13. 13
“I need you to put every file on that computer onto this.” Elias handed Misha the small plastic drive.
“Why would I help the American government?” he asked, setting the drive on the desk next to the computer.
After packing up our equipment and stacking it near the door to our room, our next stop was the lab.
We needed to take the files from the computer, and secure the virus samples so we could bring them back with us to the United States.
If it wasn’t done today, by us, then the chances of the Russian government allowing another agent to retrieve them was slim to none.
It was all politics and cover-ups, no matter who was in charge.
I’d seen it in Richmond, at the CIA building, and Elias’s entire career was centered around hiding information.
Nothing was out in the open, and no one asked for help.
Except for Dr. Novikov, and the help he asked for came with fine print that I hadn’t been able to read.
“You’ll help us so the best minds in the world can fix this,” Elias answered. “Fill it up.”
Misha took a moment, looking between Elias and I, before he sat down at the computer.
“We need something to store the virus in,” I said to Elias. “Look for a cooler like the one I used the last time.”
The last time. I couldn’t believe there had been a last time.
Elias and I, once again, were racing against the clock, a mutated doctor, and a virus we didn’t understand.
The key difference being that this time around, I didn’t solve the problem.
There was no vaccine. If either one of us got infected it would be the end.
We spun in circles around the room, yanking boxes off the shelf, tossing supplies onto the floor. This lab was forgotten, and I was unsure if we would even find what we needed here, but I wasn’t feeling confident enough to venture further into the building to dig through storage closets.
“Why do I have the worst luck?” I muttered to no one, to the world, to myself.
“Mine might be worse,” Elias answered. He wasn’t wrong. His life had been a constant case of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Except for Baker and Pryor. He was exactly where I needed him to be.
I spotted what I needed on the very top of the shelf but it was pushed back and I couldn’t quite reach it. I was tall, but I wasn’t as tall as Elias.
“I need you to grab this for me,” I said, pointing.
Elias walked over, reaching above my head. “I thought that you could take care of yourself.”
“My leg is so close to your crotch right now. Another word and I’ll knee you in the dick.”
He held the cooler out to me and I ripped it from his hands. “Sorry,” he said. “Just trying to pretend that this isn’t happening.”
“Imagine if you weren’t here, like Montgomery wanted. The entire mission would be a bust because I wouldn’t have been able to reach that.”
He smiled. “That would have shown him.”
I wanted to reach out to touch him, to help him pretend that this wasn’t happening again.
Instead, I met his gaze, the quiet knowledge of what had nearly happened at Baker and Pryor dancing between us.
He hadn’t meant to leave me to fend for myself in the lab, but I was left alone, and I didn’t want to do it again.
Panic sat in the back of my throat and threatened to steal my breath.
“Don’t leave my side.” I swallowed. “Please.”
Elias’s hand reached out to grab my face.
Fingers tracing my cheek, he looked over me.
He committed the bags under my eyes and the sweat forming on my temple to memory.
If this was the last time Elias saw me alive, this version of me would haunt him forever, I was sure of it.
“I won’t.” He kissed me softly, lingering. “Not this time.”
“Okay,” I said, my lips brushing against his. “We’ll be okay.”
The power shut off.
I’d grown accustomed to the electric hum that covered the quiet, and now that hidden silence was suffocating.
“Fuck,” Elias whispered. He stepped back, his hand leaving my face. The lab had no external windows, and my eyes looked to the door to see if any backup lights turned on. I was disappointed. We were entirely encased in darkness.
With a small click, a light emerged from a flashlight in Elias’s hand. I breathed a sigh of relief, the darkness held off even only for a moment.
“I was almost finished,” said Misha, handing over the flash drive. Elias tucked it into a zippered pocket.
Even though it wasn’t pointed in any specific direction, the ambient light from the flashlight was enough to navigate around the room.
It was a small lab, Misha and Elias making the space that much tighter.
I navigated around their bodies, squeezing between them and the shelves, the workspace.
My hands trembled as I grabbed a tray of viral samples.
I fit as much of NT02 into the cooler as I could, and the modified adenovirus, too.
I couldn’t trust anyone besides myself to have it.
“I need something to keep this cool,” I said. “Ice packs, anything, really.”
“The kitchen?” Elias offered. “If we need to throw a bag of frozen vegetables in there then that’s what we’ll do.”
Misha had nothing to say, but stayed close to us as we traveled in circles around the outpost. Elias led us like before, the only option now that he had the flashlight, and I stayed close to his side.
Nearly tripping over his feet, I had to back off.
We walked slowly, keeping our footsteps light, listening for any sign of the likely mutated Dr. Novikov.
When we reached the mess hall, Misha went for the window, standing on a table to peer outside.
Enough light poured in that we could see where we were going, but Elias kept the flashlight on, guiding it around as he took me into the kitchen.
There were a few commercial refrigerators just behind the service window, so we ventured further back, Misha slowly leaving our line of sight.
At the back of the kitchen, Elias pulled the lever on a large metallic door, causing a whoosh of frigid air to hit my face.
I followed him inside of the freezer on the lookout for anything reasonable to add to the cooler. Everything was oversized, not so much as a bag of corn was smaller than five pounds.
“The samples are all water tight, right?” Elias asked.
“I mean, they don’t leak, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Elias tilted his head, tucking the flashlight between his cheek and shoulder so he’d have the use of both of his hands. I heard a nostalgic crack, and I looked down at what Elias was holding.
Ice cube trays.
I holstered my gun and opened the cooler, holding it out for Elias to dump the tray of ice into it. He repeated this a few times until nothing else would fit. The lid barely snapped shut.
“Will this work?”
“For a few hours?” I nodded. “Yeah, it’ll work.”
Misha was sitting when we returned, the axe laid on the table beside him. Elias and I stopped a few feet away.
He looked up, his face a blank slate. “I never wanted to come here.”
“Neither did we,” I said. “Why did you?”
“Dr. Novikov works with Moscow State University. He convinced me to work on my dissertation here.”
I sat down at the table across from him, setting the cooler down on the flat surface. Elias stood behind me, and his shadow moved on the floor as he paced around the room.
“Can I ask what your dissertation topic is?” I wanted to know how exactly large of a pawn in this game he was.
“How certain bacteria are able to move metal ions through their membranes.”
My breath hitched, and I heard Elias shift behind me. His shadow raised his gun, aiming it over my head at Misha.
“What have you done?” Elias asked.
So careless. So short-sighted. Was he always like this, or did being around me make him trigger happy?
“Shoot me, I do not care.” Misha sat still as a stone. “My life is ruined after today.”
“Put the gun down, Elias,” I ordered. I shifted my weight, leaning forward. I looked Misha in the eyes. “Did you know what you were doing?”
“No,” he admitted. “I did not connect the dots until he forced me to work on that virus with you. I did not want to ask questions. He could end my career if I disobeyed.”
“You didn’t want to get near the virus, no one did. You told me when you came into the lab that first time. Why was that? There had to be a reason for you to be frightened by it.”
“Dr. Novikov told us it was dangerous, that there was no cure for what it could do to us. This outpost is outdated, it has the bare minimum when it comes to safety. I was not going to get near it. He offered me such a great opportunity, to work with him, that I would do whatever he asked of me.” Behind the stony facade, I could see fear in his eyes as he spoke.
He’d gotten in too deep, but unlike me, he didn’t have anyone to help him out of it.
Elias had saved me without me asking anything of him. I could do the same for Misha.
“Misha is your nickname, right?”
He nodded.
“What is your name?”
“Mikahil Aliyev.”
I didn’t ask for permission, I didn’t make sure that it was okay. “You should come back to the United States with us, Mikahil.”
“Cassie. . .” Elias scolded. It was gentle, but it was an admonishment.
“He should.” I gripped my hands on the table, refocusing on Misha. “You should. I don’t know what it’s like here, but you could be the fall guy in all of this and you don’t deserve that.”
He laughed bitterly. “And the United States is so much better?”
“They certainly won’t kill you,” I said. “You’d be valuable to them. You have information they could use, I’m sure.”
“I do.”
Heavy, dragging steps entering the room captured our attention.
I turned as Elias raised his gun, and my arm swatted at his to stop him. His finger on the trigger, he nearly shot at the floor as my hand collided with his bicep.
“What are you doing?” He shouted.
“Don’t shoot her!”
Dr. Katya Petrova had stumbled into the room.
“Kill me,” she whispered.
“There you have it,” Elias said. “She’s giving me permission. Let go of my arm.”
I launched myself up, the cooler forgotten on the table. Never letting go of Elias, I stood between him and Katya. “Let me talk to her,” I pleaded.
“You’re being reckless.”
“Trust me. She’s not like the others.”
He hesitated but ultimately lowered his gun. I was almost sorry for weaponizing our earlier conversation. “If she so much as raises a hand toward you, she’s dead.”
I whispered, “Thank you.”
I narrowed the gap between us, Katya and I, but I kept enough distance to keep Elias at ease. “You can talk, Katya?”
“Every few hours he comes to me.”
He said he was keeping her near-human, and both Elias and I had thought that was the big reveal, that was what he was hiding behind his ever present smile. “Are you infected?”
“Yes.” She was gasping for air. “He did this.”
“Why?” I asked. “Why did he do this?”
“To see what would happen.”
At that moment, I trusted a dying woman far more than I ever trusted Dr. Novikov.
Every conversation I had with him, more and more information that contradicted itself piled up.
I was confused, to put it simply. He was the reason I was here to make a vaccine, but it was becoming clear that we had different goals.
Katya hadn’t infected herself because Taylor had given her the idea. Dr. Novikov had experimented on her, so that he could learn how to become as strong as Taylor. I doubted she was sick at all.
He didn’t need a vaccine. He needed fresh eyes on the virus so he could learn enough to manipulate it. That was why he brought Misha, and that was why he brought me.
“I can feel it changing me,” she said. “He gave me other injections, too. He held off the transformation. He hasn’t come today. It will take me. Kill me while I am still of sound mind.”
Resigned from the conversation, devastated knowing what needed to happen, I walked back to the table, sitting down across from Misha once again. Closing my eyes, I covered my hands with my ears. It would be so loud, I wouldn’t be able to hide from the sound of the gun, but I tried anyway.
Elias fired once.
A second time.
Then I felt his hand on my shoulder, the heat from it soaking through my shirt and into my skin.
My hands dropped from my head, one landing on Elias’s.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I squeezed his hand. “She couldn’t be saved. I couldn’t figure it out.” My eyes fell. I stared at my lap.
“We knew this wasn’t going to go away in a few days. If you want someone to blame, you can blame Novikov for cutting our time short.”
“Blame me,” said Misha. “I could not help you.”
“Sure,” Elias agreed. “Blame him. Just not yourself.”
Tears rimmed my eyes. I’d sat by and let a woman die. If I had focused on my work instead of investigating the building, I might’ve had enough time to find a solution. Novikov wouldn’t have been onto us. “She didn’t deserve any of this.”
“No one does, but she’s not innocent.”
I read the reports, I knew she contributed to the development of the virus, but I could see in what was left of her that she was suffering. Novikov had destroyed her to study their precious pathogen. He was the villain here, and I’d be damned if I forgot that.
“Why don’t we see if we can get the power back on?” Elias suggested to my silence. “Maybe we can get into the computers of the locked wing.”
“I’d rather sit here and wait.”
Elias hooked a leg over the bench next to me and sat facing me. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” I snapped. I needed time. I just let him kill a woman aware enough to ask for it. Killing wasn’t as easy for me as it was for him. It wasn’t just a job I could leave at the door when I decided I was done for the day.
“You can’t shut down right now. We have orders that we need to follow.”
“I don’t care about our orders.”
“Do you think this is easy for me?” He set his gun on the table, his hands reaching for my face, forcing me to look at him.
“If you think I'm some mindless killing machine then apparently we don't know each other.
I've been playing this part for more than a decade now and it has never gotten easier.
You've seen me come home as a shell of myself. You know this fucks me up.”
“You almost shot her before I could speak to her, like it didn't matter that she was still a person.”
Elias let go of my face, but I didn't look away from him.
“She was infected. If I hesitate, we die. I learned that years ago. She was ready to go and I did her a favor. Please don't make me feel bad about this.”
“This is really hard.” My voice was so quiet I barely heard it.
“We have to keep going until it's over. Then we can go home and you can cry or hit me or sleep for a week. But we have to finish this.”
Misha watched us, studied how we interacted.
“You came here to protect her,” Misha said.
“I'm glad you figured that out.”
A voice called from the hallway, interrupting our conversation.
“Dr. Hayes, I need to speak with you.”