“Seems almost peaceful, doesn’t it?” Jon’s deep voice was quiet.
“Mm-hm.” She sighed. “It would be nice to think we’re on a—a boating trip, going north to go camping or something.”
He slanted a glance down at her, his ice blue eyes bright in the starlight. “You go camping?”
Sophie laughed. “Nope. Not a chance. Bears and mosquitos and squatting to take a poop.” She gave a theatrical shudder. “Not for me. I imagine you’re the camping sort of guy, am I right?”
“No way.” It was his turn to laugh. “We do what you’d call camping in the rough for a living. We once slept outdoors for three months in—in a place that was equatorial jungle. Mosquitoes the size of birds, spiders the size of dinner plates, I kid you not. We had to smother ourselves in enough Deet to cause liver damage. Part of those three months was the monsoon season so we got toe and crotch rot. We couldn’t use heat for cooking so we ate MREs—meals Ready to Eat, though ‘Meal’ is stretching it. They’re like lightly flavored sludge and gum you up. We couldn’t talk and we couldn’t move. So pitching a tent somewhere and using oak leaves for toilet paper is not my favorite leisure activity, no.”
Sophie laughed. She could see it, see how uncomfortable he and his teammates had been. She’d seen his captain and two of his teammates. They looked just as hard and driven as Jon did. They’d lived in those appalling conditions for three months and?—
“Did you accomplish what you set out to do? In those three months?”
His eyes narrowed to a light blue slit, firm beautiful mouth curved up in a smile. God he was devastating when he smiled. “Oh yeah,” he said softly. “We did.”
“Whacked a bad guy, eh?” she said and he recoiled.
“Who told—” then he bit his lips.
Sophie laughed. “I can’t imagine any other reason for camping out under those conditions for three months. If it was intelligence you were after there are easier ways. A listening drone at a high altitude would have done it.”
He smiled again and mimed zipping his mouth shut. Oh God. Now adimpleappeared. Not fair. A dimple was overkill.
She sighed.
So he’d camped out for three months to kill someone. Someone who undoubtedly needed killing. If you’d asked her even a week ago if she could become the lover of a man who killed for a living she’d have said no. Unequivocably no.
But that was then and this was now. She’d known, theoretically, as a purely abstract concept, that evil existed in the world.
What had been unleashed now was evil on an unimaginable scale. She’d been able to piece together some of the story from Dr. Charles Lee’s computer. He’d been working on a secret program of human enhancement via a new drug. Genetic material delivered in a viral vector. Only it had backfired. It had, yes, enhanced the infected’s performance. The infected were indeed stronger and faster and utterly unafraid. They were also insane. And doomed to die in a few days like some monstrous insect that was born, lived and died in the space of a week.
And she knew the reason the virus was so virulent. It was because Dr Lee had been in such a hurry. For some reason he’d been under massive time pressure. If she’d had access to all his files she could have pieced it together, though now it was ancient history.
And because Dr Charles Lee had been in a hurry, he’d created an abomination that had the potential to wipe human life off the face of the earth. If they couldn’t contain it, only a few strongholds on the planet would survive. On the vasts steppes of Central Asia, perhaps. In Antarctica, maybe. Some isolated tribes in Amazonia. The poor souls on the Space Station wouldn’t survive because there would be no one left on earth with the technical expertise to bring them back down.
All of this was evil. And combating this required not only her skills and Elle’s skills and Catherine’s skills but it also required the skills of Jon Ryan and his fellow warriors. And she could only be happy that he was a trained killer because he was the right man in the right place.
She would never have escaped San Francisco with the vaccine without him. She’d have died in her apartment when the water and food ran out. And anyway, before that happened, the vaccine would have been rendered inert.
Jon had saved her life, saved the vaccine, and was still doing it.
He was also teaching her about love. The tough trained killer had opened an unimagined world to her. While chaos ruled in the streets outside her windows he’d given her pleasure she’d never even known existed. It wasn’t casual, what they shared. They were two people who would never have gotten together under any other possible circumstances, but what they had, forged in fire and death, was real. She believed that with all her heart.
She breathed in, no chemical smells at all, only the salt spray and diesel from the engine. A very old fashioned smell. Nothing ran on diesel any more except boats and the few heavy trucks left on the road.
His finger caressed her cheek. “Beautiful night for the end of the world.” She felt his deep voice vibrate in his chest.
“It is.”
His large hand slid into her hair holding her still as he leaned over and kissed her brow. “But if we do our jobs right and our guys up in Haven do their jobs right, it might not be the end of the world, after all.”
“What do you think it might be like?”
“What?”
“The aftermath. What do you think might happen? Best case scenario.”
“Well.” He took a deep sigh. “Best case scenario. I’m the wrong guy to ask about a best case scenario, soldiers tend to look at worst case scenarios and plan accordingly. But okay. So…everything goes well in the next week. We stabilize the uninfected in their homes. Make sure they can protect themselves and have ample food and water. Once we get some air support we drop in supplies. It looks like by next week most of the infected might be dead, if they can’t fend for themselves. But we don’t know if pockets of the virus can survive—you and your brainiac girlfriends will be able to tell us about that. So we need to make sure that vaccine gets to every able-bodied and able-minded man woman and child in the continental USA. And strict protocols on who gets in and out of the country. So international commerce is going to stop for a while. There’s going to be an international economic crisis. The US government is going to be very very sorry it behaved like it did with us in California. It behaved badly, but there was a lot of panic. But if I know my Captain and Mac, and I do, and if Snyder is as tough as his reputation, our guys are going to milk that regret for all it’s worth. Any reconstruction work and money going on is going to happen here first.”
