Chapter 20
20
After a quick glance up and down the hallway, Gil felt the sergeant’s pulse. It was faint, but still beating. He couldn’t see any signs of a blow or any blood. In fact, he had no idea what had happened to her. Maybe she’d simply fainted?
Whatever the cause, she was out like a light.
“Give me a hand,” he called to Ani, who hurried to join him. Together, they managed to carry Sergeant Thomson inside and settle her onto the couch.
“I’m going to scope out the rest of the hotel, see if I notice anything off. Can you take care of her?”
“Yes, I’ve got this.” Ani was already in doctor mode, checking her temperature with the back of her hand. “But be careful out there. Maybe someone’s trying to draw you out.”
“Now you’re thinking like an agent.”
“I’m serious. You should take that gun with you.” She gestured at Sergeant Thomson’s firearm.
Good point. She really was thinking like an agent.
With silent apologies to the U.S. military, he eased Sergeant Thomson’s Glock from its holster. She would want him to be safe, after all. That was her entire purpose here—supposedly.
He speed-checked all the stairwells, all the elevators, and spoke to all the hotel staff members and guests he came across. No one had seen anything odd or unusual, such as someone running away or brandishing a weapon.
It wasn’t until he checked the dumpster behind the kitchen that something caught his eye. Resting among the black garbage bags and empty banana boxes was an empty syringe.
Had some random passing junkie tossed it in the dumpster? Or was that Thomson’s assailant’s weapon of choice?
He didn’t have any rubber gloves with him, so he tore off a piece of black plastic from one of the garbage bags and used it to carefully extract the syringe. After a thorough check for anything else tossed in the dumpster, he jogged back into the hotel and took the three flights of stairs at a run.
In the short time he’d been gone, Ani had unbuttoned the sergeant’s uniform jacket and loosened her shirt. A damp folded washcloth lay across the woman’s forehead.
“I bet she’ll be furious when she wakes up,” Gil said. “I never met a soldier who liked being a patient.”
“Too bad. She has a fever of about a hundred and one, but that’s just my guess. Her heart rate is jumping all over the place. I can’t imagine what happened to her.”
“Does this help?” Gil showed her the syringe. “I found it in the dumpster.”
“You haven’t touched it, have you?”
“God no. Do you think it could be a drug of some kind? Meth or heroin, something like that? Have you seen an injection site?”
“I haven’t looked for anything like that.” Together, they examined Sergeant Thomson’s clothing, gently turning her onto her side to check her back as well. And there it was. On the side of her lower left pants leg, they found a tiny hole. The syringe had penetrated through all her layers of clothing and into her flesh.
“Any idea what they could have injected her with?” Gil asked Ani.
“Impossible to say without testing her. We need to get her to a hospital. How did anyone get close enough to her to inject her?”
“The hotel might have security cameras in the hallways. We can ask to look at them, but we’re not the police. I think her people should do the investigating.”
She lifted the washcloth and felt Thomson’s forehead again. “I think her fever’s coming down a little.”
She hurried to the bathroom to wring out the cloth, while Gil examined the puncture wound on Thomson’s calf.
He tried to reconstruct the noises they’d heard outside the door, but he’d been so caught up in Ani at that moment that he’d barely registered any of that. He’d heard a thump, but no voices. Sergeant Thomson wasn’t the quiet type; if she’d been able to, she would have called out a warning. Whatever was in the syringe must have been something that instantly knocked her out.
Ani came back in with a fresh washcloth. Kneeling next to the couch, she gently wiped the beads of sweat of the sergeant’s face.
“It must have been a fakeout,” he murmured, picturing it play out in his mind. “A guest came down the hallway, then pretended to trip over something and took a tumble. Thomson tried to help, but while the guy was on the carpet, he took out that syringe and emptied it into her.” Yeah, that made sense.
Ani’s dark eyebrows drew together. “But why? Do you think they were after us? Why didn’t they pounce when you opened the door?”
“Good question. Maybe they intended to, but Thomson did something to screw up their plan.” He scanned the sergeant’s unconscious form. “Her comms radio. She had it before, right?”
“I think so. Yes, I think I saw her use it.”
“It’s gone now. Maybe she tried to call for help, and the attacker panicked, grabbed it, and ran.”
“So, not exactly a smooth operator.”
He shrugged helplessly. “The hell if I know what happened. But I know one thing. We shouldn’t stick around here waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
She worried at her lower lip. “We can’t just leave her. She needs to go to a hospital.”
“Agreed. We’ll call nine-one-one and then skip out of here.”
“And go where?”
“Lachlan. Firelight Ridge. Home. You can finally get a full night’s sleep.”
He thought Ani would be happy with that plan, but instead she rose to her feet with a troubled expression. “There could be a problem with that plan.”
“What’s that?”
“Sergeant Thomson’s fever, the way she’s sweating, it’s a lot like how Victor looked when I saw him at the airport.”
He sucked in a breath. “You think she has the omegavirus?” Now that he looked more closely, he saw that her dark skin was flushed with heat, as if she was burning up inside.
“I don’t know, but it’s a possibility.”
And then another horrifying idea struck him. “Do you think that’s what the syringe was for?”
Their eyes met and held. This whole situation had just gotten even more frightening, if someone was going around injecting people with this thing.
Ani started shaking her head, as if trying to bring them both back to sanity. “No. That’s impossible. It wouldn’t be instantaneous. Viruses don’t replicate that fast. She must have gotten it some other way. The point is, even if we didn’t have the virus before, she could have just exposed us. We can’t go back to Firelight Ridge.”
He jumped to his feet and paced around the suite again. “Dr. Christianson said it’s not airborne.”
“But we’ve both touched Sergeant Thomson. We carried her in, and I’ve been tending to her. The other thing is that Dr. Christianson doesn’t know everything about it. It’s a virus that hasn’t been seen in hundreds of years, maybe thousands. It could have multiple means of transmission. We have to assume we’ve been exposed.”
Ani made a really good point, much as it killed him to know he couldn’t go back and check on Lachlan yet. “I wonder if they did this in order to expose us,” he said slowly, staring down at the sergeant. “Maybe she’s just collateral damage.”
“Why would anyone do that? That’s insane. We have nothing to do with any of this.” Ani looked suddenly overwhelmed, her eyes huge, her face paling.
Gil could have kicked himself. Terrifying Ani even further wasn’t going to help anything. “You’re right, I see no reason why they would. I’m being a suspicious bastard, it kind of goes with my profession.”
“Well, maybe Lachlan’s right and you need a new profession.” She shook herself out of her moment of shakiness. “Sorry. That just threw me for a loop. Right now, I’m glad you’re in the protection business. So what now, if we can’t go back to Firelight Ridge and we can’t stay here?”
“I think we should find Victor,” he said after a moment. “He dragged us both into this thing, he owes us some answers.” The rest of his thought went unspoken.
If he’s alive.