Time of Attack (11 page)

B
oth Quinn and Thibodaux had lived at Emiko Miyagi’s home for a time when they’d first been tapped by Winfield Palmer to work as Other Governmental Agents. Quinn was familiar with the layout as well as the woman’s love for the austere when it came to furnishings. Though the outer brick façade of the home had changed little over the two centuries since it had been built, the interior had been completely gutted and replaced with tatami grass mats, white pine beams, and sliding paper doors.

The bath area was off to the side of the rear patio and—as all traditional baths—located far from the toilet. It was enclosed in a ten-by-ten cedar room with benches and hooks along the inside wall like a pool house. A sliding cedar door led from a lower alcove that contained a shelf stacked with folded white towels used to both wash and dry. Quinn left his running shoes in a small wooden cubby above the floor.

Japanese baths were often social locations, a place to share gossip as well as to clean oneself. Two cedar stools were situated under a row of water spigots, low and easy to reach when seated. The round tub beside the spigots was built from cedar slats and resembled an oversize barrel that had been cut in half. At nearly six feet across, it dominated the steamy room.

Stripping naked, Quinn left his sweats and T-shirt on a cedar shelf over one of the benches inside the sliding door. The faint hint of smoke from an oak fire drifted through the humid air, mingling with the smells of soap and scorched minerals from pipes that heated the near scalding water. Quinn sat in front of the spigots with a bar of soap and a wooden bowl. The stool was small, like something meant for a child, but it got the job done. Though a long soak was traditional, it was customary to scrub until your skin was pink before entering the tub, leaving the water clean enough for the next person to use as well.

Quinn finished washing and fed a length of split oak into the wood-fired heater box. He’d just slipped into the steaming water when his phone rang on the bleached wooden table next to the tub.

Winfield Palmer began talking as soon as Quinn picked up the call.

“I gotta ask,” Palmer began his rant. “Do you have any idea what kind of a shit storm you’ve ignited with your little stunt? Every news outlet in the country is filing Freedom of Information Act requests for the casino security camera footage that shows you trying to drown a man before someone else blows his brains out.”

“As far as they know it was a man who shot the Speaker of the House,” Quinn said, half to himself. He was not the type to try very hard to explain his actions. He slid down so only his head and the shoulders were above the surface.

“
One
of the men who shot Drake,” Palmer said, as if he had the winning card. “And a lot of good you did. Thanks to you, Drake is back at his residence and demanding answers.”

“He’s out of the hospital?” Quinn sat back up in the water, wiping beads of perspiration out of his face. This was news.

“Yes,” Palmer said. “Shot twice in the chest, but neither bullet got close to anything vital. He did lose a toe in the shootout and, oddly enough, he also had a small-caliber wound through the bottom of his foot. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

Quinn chose his words carefully. “Do you remember when we met?” he asked.

“Of course,” Palmer said, momentarily stumped by the sudden question during his tongue-lashing.

“Your sister’s boy had been kidnapped in Iraq. I was sent in to get him back and . . . take care of things.”

“I said I remember,” Palmer snapped. “What’s your point?”

“You and I both know Hartman Drake murdered his wife. We know he was intimately connected to a terrorist organization that tried to kill the president and the VP. Someone connected to this man tried to shoot my little girl and ended up nearly killing my wife. You said it yourself before I went to Vegas. There is something bigger than an attempt on my family going on here. You are strategy, I’m tactics. I get that. But if all this had happened to someone else, you would have sent me.” Quinn plowed ahead, not giving Palmer a chance to speak.

“Point taken,” Palmer said.

“What are we going to do about Drake?”

“I’m working on that,” Palmer said. “He’s become a media darling again—attacked twice by terrorists and survived. The conspiracy blogs have fuzzy photos of you in Vegas from a half dozen tourists’ smartphones. Some call you a government agent; others have branded you one of the terrorists.”

“I can’t help that now,” Quinn said. “But I can find this Japanese girl and get some answers from her.” He kept the Foo Dog information to himself for the moment.

“All right,” Palmer snapped. “Just do us all a favor and keep your head down. Listen, I’ve got to go. We have some kind of plague outbreak in southern Utah. That’s not too far from Vegas. You don’t have anything to do with it, do you?”

“I do not,” Quinn said, feeling worse than he had before the call. “I’d better let you get to it.”

He reached over the edge of the tub and dropped the phone on the wooden table beside his towel before letting his back slide down the slick cedar boards of the tub. The slightest movement brought prickling pain in the near scalding water. He welcomed the feeling, hoping the heat and sweat would purge his body and his mind.

He closed his eyes and breathed in the heavy scent of the oak fire and mineral odor of steam. A whisper-like rustling at the sliding door caused them to flick open.

He sat up straighter, ignoring the burn at his movement, and wiped a hand across his face when he saw the form of Emiko Miyagi through the cloudy haze. She stood in front of the curtains that blocked the doorway as if waiting for permission to enter her own bath.

Quinn wasn’t uncomfortable with his own nudity. Miyagi had seen him naked before, when she and Thibodaux had rescued him from three of Doctor Badeeb’s men. But there was something oddly out of place about this visit. Japanese baths were often communal, but in the year and a half since he’d known her, Miyagi had drawn a strict line between teacher and student, remaining ever aloof and distinct.

She tilted her head to one side, studying the situation before she committed herself by stepping fully into the room. Dark hair fell in damp strands, dripping against the indigo cloth of a cotton summer kimono, known as a
yukata
. It was printed with large white chrysanthemums as big as a fist. A bright red sash wrapped around her narrow waist. Her face was flushed, presumably from a hot shower of her own before she was to enter the bath.

“I apologize.” Quinn grabbed his towel from the nearby table and started to get out of the tub. “You expected me to be finished with my bath by now.”

Miyagi raised her hand to stop him.

“It is quite all right, Quinn-san,” she said. Her voice was soft and matter of fact, as if she did not want to mar the contemplative mood of the bath. “Please, wait a moment longer if you do not mind.”

Jericho settled back into the water.

“I . . .” She paused, taking a tiny step forward, her hands clasped at her waist. The wet hair and bright kimono made her look girlish, more feminine and fragile than he knew her to actually be. “In light of all that has happened . . .” She nodded, moving forward again. Her steps were small, constrained by the tight kimono. “. . . I feel that I must tell you a story.”

She stood a mere two feet from the tub now, close enough that Quinn could see the slight tremor in her lips.

“I believe it will explain much that you need to know.” Her hands moved behind her back. “But it will also produce many questions. It is a story of youth and heartbreak—of violence and death.”

Quinn, who was surprised by little in the world, let his mouth fall open when Miyagi drew away the red sash and let the kimono slip from her shoulders and fall to the floor.

Completely nude, she gave a shuddering sigh, fragile, and completely out of her normal character.

“It is a story of my tattoo.”

 

T
he cell phone in the breast pocket of Governor Lee McKeon’s camelhair blazer began to vibrate the moment he cut into his French toast at the Sassy Onion. He considered ignoring it. His breakfast mate, the president of Willamette University, had a lot of powerful and, more important, wealthy friends who were potential political backers. It wouldn’t do to snub him by answering a cell phone.

“Go ahead and take that, Lee,” the bow tie–wearing academic said around a mouthful of bread and syrup. “I’m sure it’s important gubernatorial business.” It was he who’d insisted they have the French toast. What else would one order for breakfast at the Sassy Onion?

McKeon thanked him for his understanding and answered without getting up, though he knew that would severely hamper his side of the conversation. Since the call was international, it would likely be monitored by one of the alphabet-soup government agencies anyway. The phone was a burner, purchased at a convenience store in Portland. Ranjhani would have a similar device that he’d picked up in Lahore. Everyone expected a governor to have more than one phone, so even his aides didn’t give him a second look.

“Yes,” McKeon said.

“Peace be unto you,” Qasim Ranjhani said.

“And to you,” McKeon said in English.

“Can you talk?”

“Yes, for a moment,” McKeon said.

“Very well,” Ranjhani gave a long nasal breath. “I believe we should meet to discuss a few options.”

“I’m not sure that is advisable,” the governor said. “There are a lot of delicate issues with that project.” Though it was no secret that his biological father hailed from the subcontinent, the last thing McKeon needed was for some photo of him with an unknown Pakistani to end up on the Internet. Americans loved to showcase their minority candidates as long as they associated with the correct sort of people.

“As you wish,” Ranjhani said. “Your father would be very proud of you, you know. We are going to change the course of history.”

“I look forward to it.”

Governor McKeon ended the call. His hand shook as he cut into the French toast. He tried to keep up his side of the conversation with the university president, but all he could think about were the words Qasim Ranjhani had spoken. The course of history would indeed make a sharp bend and he, Lee McKeon, would be at the forefront. McKeon smiled as he swallowed the sweet toast and syrup. He would be a good son, and, Allah willing, see his father’s plan to the glorious finish.

 

D
octor Todd Elton peeled off blue nitrile gloves, using the thumb of one to pull off the other so they ended up in a neat, self-contained ball without the outside of either ever touching his skin. He let them fall into the red infectious-materials bag lining the bin in the corner, then scrubbed his hands in the exam room sink.

A serious runner with seven marathons under his belt, Elton was slender with a mischievous glint in his eyes and the deep dimples of someone who smiled in his sleep.

He did not remove his protective glasses—meant to keep any errant fluids out of his eyes—and spoke over his shoulder while he washed. His scrubbing and speaking were more animated than usual.

“Well, okay, Mrs. Johnson,” he said, working the Betadine soap into a thick lather all the way up to his elbows. “Sorry about causing you so much pain there.” He pushed his glasses back with his shoulder, hoping his patient didn’t notice the sweat beading on his forehead.

Draining a boil on an elderly woman’s neck was not unknown to him in his nineteen years of medical practice—but treating so many people for the same such sores in one day was like something out of a horror movie. Surely this was a record. And no boil he’d ever treated had a sore throat associated with it. He had already lanced three boils for his brother-in-law and then sent him home with a prescription for a steroid inhaler that the doctor hoped would ease his labored breathing. A half hour before Mrs. Johnson arrived, Bedford’s army buddy, R.J., had come in with six of the cursed little boils. And that had just been the beginning.

“It’s okay, Doctor Todd.” The sweet little woman coughed into a crumpled white tissue. She weighed less than a hundred pounds and couldn’t have been five feet tall from her bunioned feet to the top of her perfectly quaffed silver-blue hair. “I’ve felt worse pains, I suppose.” She gave a tremulous chuckle. “Though I can’t remember when at this very moment.”

Elton dried his hands on a paper towel and then looked down at the red bag filled with medical lances and gauze covered with blood and gore. It was a struggle to resist the urge to keep scrubbing his hands until they were raw.

He turned to face his patient, keeping a good distance between them. “We’ll get you a prescription for some antibiotics. I’m going to go ahead and treat you for MRSA, just in case you’ve got one of the nastier bugs. The culture will take about three—”

Brandy, his PA, knocked on the door and then opened it without waiting for an answer. Her purple scrubs were visible through the narrow crack.

“Can I see you a moment, Doctor?”

Elton forced a smile, relieved to have an excuse to escape the confines of the exam room. “I’ll just be a minute, Mrs. Johnson.”

The old woman gave a polite nod and he pulled the door shut behind him.

Brandy’s round face was ashen. “There are two more in the waiting room now.”

“Seriously?” Elton stared blankly at the wall. “That makes—”

“Your brother-in-law came in yesterday. You’ve done nine already since we opened. Four more have come in over the last twenty minutes.” Brandy rolled full lips into a white line. “This is just too weird.”

The doctor gave an exhausted sigh. “I’ll give Public Health a call . . .” As lead physician at both the Kane County Hospital and Clinic it was his responsibility to ensure all necessary protocols were followed when it came to the outbreak of a contagious disease—something he’d never had to face in his small, southern Utah town.

Brandy followed close behind as Elton made his way down the bright hall to his office, as if she were afraid to be left alone. Donita, the records clerk, glanced up as they passed her office. A worried half grin crossed her face. Everyone could tell this was no ordinary day at the clinic.

The public health hotline picked up on the second ring. Instead of helping him with his problem, the harried woman on the other end said she would need to transfer him. A half second later, someone from the Centers for Disease Control answered.

He put his hand over the receiver and looked at Brandy. “Odd,” he whispered. “They’ve transferred me to the CDC.” He turned back to his conversation. “Yes, this is Todd Elton in Kanab, Utah . . . No, K . . .
A
. . . N . . . Yes, Kanab. Anyway, I’m a family practice physician and . . .” He took a deep breath. “We have a bit of a situation I’d like to run by you—” He nodded, though talking on the phone and the woman on the other end had no idea he was nodding. She asked a series of questions, callback numbers, physical address, number of people involved, all likely off a predetermined checklist kept beside the hotline telephone.

“Yes,” Elton answered at length. “Well, it’s an acute outbreak of feverish boils around the groin, armpit, and neck. There’s been one male patient but it generally appears to be affecting women . . . Yes, fourteen total so far . . . Yes, I’m running cultures—”

He sat silently for a moment, listening, perfectly still but for his eyes that kept darting between Brandy and his desk.

Elton shook his head, grimacing at Brandy as if he’d just heard something odd. “Yes,” he said. “As a matter of fact one of the patients is a soldier. All right, I understand.”

He hung up. “Get this,” he said, taking a deep breath, “they were already working on it.”

“How’d they know about us?” Brandy crinkled her forehead.

“Not us,” Elton said. “I guess there are cases popping up in other places.”

Brandy caught her breath. “What other places?”

“I was talking to a government agency.” Elton chuckled, trying to relieve the tension he felt in his gut. “She was not extremely forthcoming with that information.”

“What are we supposed to do?”

Elton toyed with the notepad where he’d written the number for CDC. “The lady said she’d call right back. But I get the feeling they are sending someone to take over.”