Reckless Creed (8 page)

FLORIDA PANHANDLE

C
reed handed Jason another beer over the countertop that separated his kitchen from his living room.

“Maybe I just don't want to believe Tony would do something like this without me,” Jason said.

His eyes darted to Creed's, looking for judgment, checking to see if Creed might think it odd that friends would share suicide. That Jason would be disappointed that his friend didn't include him.

Creed shrugged and asked, “How long you guys been friends?”

He was relieved when Jason started telling him how he and Tony had been best friends since grade school.

“We actually didn't have much in common. Even in sixth grade Tony had girls fawning all over him,” Jason said. “I was a bookworm. He was the athlete. I helped him study and pass tests, and he helped me figure out how to get girls and not get clobbered in football.”

Creed couldn't relate. He'd never had a friendship like that in grade school or high school. He was fourteen when his sister
Brodie disappeared. He couldn't even remember what life was like before that. For many years it hurt too much to think about it. It seemed wrong to think of happier days when he had no idea what was happening to his sister.

He watched Jason as he talked. The kid was actually smiling.

“Tony was the one who wanted to sign up for the army. I didn't give it a second thought,” Jason said. “Of course I was going, too. The recruiter made sure that we trained together and shipped out together.”

Something crossed Jason's mind, and Creed saw the smile fall almost as if a shadow had passed by. His hand went to the stub of his arm and started rubbing.

“He told me he felt like it was his fault. Me losing my arm. Just because he talked me into signing up. And yet, he came back with his own problems. Yeah, sure, his body looks okay. Not like Colfax with his glass eye and Frankenstein scars, or Benny with both legs sliced off above the kneecaps. Hell, compared to those two, I even feel lucky. But Tony . . . he came back looking normal, but his mind hasn't been right since Afghanistan.”

Creed noticed that Jason was talking about his friend going back and forth from present tense to past. Not unusual. The shock of Tony actually being dead would need to wear off. And yes, Creed understood that Tony didn't just have PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) but had been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury.

“Tony calls them his brain fevers,” Jason continued. “I've seen them. Looks painful. He said it feels like his head is getting ready to explode—pressure, pain, sometimes even a pounding sound. Still able to joke about it. Every once in a while he'd ask us guys if
we could hear it and cock his head with his ear toward us.” Jason smiled.

Suddenly Jason sat up straight on the bar stool as another memory came back to him.

“I just remembered. Tony told me he actually called the VA's suicide hotline.”

“When was that?”

“Last summer, during one of his episodes. It ended up being something we joked about. They put him on hold.”

Creed just shook his head. He'd heard enough stories like this one that they no longer surprised him.

“He waited thirty-seven minutes. By then he was pissed off and more focused on telling them to screw off.”

Creed opened the refrigerator to grab a couple more beers but stopped.

“Are you hungry?”

“You cooking?”

“Of course not, but I have some leftovers that Hannah brought over.”

“Yeah, I could eat something.” But the kid didn't need to answer. His eyes lit up at the mention of Hannah's cooking.

Creed pulled out the glass casserole dish and was about to peel off the foil when he decided to leave it and turn on his oven. Ordinarily he'd grab a fork and eat it cold right out of the dish. Bad habits of living alone. From the counter he unwrapped a loaf of homemade corn bread. Sliced a couple of pieces and slid a plate over to Jason.

“The chicken and black-eyed peas will take about fifteen minutes to heat up.”

Jason was biting off chunks of bread before Creed brought out the butter. The kid's appetite always made Creed smile. Both men were in their twenties—Creed at the end and Jason at the beginning—yet most of the time Creed felt like decades separated them instead of years. Maybe part of it was because Creed had already gone through much of what Jason was going through now. Only for Creed it felt like a lifetime ago.

“Hannah promised to teach me how to make this,” Jason said about the bread.

“You cook?”

“A little bit. And making bread is baking, not cooking.”

When Creed raised an eyebrow, Jason said, “My little sister and me were latchkey kids. My dad worked the night shift and my mom didn't get home until five or six. I got tired of frozen pizzas and grilled cheese.”

Creed had never heard Jason talk about his family. Maybe seeing his grandfather had reminded him of them.

“They live in the area?”

“Mobile.”

Fifty miles away and yet Jason had lived at Segway House in Pensacola when he came back. The kid must have suspected what Creed was thinking.

“It was hard on them, you know,” Jason explained. “When I came back. It was like they didn't know what to say to me. My mom wanted me to stay with them, but I couldn't.” He shook his head, looking down at the plate of homemade bread. “I just couldn't take them staring at me, all sad and stuff. So frickin' polite and careful. I felt like I was being crushed under their pity.”

Jason grabbed the neck of his beer bottle and took a long gulp.

“My dad didn't even come to the hospital,” he continued. “Said it was too hard on him to see me like this.” He raised his amputated arm to emphasize “this.” “It was too frickin' hard on
him
.”

Creed understood. He'd never been able to rely on his own family. That was why he'd joined the Marines. Now his family was Hannah and the dogs. There was nothing he could say to Jason to make any of it better. No wise words. No sage piece of advice.

Instead he glanced at the time and said, “Why don't you stay here for the night?”

“What?”

“The sofa's pretty comfortable. Scout's downstairs in the kennel with the other dogs. You can check up on him during the night if you want.”

“You're worried I'm gonna off myself if I'm alone. Because of Tony.”

“No, it's not that.” But it was exactly that. “Look, it's been a tough day. It was just a suggestion.” He pretended like it was no big deal.

“Oh, I get it,” Jason said with a smile.

Creed braced himself for the kid's indignation. Sometimes he wanted to ask Jason if his shoulder ever got tired with that huge chip on it.

But the kid surprised him when he said, “You're missing Grace and Rufus.”

It wasn't a secret that the Jack Russell and the old Lab usually slept with Creed. Before he could respond, Jason added, “Okay, yeah. I wouldn't mind being closer to Scout.”

NEW YORK CITY

C
hristina Lomax pushed her way through the crowd of people. She'd taken Broadway by mistake. She was trying to get back to Fifth Avenue when the evening shows finished, and suddenly Christina found herself swept up in a wave of people. She no longer knew which direction she was headed. And yet, this was exactly the kind of thing her handlers had wanted.

They had emphasized over and over for her to make contact with as many people as possible. Touch objects that many others would touch after her—taxicab door handles, elevator buttons, café menus.

Now all she wanted to do was find her way back to the hotel. She needed a cab. It was too far to walk, especially with the muscle fatigue. She swore it wasn't half this bad when she'd left the hotel. Her knees felt wobbly and so did her stomach. The only thing she had eaten for the day was a hot pretzel from a street vendor. The salt had soothed her sore throat and the warm doughy bread filled the void. But that was hours ago, and even though she didn't have
much of an appetite she knew she needed to eat to keep her strength.

Through a slice of the crowd she could see a line of yellow taxis and black sedans. Christina tried to elbow her way to the curb. In front of her, theater patrons piled into the cars. She twisted through bodies, but every time she got close enough someone beat her to the cab door. She kept getting shoved back. It was like swimming against the current.

Finally she gave up.

She decided to walk to the nearest hotel. She'd go inside for a few minutes, then come back out and ask the doorman to hail a cab for her. It had worked earlier.

She was dressed well enough to be mistaken for a tourist who could afford to stay at a midtown luxury hotel. Though it didn't really matter. Christina had learned years ago that it wasn't so much about how you looked but how you carried yourself.

Confidence.
That was what it took.

An air of confidence could work better than Cole Haan leather flats. She never had designer shoes or clothes all those times she used the bathroom at the Home Depot or replenished her necessities at Walmart, and no one had given her a second look. No one would have ever guessed that she was homeless and living out of her car.

She was on the fringes of the Broadway crowd when the man beside her leaned down and said, “I have something for you, Christina. But don't look at me.”

Her entire body went rigid, but she managed to keep from looking over at him. They walked together, only it was more like they were being swept up in the same direction.

“Try not to look surprised or anxious,” he told her as he faced forward.

Out of the corner of her eye she tried to see if she recognized him. He was only a few inches taller than her. He wore a dark sports jacket and matching trousers, shiny leather shoes. His hair and beard were trimmed short with streaks of gray, though Christina guessed he was close to her age, somewhere in his forties.

“I don't understand,” she said, keeping her voice calm and her eyes from glancing at him. “Who are you?”

“My name's Howard, but that's not important. I've slipped something into your jacket pocket. Don't reach for it now. Wait until you're back at your hotel.”

Her pocket? When? How was that possible? She hadn't felt a thing. But she refrained from questioning him.

“Keep it on you at all times. When you're done, it's important the authorities find it on your body.”

What in the world was he talking about? No one had mentioned that she needed to carry something. But he was already gone.

On her body? It sounded like he meant when she was dead.

OUTSIDE ATLANTA

S
tephen Bishop ate a late dinner alone in the corner office just two doors down from the suite of laboratories. Not an uncommon habit for scientists. At least for dedicated scientists. Dr. Howard Getz had cancelled their scheduled evening meeting. Something about a family emergency he needed to attend to in New York.

“My sincere apologies,” he had said earlier over the phone.

Family could be a scientist's weakest link, especially during the launch of an experiment like this that had monumental ramifications. But the man sounded so pained that it was difficult to question him.

Bishop knew absolutely nothing about Dr. Getz's life and didn't care to, although it was hard to avoid the display in his office. His walls and bookcases were interspersed with dozens of photos of Getz and a smiling wife with or without several children in various stages of life.

Bishop didn't trust the man, but Getz was one of the two scientists Colonel Hess had recruited for this project. Getz and Dr. Sheila Robins didn't know all the details about the operation;
however, both of them—at one time or another—had worked on creating various strains of the bird flu at different DARPA facilities.

Getz's goal was to ultimately make a universal vaccine. Of course he understood that in order to do that he needed to first make it contagious. Robins's work was more in line with Bishop's: to make a potent strain that easily transferred from bird to human, then human to human with very little contact. Birds would be the perfect carrier. Robins saw the same advantage as Hess did in creating a new biological weapon.

The research facility was huge, though you'd never know that unless you could first find it along the winding back roads. It was tucked into the woods at the base of the Smoky Mountains; few outsiders even knew it existed.

Bishop had no clue how many scientists and staff worked here. The number was enough that no one cared about or noticed three new faces. That was one of the nice things about scientists. Most were intensely private people, and in a DARPA research facility, many were secretive and protective about their own projects. They had no extra time or inclination to care about anyone else's.

Bishop knew there were dozens of facilities like this one across the country that operated off the grid with little regulation and much independence. When Hess was pressed to find a laboratory suite for Bishop to use to run this experiment, he had no problem making the arrangements.

Still, it had taken some convincing on Bishop's part. Perhaps Hess might even call it blackmail. Bishop simply appealed to Hess's own goals and ambitions. As head of DARPA, Colonel Abraham Hess had spent decades investing in research that would facilitate the protection of soldiers and the death of the enemy. The enemy
had changed through the years. It was no longer the Russians and the Cold War. Now it was the medieval forces like the Taliban and radical Islamist terrorists.

Bioweapons were just a part of the dirty secrets that Hess and his minions didn't want the world to know about—and heaven forbid the bleeding-heart ruling class should be confronted with that reality, the ones who had no stomach for offending the enemy, let alone killing them.

Bishop and Hess disagreed on many things, but the one thing they did agree on was that for every twisted quasi-immoral weapon that DARPA could dream up, the enemy was already two steps ahead of them. And there was no easy method to combat this new enemy—terrorists who strapped bombs to their chests and were willing to blow up hundreds of civilians along with themselves.

Bishop's grandfather had been a scientist in the 1960s, when there was a race to build and stockpile bigger and better and more bombs than the Russians. He and Hess came up in their careers during a time when biological weapons like VX nerve gas and sarin gas were considered the latest tools in a growing arsenal of alternative weapons.

In fact, Bishop's grandfather was one of the first to test the use of mosquitoes as carriers for dengue fever. Back then they used the military's enlisted men as test subjects. Fifty years later when those facts came to light—after being hidden and buried in classified documents—the American people were appalled.

Last fall Colonel Hess had faced a congressional hearing—a political firestorm—and somehow he had risen out of the ashes. And he'd managed to do it without releasing any information about DARPA's current research, nor did he sacrifice a single DARPA
research facility or project. That was if you didn't count the unfortunate loss of the North Carolina facility, which really couldn't be counted. Its demise came from a massive mudslide and not the political firing squad.

The new cell phone started ringing.

Speak of the devil.

“This is Bishop.”

“You were going to call me.” The old man's voice sounded like gravel on sandpaper.

“I see you received the new phone number.”

“Tell me again why it's so important these carriers be eliminated,” Hess said.

“We cannot risk them telling how they became infected.” Bishop had already explained this to the old man. “If we wait until they get too sick, they may end up saying things.”

“One of your watchers killed a young woman and left her body in a river.”

“They're supposed to make it look like suicide.”

“I'm told he panicked. The woman had called the county sheriff.”

Bishop sat up and gripped the phone. This was new information.

“What did she tell him?”

“Some fantastical story about being a part of a government experiment that was making her ill.”

This was exactly what Bishop worried about. “Did he believe her?”

“It doesn't matter. I sent one of my men to clean up the mess. From now on we use only recruits that I choose.”

“I really can't be bothered by those minor details,” Bishop said, hiding the wave of relief. “We'll use yours for the next phase.”

“And your watchers,” he said, “they need to report to my man.”

Hess had sensed vulnerability like a shark in bloody water and was using it to seize even more control. It wasn't out of concern for the project's success as much as his own self-preservation.

Bishop swallowed years of preparation along with pride and pretended this was no big deal, then simply said, “Fine.”