One Rough Man - Brad Taylor [176]
“Hello, young lady, we’ve been waiting for you. I’m Payton Warren,” he said, extending his hand.
Jennifer didn’t even begin to know what to say so she simply shook his hand, mute.
To his left was Kurt Hale. She looked around, recognizing the secretary of state and the secretary of defense. She saw other faces that she didn’t know, but felt she should, vague recollections from Sunday news shows. What’s this all about? Why am I here? She went from face to face, waiting on someone to tell her what to do. At the far end she saw a man with a horrendous visage. His face was scabbed, without any eyebrows. His arm was in a sling, a set of crutches to the side of his chair. He was smiling at her. The smile was real and familiar.
103
I saw Jennifer look from face to face, waiting for her to get to me, wanting to see the same glow I had experienced when she entered the room.
It dawned on me that I had been subconsciously holding back, protecting myself from the meat-cleaver of disappointment if it was a case of mistaken identity and someone else was at the Dulles Airport. Maybe secretly protecting myself against the trauma of having the newly formed scab covering the loss of my family ripped out raw had the unthinkable happened. In that moment, I realized that Jennifer had been right in Bosnia: Her death would have destroyed me completely. Left me broken beyond repair.
I watched Jennifer continue to search for some indication of why she was here or someone she recognized. She looked like shit. Like she’d spent the last twenty-four hours sleeping on park benches and knew the next twenty-four hours held nothing but the same. She finally got to me. I saw her face change from a lack of recognition to one of shock, then she fell backward into a chair. Not exactly what I expected.
From behind her, Knuckles jumped up, saying, “Whoa! Hang on there. You okay?”
I could tell she recognized him, but she simply stared like she was seeing a ghost.
He asked again, “Jennifer? You all right?”
Something clicked within her, and without a word, she jumped up and raced over to me.
Holy shit, she’s going to hug me. It would hurt, but I didn’t want to stop her.
She stopped short, smiling, tears running freely down her face. She leaned over and gingerly kissed my forehead on the crew-cut of singed hair.
“You bastard. I guess you do have ten lives.”
I grinned. “Yeah, I guess so. Took you long enough to get home. I was starting to worry.”
She ignored everyone else in the room, simply taking my hands into hers and staring at me. After a second, she seemed to remember where she was, and what had led to this meeting. She asked, “What happened? What’s going on? Why isn’t everyone dead?”
Kurt said, “Well, we ended up being very, very lucky. Scientists are still studying the material, but it looks like the WMD was only deadly to those genetically predisposed.”
“What’s that mean?”
I took over. “The weapon they found was an ancient sack of spores from a plant that’s probably extinct. It causes major anaphylactic shock in people predisposed to be allergic to it. Basically, it causes the same reaction as in someone allergic to bee stings, only a hundred times worse.”
“Okay ... that still sounds pretty bad. Isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it is, but I managed to kill Carlos before he could set off the device. He fell on top of it, which somehow caused it to go off. His body tamped down the explosion, like a soldier jumping on a grenade. On top of that, it looks like folks from Europe aren’t nearly as susceptible to the spores as guys from Guatemala, where they came from. Luckily, I fall into that camp.”
Jennifer processed that, coming to the natural conclusion, “So, the whole thing was a waste of time? All that death and destruction for nothing? Ethan’s death—”
The president spoke. “No, not at all. The bomb killed close to fifty people, but the team forced the terrorist to set it off far enough away from