Mason awoke with a groan and tried to sit up. Something sharp prodded the inside of his elbow. He tried to pull it out, but someone held his hand.
“Shh,” a soft voice whispered. “Try not to move.”
He glanced around the room. A large window, through which he saw only sky. A cord tethering him to an IV bag. A bedside monitor displaying his racing heart rate. Walls the same color of yellow as the blanket covering him. A television mounted near the ceiling. Laminate cabinets and a bathroom.
His eyes finally settled on his wife, who was seated beside his bed in a faux-leather chair. She was smiling despite the tears on her cheeks.
“Hey, Angie.”
She placed her hand on his cheek and buried her face into his neck.
“Don’t you ever do this to me again,” she said. “You hear me?”
He tried to wrap his arm around her back, but even thinking about moving ignited the pain that spread throughout his body. It felt like he’d been kicked squarely in the chest by a horse, and his face … he could see stitches from the corner of his eye, feel the warmth of superficial burns on his forehead. He kissed the top of her head and regretted even that minuscule movement.
“Kane?” he asked.
She raised her face, and he read the truth in her expression. Her lips quivered and fresh tears shimmered in her emerald eyes.
“He didn’t make it.”
Mason let his head fall back onto the pillow and stared up at the ceiling.
It was his fault Kane was dead. Had he listened to his partner and killed the man with the blue eyes, he would have prevented the explosion and maybe even still been fast enough to hit the second man. Or maybe shooting the man in the hat would have provided enough of a distraction for Kane to take care of his captor himself. Or perhaps after witnessing his partner’s death, the second man would have been willing to trade Kane’s life for his freedom. None of those possibilities had registered in Mason’s mind at the time, though. His sole focus had been on saving his partner, whose blood was now on his hands.
The door opened and a lanky man with chest hair blooming from the V-neck of his scrub top entered. He wore a white lab coat, and a stethoscope was bundled into a pocket stitched with red letters. Dr. Alan O’Ryan. A man in a black suit followed him into the room.
“Mrs. Mason…” the man said.
“He just woke up,” Angie said. “There’s no way in hell I’m leaving him.”
Mason sized up the man with a single glance. He positively reeked of power. Tailored suit. Expensive watch. Polished leather shoes. Silver hair. Dark, alert eyes that dismissed everything around him except for Mason.
“It’s okay, Angie,” Mason said. “Agent Marchment and I only need a few minutes.”
His wife’s eyes sought his. She recognized the name, either from him or through the course of her own work, and understood the gravity of the situation. Mason nodded subtly to assure her that everything was under control. She brought his hand to her lips, kissed his knuckles, and gently placed his arm beside his leg.
“I’ll be right outside if you need me.”
“This won’t take long,” Marchment said.
Angie brushed past him without a word. She opened the door, looked back, and closed it gently behind her.
“I think that’s the first time she’s left your side since she got here last night,” Dr. O’Ryan said. He smiled, removed Mason’s chart from the bracket on the bed, and set about making notations.
Marchment sat in the chair Angie had vacated, slid a folder out from beneath his jacket, and removed a report. Mason already had a pretty good idea what it said. The ranking DEA agent and bureaucrat ostensibly in charge of the Bradley Strike Force waited for the doctor to check Mason’s vitals, examine his EKG strip, perform a cursory physical examination, and test his pupils before clearing his throat. The doctor took the hint. He returned the chart to its holder and disappeared into the hallway.
“The secretary of the United States Department of Homeland Security wanted me to personally congratulate you on the success of your mission,” Marchment said. “Thanks to our strike force, whatever contagion was inside that quarry never left the reservation. No one outside of this room may ever know it, but the country’s a safer place because of you.”
“The men in the building,” Mason said. “They knew we were coming. They could have easily smuggled the virus out through the open desert.”
“We have every reason to believe the threat was contained.”
“Until people start dying,” Mason said.
Marchment smiled patiently and straightened the stack of papers on his thighs. Whatever Mason might have thought, his superior obviously wasn’t going to hear it, not when he’d already taken credit for the victory.
“You’ve been through a lot these past few days. You both have. What do you say we run through this debriefing so you can get back to your wife?”
Mason took a deep breath, steeled himself, and listened as Marchment detailed the fate of his colleagues.
Of the eighteen law-enforcement officers who had launched the assault on the stone quarry, only five had survived. Becker had maintained his position up the mountainside; the sniper who’d watched the first explosion tear through his teammates had not. Had the ATF agent not shown that kind of discipline, he might not have survived to drag Mason out of the rubble. The pilot of the crippled Black Hawk had managed to land it on the opposite ridge. Land being a subjective term, anyway. He’d sustained significant intracranial hemorrhaging, but Razor had gotten the worst of it. The doctors were optimistic that he’d at least regain partial use of his legs. Templeton, who’d been miles away from the disaster, escaped largely unscathed. At least physically. He wouldn’t soon be able to forget the images he’d witnessed via satellite relay or the accompanying sounds of his colleagues being slaughtered.
Forensics teams were still sifting through the wreckage and anticipated they’d be doing so until roughly the end of time. As it was, they were going to have to get exceptionally lucky to make any positive identifications of the victims Mason had seen hanging from chains, especially after the second explosion incinerated their bodies and dropped the rear half of the building and countless tons of rock onto what little remained. If their theory about the victims having been undocumented aliens was right, no one would ever know to come looking for them, let alone in storage boxes at the Pima County morgue. Grim as it was, at least there’d been enough left of them to confirm that the virus hadn’t survived the blast, a fact corroborated by the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, which claimed it dealt with emerging infections like this one on a daily basis and seemed genuinely disappointed to be leaving with little more than a sack of dead birds.
Most of those who died in the siege were shipped back home to their loved ones. In most cases, their next of kin had to content themselves with ashes and not be too picky about whose they might actually be.
Mason signed himself out of the hospital AMA so he could ride back to Denver with Kane’s coffin. There was nothing inside it, but that wasn’t the point. His widow deserved to have a polished box with a flag draped over it unloaded from the cargo hold of a plane. She deserved a proper funeral with a motorcade. And she deserved the courtesy of her husband’s partner looking her in the eye when he told her that her husband had died with valor in the service of his country. That he had died a hero.
As he stood over Kane’s grave, leaning on his crutches and staring at the empty coffin, he thought about what he could have done differently. Truth be told, he’d thought of nothing else since awakening in the hospital. The fact that everything had transpired too quickly was no excuse. He’d been in a position to save his partner’s life and he’d failed. He remembered Kane’s final words in his earpiece, the expression on his partner’s face when he took the shot over his shoulder, and the pair of inhumanly blue eyes beneath the brim of a Panama hat as the world became fire. There were a dozen different choices he could have made, any one of which could have led to Kane standing beside him rather than his widow, whom Mason hadn’t even known existed until he was informed she would be receiving the coffin at the airport.
Kane had always preached the importance of separating the personal from the professional. Of all the things his partner had taught him, that was the one thing Mason wished would have stuck.
“Spencer never told you about me, did he?” she said.
Mason shook his head and continued to stare down at the empty casket.
“That’s my Spencer, all right.” She smiled and tipped her face to the sky. The tears on her cheeks glistened. Her name was Christina and she was beautiful in a way Mason attributed to class and wealth. Her dark hair was pulled back with enough force to draw lines of strain from the corners of her brown eyes to her temples. “He talked about you, though. You should know that.”
Mason glanced at her from the corner of his eye.
“He saw a lot of himself in you. Or maybe he just saw a younger version of himself.” She sighed. “You were with him when he died.”
It was a statement, not a question. Mason had known he would eventually have to address the issue, but he had trouble recalling the words he’d rehearsed thousands of times in anticipation.
“He died a brave man in the service of a country that will never be able to repay the debt—”
She cut him off with a laugh. There was no humor in it.
When he looked up, she was trying to wipe away her tears without smearing her mascara.
“You all tell the same stories, which is to say you speak without actually saying anything. I know my husband is—was … a brave man. I know he cared deeply about his country. Probably more than anything else. I know things about him that I will never share with anyone. Because they’re mine. Mine in a way that maybe someday you’ll understand.” She gave up the battle and smeared her makeup across her cheeks. “Tell me his last words.”
Mason looked downhill toward where Angie waited in the car, her face hidden behind the reflection of the sun on the tinted window. He prayed his wife would never be in this woman’s position.
“He said, ‘Take the shot, damn it.’”
Christina was quiet for a long moment. When he looked up, she wore an expression he couldn’t quite interpret.
“I figured it would be something like that.” She sniffed. “I was hoping he made his peace with God at the end.”
He debated about trying to tell her what she needed to hear, but he realized she’d see right through him.
“Spencer always said we Catholics have a ‘good gig,’” she said. “That we can do whatever we want in life as long as we ask for absolution at the end. So that was how he lived, with the belief that with his dying breath he could weasel his way through the gates of heaven and meet me there.”
Mason didn’t want to tell her that the room in which her husband died—a room filled with the decomposing remains of anonymous immigrants hanging from the ceiling by meat hooks—was obviously beyond even God’s sight.
“Tell me…” She took Mason’s hand and turned him so that she could look into his eyes. He was self-conscious of his lack of eyebrows. Not to mention the C-shaped scar around his left eye. They were further reminders that he had lived, while others, including her husband, had died. “Could you have saved him?”
He met her gaze for the first time.
“Yes.”
Mason left her at the graveside, staring in the opposite direction across the green field, toward where swans floated on a clear pond shaded by elms. In that moment, as he walked downhill toward his waiting car, he experienced complete clarity of thought.
He might have failed to save Kane, but he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to avenge him.