll kill you.”

“I'm responsible for Dragan having the smallpox that he's already got. If this attack happens, all those deaths are on me. I made it possible. I couldn't live with that. This way, I guarantee that I will have a chance to stop him.”

She couldn't fault him for having a conscience. In fact, it was nice to know that he did. But it didn't make her any less angry or any less afraid for his safety.

“It's suicide,” Kate said. “You idiot.”

“Where's your optimism?”

“I prefer being realistic.”

“You'll rescue me before anything bad happens,” Nick said.

“Don't be so sure. I was too late in Antwerp.”

“You made up for it later.”

“That'll be hard for me to do if you're dead.”

“I think you're missing the point here,” he said. “I'm trusting you with my life. How much more could I trust you than that?”

Kate squinched her eyes shut. “Ugh!”

Litija squinted at the screen. “It looks like they are saying goodbye.”

Joe shook his head. “I think Nick is up to something.”

“How can you tell?”

Because he'd heard their conversation. “He's got that sparkle in his eye.”

It was true, he did. Or maybe Joe just imagined it.

“You can see a sparkle?” she asked.

“Can't you?”

The phone rang. Joe hit a switch, putting the call from the tunnel on the speaker.

“Nick is the smallpox sample now,” Kate said.

It took a second for Litija to wrap her head around that. At first what Kate said made no sense at all to her, and then she realized it was brilliant. Things could move forward exactly as Litija had planned. The only difference was that now the box carrying the virus wasn't titanium, it was flesh and blood.

“How is he getting out of the lab without infecting everyone?” Litija asked.

“He'll strip out of his clothes and put himself in an impermeable vinyl suit like the blue ones hanging in the control room,” Kate said. “The suits have independent air purifying respirators that operate on a battery with a six-hour charge. But there's one thing he needs to know first. Does Dragan have the smallpox vaccine? If Nick can get it within the next seventy-two hours, he has a chance.”

“Yes, of course he does,” Litija said, though she had no idea if Dragan did or not and she didn't care. It was the only answer Nick wanted to hear so that's what she gave Kate.

“Gaëlle will lead the others out of here and up to the street,” Kate said. “I'll bring Nick to the manhole on rue Boissonade. Have the sewer utility van waiting to roll.”

Rue Boissonade was a good choice, Litija thought. It was a residential side street that ran along the northern perimeter of the institute, on the other side of the block from avenue Denfert-Rochereau. There was little chance of any cars or pedestrians there at this time of the morning, and there would be few, if any, surveillance cameras. Daca and Stefan wouldn't be able to see them, but the two snipers could still watch the major cross streets and give her plenty of warning if the police were coming.

“There's one thing
I
need to know first,” Litija said. “What happens if he tears his suit going through the little tunnel you just dug? He could infect us all.”

“I'll tape up any tears.”

“Won't you get infected?” Litija didn't care about Kate's health. What she was worried about was Kate starting an outbreak herself in Paris and ruining everything.

“I was vaccinated for smallpox in the military,” Kate said. “It was part of our preparation for chemical warfare.”

“Okay,” Litija said. “Give the phone to Vinko.”

Vinko got on the line and they had a quick discussion in Serbian. Litija told him that Nick was now the virus but that everything else was to go exactly as planned. When she was done, she caught Joe staring at her suspiciously.

“Why weren't you talking in English?” he asked.

“He's not very good at English and I wanted to make absolutely sure there were no misunderstandings,” Litija said. “Or people could die.”

It made sense to him. Joe nodded his approval. “Starting with us.”

Definitely, she thought.

Nick went through an air lock in the back of the lab that presumably led to the room where scientists donned their positive pressure suits. Instead, he walked off the set into the basement where Chet was waiting for him with the blue biohazard suit on a hanger. There was an open bottle of red wine and a plate of cheese, prosciutto, and grapes on a table for Nick, too.

“Well played,” Chet said.

“The real credit goes to that spider of yours,” Nick said, unzipping his sewer worker's jumpsuit and stepping out of it wearing only a T-shirt and Calvins. “You ought to sell it as a novelty item. It would go over big with little boys eager to scare their sisters and mothers.”

“Too late. You can buy radio-controlled spiders for twenty dollars on the Internet,” Chet said, scooping his spider from the floor. “This one costs two grand. It's left over from a movie I worked on. So is this biohazard suit. It only looks and sounds like the real thing. It's not actually impermeable, and the respirator doesn't purify the air you're breathing or exhaling.”

“I'll try not to wear it around anyone infected with a real virus.” Nick popped a few cubes of cheese in his mouth and poured himself a generous glass of wine, which he drank like water. “Okay, let's do this.”

Boyd, Willie, and Tom came down the stairs as Chet was helping Nick into the suit. It looked like something an astronaut might wear for a moonwalk except with a huge transparent hood instead of a helmet.

“That was a brilliant performance,” Boyd said.

“I thought I overacted and made the bite look more like a gunshot,” Nick said, stepping into rubber boots with his suit-covered feet.

“You had to. It was a silent movie,” Boyd said. “Every gesture and emotion has to be exaggerated to make up for the lack of dialogue. But you conveyed the abject horror perfectly. It really felt like you were doomed.”

“Because he might be,” Willie said. “Kate's right, Nick. You're an idiot. Making yourself the virus was a dumb move.”

“I admire what he's doing,” Tom said. “He's risking his life for one chance to save thousands of Americans. It's noble.”

“Be sure to put that in his eulogy,” Willie said. “It'll bring everyone to tears.”

“You're almost as bad as Kate,” Nick said.

Nick taped his boots to his ankles with duct tape. He got up and headed for the air lock. “You all did great work, as usual. Willie, you'd better get in your car, we'll be going soon.”

“I won't lose you,” Willie said, heading back up the stairs.

“Once we're gone,” Nick said, “the rest of you get out of here and take the first flight back to Los Angeles.”

Nick gave everyone a thumbs-up and walked through the fake air lock into the lab.

“You can find me in Miami,” Boyd said. “I'm not going anywhere near Los Angeles until I hear how this turns out.”

“That makes two of us,” Chet said.

“Three,” Tom said. “I'm meeting my family in Walla Walla.”

Kate was already in the control room holding a roll of duct tape when Nick entered the lab. He walked across the lab to the air lock and stepped inside. The door closed behind him. He waited for the green light that indicated the air had been sucked out of the tiny room and new air pumped in. It was all for show, of course, none of that was actually happening, but they had a lie to sell if anyone was watching.