1
"Daddy! Are you going to bring back presents?" six year old (about to be seven!) Tescha asked/demanded with her tiny hands fisted at her hips. "It's my birthday and you're leaving, so you need to bring presents."
Frank laughed and went to one knee beside the indignant child. This was the one thing he hated about his job. The things he missed, the milestones of his kids' lives that just zipped on by without him and even though his idea of 'partying' didn't originally consist of donkeys with missing tails to attach, there was a tiny tearing sound only he could hear in his heart at missing each new one.
And if you'd stayed in the military? Or remained a cop? he reminded himself. Did he really think it would have been any different? At least this way, even though there was always the chance when they walked out the door that the plane might crash or the disease might skip right over all their precautions, no one was shooting at him. Not yet, anyway. Never rule out any possibility. He almost smiled at his own grim humor but Marcy was still waiting for her answer and big brown eyes in a pixie face could somehow be an amazing combination of demand and plea that he simply couldn't resist.
"I don't know, sweetie," he said honestly. He'd never lie to his kids. That had been one oath he'd made to himself; not like his own father. Frank Powell wouldn't always be able to give his children the answers they wanted, but they'd come to know that they could rely on the fact that he'd give them the truth. Always. Even when it hurt.
Amazing how indignant a six, oops, seven year old! could look!
"I'll try," he amended quickly with a laugh. "But Daddy's got to go to work, you know that and I might not be able to find anything before I get back. And I want to hurry back so I can see what you look like a whole year older, you know."
"You going to go save a little girl's life, Daddy?" she asked, the fists dropping away and her arms suddenly wrapping around his neck. "A little girl like me maybe, if there's one who's sick?"
God forbid I have to, baby, he thought, but said, "I'm going to do my best to help whoever I can, sweetie. I hope there aren't any little girls who are sick though. Don't you?"
She planted a quick peck of a kiss on his cheek, said, "Yes! But hurry up and come home, Daddy, 'cause we all miss you and sometimes Mommy cries."
She was gone in a small whirlwind of denim and pink and Frank, still down on one knee, looked up and met Sheila's eyes. Out of the mouths of babes. He hadn't known she cried sometimes when he was gone.
Before he could get sappy on her, she pointed to his position and said, "If you think the getting down on your knee and proposing again thing is going to cut you any slack, mister, you're out of your mind. It's your turn to dry the dishes and there's no negotiating." She stopped, halfway turned back toward the kitchen. "That is, unless of course..." she faced him full on again, a half smile on her beautiful, beloved face, a spark in her dark eyes, "you wanted to buy me a dishwasher."
Frank laughed, got up. Ouch. Was that old age creeping up into his back? No way. "We'll talk," he said, "but I'm afraid you're out of luck on those dishes, love of my life. Connor called. We got an earlier flight. I'm on my way out the door."
She speared him with a glare before turning toward the kitchen and tossing over her shoulder, "You're gonna owe me big on this one, Powell. Leaving me alone with a birthday party and five six-year-olds to do alone. Big!"
He was still laughing at the image of a herd of rampant half-people rearranging the house and Sheila's nerves when they boarded the plane.
Papers rustling, chairs scraping, the distant whine of jet engines. Connor was getting way too accustomed to those auditory cues, a little too settled, a little too comfortable, a little too attached... and it was the last that he couldn't allow. It was a killer, and that was his missionto stop killers, not let himself get vulnerable.
The reports were complete, incredibly complete, if there was a shred of information available, the team had already found it and recorded it. He knew he could count on that always. It was almost funny, though, how he could read a report or note and tell who had written it without any signature just by how the personality bled into the paper.
Natalie was complete to the point of being microscopic. She could look at a smear on a slide of glass and practically read it before she slid it under the prongs of the microscope. She had the feel as Madylyn, the nearly mythical guru of the labs said; about the highest compliment ever given out. This morning though, she seemed preoccupied, kept fingering a small silver charm on a thin weave of bracelet. He wondered, but she hadn't offerred to explain, so he hadn't brought it up.
Miles was shuffling through a stack of papers, his ever present laptop at his elbow with an array of CDs spread out like a hand of cards beside it. The kid must study 24 hours a day. Connor knew the young man would make a superior doctor, already was as young as he was, but whether or not he'd make a good NIH operative... well, that remained to be seen. Not that his heart wasn't in it; it was, sometimes too much, another liability.
Eva looked tired, a little distant, as if she'd sat up during the night making life altering decisions, and forgot to stock her place with enough coffee for the endeavor. Or maybe she was PR'ing another young up-and-coming Senator on the side. Eva could do the impossible; if they needed vaccine that wasn't available, she could find it; if they needed emergency transport, she could provide anything, up to Air Force One; she was completely invaluable. Without her, people would die. But sometimes Stephen wondered where her priorities lay. Where her loyalties lay.
"Thanks a lot, Stephen," Frank grumbled in a half serious tone as he wandered back to the table with a cup of coffee, "now I have to get 'another' present for Marcy since I'm not going to be here for her birthday today. You're making an extortionist out of my youngest daughter."
"Ah," Connor said, his thoughts lifting, his mind switching back into work mode, "just helping her with her job skills, Frank. Okay, people, everyone got a copy of the report?"
Hate is a powerful tool.
He knew that by intellect, but he also knew it by close, personal kinship. He held his hatred close, cherishing it, waiting for it to be fed, nourished, filled. And he was patient. Very patient. He had to be or he never would have done it. It was an achievement that could have been Nobel Prize material if it weren't twisted. If it weren't meant to kill rather than to save. His hate had changed him, molded him from a man he no longer even recognized into what he was now.
So much planning, so much work. If they hadn't pushed him aside, maybe it would have been different, maybe he would have used his vast talent for something else. No matter. It was too late.
Soon it would begin and he had every step planned. Each small piece to tear off the man's soul.
The old pickup truck had been cheap. 800. And even that had been more than it had been worth at least by half, but that didn't matter either. Money wasn't much of a consideration any more. This might as well be a suicide mission. That didn't matter much any more either. What did he have to live for anyway? He'd done it. He'd gotten the bug just right; he'd seen it in the faces of the people who came into the small hospital, tearing away at their lungs, corroding their stomachs, being killed by inches. It was hard not to gloat.
The NIH team was already on the way here. Connor at their head.
His plans for them were as carefully planned and laid out as his work on the mutated disease.
The first one... it hadn't really been all that difficult to find out about her love of the piano, her daydreams as a child, that melancholy that would exist when reminded. A reminder such as a tiny, silver charm. She would be first.
Having had Jack as a son had either strengthened Connor or tapped into a vulnerable side he hadn't been aware of having harbored. Oh, he'd never been stone cold or even totally impassive; but there had always been an ability to slot things into their proper perspectives. He'd trained himselfor was it been trainedto be willing and able to stand back, hold himself outside the emotion of the moment so that he could be at his most effective.
His military tour hadn't hurt that attitude either. War was a great equalizer. Sometimes he simply had to see the disease alone and school himself to envision a blank where the face of the victim should be, and there were times when he wondered if that made him a monster.
Times like this when he walked into a situation where people were dying and his job was to stop the dying, not help those who were going through it. He had to maintain some detachment or he'd never be effective, but the small knot of people standing at the nurse's desk made him wonder at his own resolve. An elderly man, bent nearly double with grief, his adult children trying to support him both physically and emotionally while they were crushed beneath the weight of their own loss. A child, maybe eight years old, not comprehending everything, but seeing too much, watching them with huge, vacant eyes.
Stephen had to move on past them quickly. He found the door he was seeking then and knocked.
Dr. George Portman had worked long and hard to get himself to his current position as chief of staff of the small Henryville General Medical Hospital and even so, there were people who couldn't understand his leaving a lucrative career in research to a small town doc. His wife was one of those people. She put up with it for a year, waiting for George to come to his senses, and when it became clear he wasn't budging, she packed up and moved home to mother and dad and her extensive trust fund. No matter, he had simply put his energy deeper into his work... both the hospital and his little side project.
He heard the knock and hesitated a moment before answering. It wasn't going to be pleasant seeing Stephen Connor again, even with the buffer of several years, but if he didn't answer that door, nothing would be accomplished. He wondered if Stephen felt the same way. Or if he even knew what losing the position of NIH division chief to him had meant to George. Well, he'd know soon.
"Come on in, Stephen," he called.