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“The sooner I can get out of this bed,” I continued, “the sooner I can figure out who murdered my husband.”
“That’s what I came to talk to you about, Samantha.” Jonas hesitated, summoning some inner strength just like he had before telling me about Kevin.
I had no time for that. “Whatever you’re about to say, please don’t dance around it.”
But even I couldn’t have predicted the words that next came out of his mouth.
“Samantha… you have three days to live.”
CHAPTER 9
I PROCESSED DR. Jonas Hoffman’s words through a thick, gauzy wall of shock and disbelief. Part of my brain disconnected again, wanting to escape, flee this room, be anywhere but here. From far away, I heard him continue to speak.
“Although your skeletal muscles are recovering, and you are not contagious, the chemical agent is still very present in your system and showing no response to the galantamine…”
With the curtain open, my eyes finally found the clock on the wall inside my glass prison. It was fifteen minutes before 7 a.m., which meant shift change was coming. Jonas would be leaving. Going home to his life. Possibly a loved one, children. And I would be here, waiting to die, with my husband’s body in the morgue.
“The chemical agent is attacking your internal organs, one by one, and based on the rate of progression, our best estimate is that within seventy-two hours…”
Seventy-two hours from when? Right now? Or has the clock been ticking this entire time, since the attack? Although of course it’s only an estimate, doctors grappling with a nerve agent they’ve never encountered before, one that doesn’t show up in any database? I might have sixty hours. Forty, perhaps. Or even less than a day…
“And while there is no known antidote or way to halt the progression, we can keep you comfortable…”
I have to get up out of this bed. I don’t belong here. This is not my life. This is not my reality. I can’t breathe. Why can’t I breathe? Has the toxin compromised my lungs already?If I could just catch my breath I could get out of this bed…
Jonas was still explaining but I was done listening. He and his colleagues were wrong. Theyhadto be wrong.
I gathered all of my strength and pushed myself up into a sitting position, gasping for air. My muscles needed oxygen to work. And I needed my muscles to work, if they were going to propel me out of this nightmare.
The world spun around me like a carousel. I caught flickering glimpses of Jonas signaling outside the fish bowl, gesturing for help.No thank you, doctor. I don’t have the time to sit around and listen to you and your theories. As soon as this ride steadies, I’m leaving.
“Samantha,no…”
But then the ride abruptly flipped over on its side, and cold linoleum floor rose up to slam into my body.
CHAPTER 10
KEVIN HADN’T BELIEVED me, either, when I first told him I was CIA. It’s the kind of thing people joke about, not the kind of thing that turns out to be completely true.You look a little young to have been with the Company for eight years, he had said with a sly smirk, at which point I knocked him off balance and put him in an inescapable chokehold, right there on the beach.
But it was the truth. I was one of those “prodigies” whose high test scores at my prep school caught the eye of a recruiter named Quentin Marr, who was somewhat of a living legend in the world of spycraft. When I should have been picking out a gown for my senior prom, I was consulting in counterterrorism think tanks. For the next eight years I helped foil terrorist plots large and small, all by Quentin’s side. I tangled with the most sinister minds on the planet—including some within my own department.
And much to my own surprise, I had natural skills when it came to field operations. Genetics played a part, to be sure; both of my parents had been tall and athletic. But Quentin taught me to approach physical combat and gunplay and raids the same way I approached think-tank challenges: all were merely puzzles to be solved.
I’ll bet you know a dozen ways to kill me, Kevin once said, caressing the side of my neck with his fingertips, just the way I liked.
Again, I replied,you underestimate me.
Come on. How many?
I lovingly detailed those ways, one by one, with gentle touches and caresses that left him not only surprised and shocked, but a little turned on, too. Okay, more than a little turned on.
You’ve just murdered me twenty different ways and I want you more than ever,he’d said.What is wrong with me?
But by the time I met Kevin on that Mexican beach, I was burned out. Solve enough life-and-death puzzles and you begin to realize you’ve essentially solved them all; the only thing that changed were the variables. So I retired, at the advanced age of twenty-six.
Quentin was surprised, but said he completely understood. He knew better than anyone that a life of counterterrorism is a grind that chews at your soul.Why do you think I left the field and became a recruiter?he’d said.
But it wasn’t just that. I began to wonder about the road I’d abandoned, the so-called normal world. The world where I would have gone to that prom, to an Ivy League school, and maybe even met a guy like Kevin Drexel.
