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I’ll bet you know a dozen ways to kill me.
Perhaps, my love, but I never would have guessed how you’d actually be killed, less than a day after we exchanged vows.
CHAPTER 11
I SNAPPED AWAKE to find myself back in my hospital bed inside the fishbowl, lying in a puddle of my own sweat. As I twisted my body a little to glance at the clock, my body screamed in agony, as if to say:Oh, no you don’t. You shouldn’t be moving. You’re dying.
It was now 11:03. Hours had passed since I’d fallen onto the floor and passed out—more precious time squandered.
What did I have left? A couple of days and change… if even that much? What would it feel like when my organs began to fail, one by one? Which would be the last to go? I’m guessing it wouldn’t be my heart, because that had already been ripped out and torn to pieces.
I stared at the clock and pieced together a rough timeline.
Our marriage, from our vows to those last moments at the Hotel Adlon, had lasted all of twenty-one hours. My husband was gone, and I’d be following him into the grave in just two days.
This had been preceded by six months of globe-hopping romance—easily the happiest time in my life. Before that, eight years of service to my country.
Was this my reward? To see the man of my dreams die, cursed to mourn him even as my own body rebelled against me and closed up shop, one piece at a time? What was the point of any of this? Why couldn’t I have been snuffed out during a training exercise when I was eighteen, before I knew any better?
And then I realized: I was caught in a spiral of self-pity.
This was not me.
Whoever this pathetic being was, she wasnotthe Samantha Bell I had known for the past twenty-six years.
I checked the clock. I had wallowed for approximately twenty minutes. That was enough; I would not give another single moment to it.
Doors to my negative pressure room opened and closed. Vitals were taken. Pillows adjusted, IV lines checked, sympathetic looks given. And all the while I planned my future, no matter how little of it I had left.
I thought about the crime scene. My husband’s body, as well as those of the Russian father and daughter next door. They were the largest pieces of the puzzle, but there were others:
The strange scent in the air, despite all other indications that this mysterious nerve agent was odorless and undetectable.
The nagging suspicion that something about the position of Kevin’s body was off; something was missing, something I couldn’t yet identify.
The brazen attack on the Russian oligarch, which strongly suggested his enemies needed him dead, regardless of the collateral damage.
I didn’t know how these all fit together just yet. But I wasn’t going to just lie here and wait to die.
I checked the clock again. It was almost noon.
I vowed to spend whatever time I had left avenging my husband.
CHAPTER 12
THERE WERE A few pressing items on my to-do list:
1. Convince my body that it was in our mutual interest to be mobile, despite the multiple attacks being waged on its major organs.
2. Break out of this hospital.
Item number two could not happen without the first, to be sure. I didn’t think literally crawling out of this building would be a good idea. But I had to tackle both if I was going to achieve the third item on the list:
3. Identify and punish those responsible for my husband’s murder.
So while I pushed the limits of my body, forcing my limbs to obey my commands—despite numbness in some places and nerve-splitting pain in others—I plotted my escape.
Looking outside the fishbowl, I focused on the nonmedical personnel. Lip-reading was something Quentin taught me early; I was astounded at how much you could learn from a complete stranger, even if you were sitting on the opposite side of a noisy, crowded bar. They were looking at me with increasing frequency, these mysterious agents. Saying things like…
