“Why would they have those?”
“They’re a research facility.” She shrugged. “It’s actually not that unusual. Unfortunate, but not unusual. If they were trying to come up with a vaccine or antidote, they’d need samples of the real stuff.”
“Wait a minute. What are we talking about? You mean like anthrax?”
“Anthrax. Possibly the bird flu. Maybe Ebola.”
Creed took a deep breath and winced. He was hanging on to the final threads of the pain medicine Dr. Avelyn had given him.
“He said the samples are stored in a lockbox. He thinks someone was trying to steal it. That they murdered Dr. Shaw and Dr. Carrington and these other men and hoped it would be covered up by the landslide.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” he asked.
“I am telling you.”
“When did you find out?”
“Just before I came to get you.”
“But you’re only telling me now?”
“Logan told me in confidence. The bastard,” she mumbled. “Now I don’t even know if it’s true.”
“Wouldn’t Ben know about all this?”
She rubbed her hands over her face, wiping at the exhaustion.
When she didn’t answer he realized it was one of the phone calls she was waiting for.
Creed let it go and asked instead, “Do you think this dead man—the one with the strange bruising—do you think he might have been exposed to one of those deadly samples?”
Her eyes looked up at him and he could see that she had already thought about this.
Creed said the obvious: “If he was, isn’t there a chance that you and Dr. Gunther were exposed?”
“We had gloves and masks on. We didn’t come in contact with any of his bodily fluids.”
“Are you sure?”
His eyes held hers until he saw the realization strike her. She grabbed his hand.
“I know what you’re thinking. Your hands were drenched in her blood. I can’t say for certain that we weren’t exposed, but I do know that she was careful. She hadn’t even cut him or taken any blood.”
Her phone rang, startling both of them.
She grabbed it, looked at the screen, and answered without a greeting.
“Thanks for calling me back. Have you heard from Logan?” Her face remained unchanged as she listened. “He told me earlier that you found where the facility is buried. I need you to take me there.”
63.
At midnight O’Dell finally got a call from Ben.
“You sounded upset. Are you okay?”
“No, I’m not okay. You need to tell me what the hell is going on.”
She was talking in a forced whisper so she wouldn’t wake those in the cots around her. She saw Creed stir but she knew Dr. Avelyn had given him another dose of pain meds. She hurried to find an exit.
Clear skies, but the air was crisp and still held the smell of the smoldering fire blocks away.
“Maggie, all I know is that the second body you dug up was shot in the back. And that Dr. Shaw is now believed to be one of the victims.”
“You had to know that this facility had Level 3 and Level 4 pathogens.”
She waited out his silence.
“Is that what Logan told you?”
“It would have been nice if you had told me.”
“We suspected it,” he said. “But I swear to you, Maggie, I didn’t know when I asked you to go down.”
“I can’t believe you let me dig around in the mud knowing what could have been mixed in the debris.”
“The lockboxes they use wouldn’t have been broken open.”
“Did you know that landslides can be so strong and violent that they can literally rip a body apart?”
“No, I didn’t know that. But I understand that may have happened to Dr. Shaw.”
“If they can rip buildings to shreds and dismember bodies, why wouldn’t a landslide be able to breach your lockbox?”
“It hasn’t been breached. I understand they’re still getting a signal from it.”
“I can’t believe that I had to hear about this from Logan. When did you think you were going to tell me, Ben?”
He was quiet again. She hated that calm he could manage in the middle of any storm. He had performed surgeries in Iraq and Afghanistan with mortars firing around him. He had treated patients with Marburg in Sierra Leone. He had treated Maggie and her former boss after the two of them had been exposed to Ebola. And always he maintained that disciplined calm that could be as reassuring as it was annoying. Right now, O’Dell found it completely annoying.
“I examined the body of the dead man last night with Dr. Gunther, the medical examiner. His skin looked like it had been exposed to something, Ben. Something extreme.”
“What did the ME think it was?”
“She wasn’t sure. But she thought she’d seen something like it before.”
“What do you mean?”
“In the 1960s, when the U.S. Army sprayed some experimental simulant over Eglin Air Force Base. She told me airmen were spitting up blood and bleeding from their ears. She thought the blisters and rash on the man we dug up looked similar.”