The Hades Factor

  The man’s elbow snapped. He screamed and jerked, and his face turned white and twisted in pain. As he passed out, the Glock fell to the pavement. All this happened in seconds. Smith gave a grim smile. At least he did not have to kill the man. In a single motion, he scooped up the weapon, rolled onto his shoulder, and came up on one knee with the pistol cocked. He fired. The silenced bullet made a pop.

  One of the two men running at him pitched forward, twisting in agony on the cold pavement. As the man grabbed his thigh where Smith’s bullet had entered, the second man dropped beside him. Lying on his belly, he lifted his head as if he were on a firing range and Smith were a stationary target. Big mistake. Smith knew exactly what the man was going to do. Smith dodged, and his attacker’s silenced gunshot burned past his temple.

  Now Smith had no choice. Before the man could shoot again or lower his head, Smith fired a second time. The bullet exploded through the attacker’s right eye, leaving a black crater. Blood poured out, and the man pitched facedown, motionless. Smith knew he had to be dead.

  His pulse throbbing at his temples, Smith jumped up and walked cautiously toward them. He had not wanted to kill the man, and he was angry to have been put in the position where he had to. Around him, the air seemed to still vibrate from the attack. He gazed quickly up and down the street. No porch lights turned on. The late hour and the silenced bullets had kept secret the ambush.

  He pulled an army-issue Beretta from the limp hand of the man he had shot in the eye and, with little hope, checked his vital signs. Yes, he was dead. He shook his head, disgusted and regretful, as he removed weapons from the reach of the two injured men. The man with the broken elbow was still unconscious, while the one with the bullet through his thigh swore a string of curses and glared at Smith.

  Smith ignored him. He hurried back toward his Triumph. Just then the night rocked with the sound of a large truck’s approach. Smith whirled. The broad white expanse of the unmarked, six-wheel delivery truck sped into the intersection. Somehow these killers had found him again.

  How?

  In combat, there is a time to stand and fight, and a time to run like hell. Smith thought about Sophia and sprinted down a row of looming Victorian houses close to the sidewalk. In some backyard a lonely dog barked, followed instantly by an answering bark. Soon the animals’ calls echoed across the old neighborhood. As they died away, Smith slid into the black shadows of a three-story Victorian with turrets, cupolas, and a wide porch. He was at least a hundred yards from the intersection. Crouched low, he looked back and studied the scene. He memorized the parked cars and then focused on the truck, which had stopped. A short, heavy man had jumped from the cab to bend over the three wounded men. Smith did not recognize him, but he knew that truck.

  The man waved urgently. Another two men exited the cab and ran to carry away the injured attackers while the first man raised the truck’s rear accordion door. A half-dozen men piled out over the tailgate and waited, their heads swiveling as they examined the night. Even in the capricious moonlight, Smith could see the heavy man’s face glisten with sweat as he issued orders.

  The two wounded men and the corpse were put into the car that had pulled up alongside Smith, and one of the men drove it quickly away, heading north. Then the big delivery truck left, too, going south toward the river, while the leader sent his men off in pairs, no doubt to search for Jon Smith. With luck, each would assume he was more than a match for a forty-year-old, sedentary research scientist, despite the reports of their two surviving comrades. An ivory-tower freak who wore a military uniform as a courtesy and had gotten lucky—people had made that mistake about Smith before.

  He listened from his hiding place until two of them drew close. This pair he would have to neutralize somehow. He turned and loped off into the shadows, making sure they heard him. They took the bait, and a wide gap opened between the pair and the others as they pursued him. All his nerves were afire as he trotted across dark yards, watching everywhere. Four blocks beyond the intersection, he found a combination that would work: A white, Colonial-style mansion stood lightless up at the end of a short drive, while off to the side was a gazebo, nearly invisible in the camouflage of night and the thick trees and bushes that marked the property.

  He coughed and scuffed his shoes against the driveway to make sure they would hear and think he was heading off to hide at the mansion. Then he slipped into the secluded gazebo. He had been right—through its latticed walls he had a clear view of the property. He set the Glock and Beretta on a bench; he did not plan to use them for anything more than intimidation. No, this work had to be done in silence and with speed.

  One long minute passed.

  Could they have somehow guessed what he was doing and called in the rest of the team? At this moment, were they circling to come up from behind? He wiped a hand across his forehead, removing sweat. His heart seemed to thunder.

  Two minutes … three minutes …

  A shadow emerged from the trees and ran toward the left side of the big house.

  Then a second ran toward the right side.

  Smith inhaled. Thugs, civilian or military, were predictable. Without much imagination, their tactical ideas were rudimentary—the direct charge of the bull, or the simple ruse of a schoolboy quarterback who always looked the opposite way from where he intended to throw the football.

  The two closing in like pincers in the night were better than most, but like Custer at Little Big Horn or Lord Chelmsford at Isandhlwana against the Zulu, they had done him the favor of splitting their forces so he could take them on one at a time. He had hoped they would.

  The bolder padded around the mansion’s right side, between it and the gazebo. That was a break for Smith. As the man continued on, Smith crept toward him from behind. He stepped on a twig. It was a soft snap, but loud enough to alert the attacker. Smith’s heart seemed to stop. The man whirled around, pistol rising to fire.

  Smith acted instantly. A single powerful right fist to the throat paralyzed the vocal cords, a sweeping arc of right leg smashed a size-twelve shoe to the side of the man’s head, and he dropped quietly.

  Smith slid back into the gazebo.

  One … two minutes.

  The more cautious of the pair materialized in a patch of moonlight between the gazebo and the fallen man. He had had the sense to circle his partner out of sight. But that was where his imagination ended, and he hurried to kneel over the fallen man.

  “Jerry? Jesus, what—” Smith’s appropriated Beretta smashed across the back of the bent head.

  Smith dragged both unconscious men into the gazebo. Crouched over them, he panted as he listened to the night. The only distinctive sound was of a distant car heading south. With relief, he left the gazebo and loped through the shadows of houses and trees back the way he had come. As he neared the intersection where he had been attacked, he slowed and listened again. The only noise was what sounded like the same car driving in the opposite direction, this time north.

  On elbows and knees, a pistol in each hand, he crawled to within a front yard of the intersection. The sprinkling of parked cars on either side had not changed, and his Triumph still waited at the curb where he had left it to go to the aid of the fake victim. No one was in sight.

  There was no way the six-wheeler truck could have found him first on Wisconsin Avenue and then here. No one had that kind of luck. Yet the truck, the car, and the “drunk” had created a diversion, intending his death.

  They had to have known exactly where he was.

  He waited as the moon went down. The night grew darker, a large owl hunted through the trees, and the distant car continued to drive south, then north, then south again, slowly making its way closer to the intersection.

  Satisfied that no one was lurking there, Smith jumped up and ran to his Triumph. He took a small flashlight from the glove compartment and slid under the car’s rear. And there it was. No imagination, no originality. The bright funnel of his flashlight revealed a transmit
ter no larger than his thumbnail attached to the car’s undercarriage by a powerful mini-magnet. The tracking device’s reader was probably in the truck or with the short, heavy leader.

  He flicked off the flashlight, slipped it into his pocket, and removed the tracking device. He admired the creativity that had manufactured such delicate engineering. As he crawled out from under the Triumph, he noticed the car he had been monitoring was almost at the intersection. He knelt beside the Triumph, watching. The car was moving slowly as the driver pitched newspapers from his rolled-down window onto the lawns and driveways of the neighborhood.

  The driver made a U-turn.

  Smith stood up and whistled. As the car slowed in the intersection, he ran toward the open window. “Can I buy a paper from you?”

  “Yeah, sure. I’ve got some extras.”

  Smith reached into his pocket for change. He dropped a coin, bent to pick it up, and with a cool smile he stuck the microtransmitter to the car’s undercarriage.

  Straightening, he took the newspaper and nodded. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  The car drove on, and Smith jumped into the Triumph. He peeled away, hoping his trick would occupy his assailants long enough for him to reach Sophia. But if these attacks where part of what Bill Griffin had warned him would happen, they knew who he was and where to find him. And where to find Sophia.

  4:07 A.M.

  Fort Detrick, Maryland

  The report from the Prince Leopold Institute of Tropical Medicine in Belgium was the third Sophia read after plunging back into work, the last scientist still there. She was too worried to sleep. If the damned general was right that Jon was off on one of his enthusiasms over some medical development, she would be furious. Still, she hoped Kielburger was right, as that would mean she had no reason to be concerned.

  She continued studying the latest reports, but not until she reached the one from the Prince Leopold lab did something finally offer hope: Dr. René Giscours recalled a field report he had read years ago while doing a stint at a jungle hospital far upriver in Bolivian Amazonia. He had been preoccupied at the time battling what appeared to be a new outbreak of Machupo fever, not far from the river town of San Joaquin where Karl Johnson, Kuns, and MacKenzie had first found the deadly virus many years before. He had had no time for even thinking about an unconfirmed rumor from far-off Peru, so he had made a note and forgotten about it.

  But the new virus had jogged his memory. He had checked through his papers and found his original note—but not the actual report. Still, the note to himself back then had emphasized an apparent combination of hantavirus and hemorrhagic fever symptoms, as well as some connection to monkeys.

  A surge of angry justification rushed through Sophia. Yes! After Victor Tremont had been unable to help her, she had doubted herself. Now Giscours’s report confirmed her recollection. What contact did USAMRIID have down there? If she was right, there had been no major or even minor outbreaks of that virus since. Which meant it must still be confined to the narrow, deep jungle in a remote part of Peru.

  In her daily logbook, she described her reaction to the Prince Leopold report, and she summarized what she recalled of the strange virus and her two conversations with Victor Tremont, since they might be relevant now. She also wrote some speculations about how a Peruvian virus could have been transmitted beyond the jungle.

  As she was writing, she heard the door to her office open. Who—? Hope filled her.

  Excited, she spun her chair around. “Jon? Darling. Where the hell—”

  In the instant before her head exploded in violent pain and color, she had a glimpse of four men surrounding her. None was Jon. Then darkness.

  Nadal al-Hassan, disguised from head to foot in lab scrubs, methodically searched the female scientist’s office desk. He read each document, report, notebook, and memo. He studied every file. The task was offensive, even though he was protected by surgical gloves. He knew such modern blasphemies occurred in his own country as well as many other Islamic, even Arab, nations, but he made no secret of his distaste. Allowing females to study and work beside men was not only heresy, it defiled both the dignity of the men and the chastity of the women. Touching what the woman had touched defiled him.

  But the search was necessary, so he performed it meticulously, leaving nothing unexamined. He found the two damaging documents almost at once. One was the only report open on her desk—from the Prince Leopold Institute, by a Dr. René Giscours. The other was her handwritten phone record of outgoing calls that the USAMRIID director apparently required all personnel to complete each month.

  Then he found her logbook musings about the Belgian report. Fortunately, it filled an entire page, beginning at the top and ending at the bottom. From a small leather case, he took out a pen-shaped, razor-sharp draftsman’s blade. With care and delicacy, he excised the page. He examined the cut to be certain it was invisible, then hid the page in his scrubs. After that he found nothing more of importance.

  His three men, dressed in identical scrubs, were completing their search of the rows of file cabinets.

  One said, “Got a new memo in a file’bout Peru.”

  Another said, “Couple of old files talked about stuff down in South America.”

  The third just shook his head.

  “You read every document?” al-Hassan snapped. “Every file? Looked in every drawer?”

  “Like you told us.”

  “Under everything? Behind anything that moved?”

  “Hey, we ain’t stupid.”

  Al-Hassan had strong doubts about that. He found most Westerners lazy and incompetent. But from the mess in the office, he decided they had been thorough this time.

  “Very well. You will now erase any indications of a search. Everything is to be as it was.”

  While they grumbled and returned to work, al-Hassan slipped on a second, thicker pair of white rubber gloves. He took a small refrigerated metal container from a leather case, released a pressure seal, and extracted a glass vial. He carefully removed a hypodermic syringe from the case, filled it from the sealed vial, and injected Sophia in the vein of her left ankle.

  At the prick of the needle, she stirred and moaned.

  The three men heard. They turned to look, and their faces went ashen.

  “Complete your tasks,” al-Hassan said harshly.

  The men dropped their gazes. As they finished straightening the office, al-Hassan put the used syringe inside a plastic container, sealed it, and returned it to the leather case. His men indicated they were finished. Al-Hassan inspected the office once more. Satisfied, he ordered them to leave. He gave one final glance at the now-motionless Sophia and saw the sweat that had beaded up on her face. When she groaned, he smiled and followed them out.

  Chapter Seven

  4:14 A.M.

  Thurmont, Maryland

  A light wind rustled through bushes and trees, carrying the stink of apples rotting on the ground. Jon Smith’s three-story, saltbox-style house was set back into the looming shoulder of Catoctin Mountain. The place was dark, not even a porch light to welcome him home, which made him think Sophia must still be at the lab. But he had to be sure.

  He was a block away, crouched behind an SUV, as he studied his house, yard, and street. He saw telltale signs: The trunk of the old apple tree was too thick where someone stood behind it, watching. Farther up the block, almost hidden by two tall oak trees, the hood of a black Mercedes protruded from a driveway of neighbors Smith knew owned only a 2000 Buick Le Sabre, which they always parked in the garage.

  Considering how quickly he had driven home from Georgetown on the almost-deserted highway and roads, there was no way the pair waiting here could have arrived first. Which meant this was a second surveillance team, and that alarmed him.

  The sentry in front could see the driveway and garage doors. There was probably a man in back, too, to cover the rear of the house and garage. But Smith could see no reason to waste a man on the side of the garage away from t
he house.

  He felt the familiar hollow of fear in his stomach every soldier knows, but also the hot rush of adrenaline. He slipped down an alley and sprinted behind the houses until past his street. Then he recrossed out of sight of the hunters. Beginning to sweat again, he worked through a stand of sycamores to the near side of his garage and slithered the last five yards on his elbows and belly.

  He listened. There was no sound behind the house. He raised up to peer inside the garage.

  And sighed with relief. It was empty. Sophia’s old green Dodge was gone. She must have been at Fort Detrick all this time. If so, she had never received his message, and that explained the lack of a porch light. He breathed deeply, instantly feeling better.

  Retracing his path, he hurried back to his Triumph and drove to a phone booth a quarter mile away. He could not wait to hear her voice. He dialed her work number. After four rings, the machine picked up. “I’m out of my office or in the lab. Please leave a message. I’ll return your call as soon as possible. Thank you.”

  The bright sound of her strong voice gave him a sharp pang and another feeling he could not explain. Loneliness?

  He dialed again. The voice that answered was all business, which was reassuring, particularly considering the circumstances: “United States Army, Fort Detrick. Security.”

  “This is Lt. Col. Jonathan Smith, USAMRIID.”

  “Base ID, Colonel?”

  He gave his number.

  There was a pause. “Thank you, Colonel. How can we help you?”

  “Connect me to the desk guard at USAMRIID.”

  Clicks, beeps, and a new voice. “USAMRIID. Security. Grasso.”

  “Grasso, Jon Smith. Listen—”

  “Hey, Colonel, you’re back. Everything okay? Doc Russell’s been askin’—”