BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
Valeria Meier had been stabilized at Frederick Health Hospital and transferred to a secure ward at the Johns Hopkins Trauma Center in Baltimore, where they could make sure no one was able to get to her, even someone as resourceful as she was. They’d kept her sedated the entire time to ensure her recovery and to make it impossible for her to communicate with anyone, at least until after they’d had a chance to interrogate her.
Mason and Layne had both slept the entire ride to the coast, grabbed breakfast and a change of clothes, and headed straight to the hospital, where Wylie had been admitted to their dedicated burn ward. They hadn’t been able to see her, thanks to the sterile isolation tent in which she was housed, but one of her doctors had been kind enough to update them on her condition. While she wasn’t out of the woods yet and she had a long and arduous recovery ahead of her—including the debridement of dead tissue and a painful series of grafts once they’d determined her immune system could handle it—he was optimistic that if they could stave off infection for the foreseeable future, she just might pull through.
With that conversation and the mental image it conjured fresh in his mind, Mason was more than ready to talk to Valeria. He’d been pacing the hallway outside of her room while he waited for the doctor to apprise her of her situation and evaluate her physical condition before letting them in. They’d flown in the physician from the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda specifically to treat her, in the hope that having a physician sympathetic to the best interests of the country might buy them a little extra professional courtesy when it came to her questioning.
Archer had arrived from Colorado less than fifteen minutes ago. He’d waited to make sure the president and his cabinet had been safely locked away inside a vault at NORAD, buried at the heart of Cheyenne Mountain, before immediately boarding a plane again. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a month and he was more irritable than ever, but they were going to need the secretary to run interference for them, at least for the time being. Neither Mason nor Layne was entirely ready to face their debriefings. There were still questions they needed to answer and one big fish in desperate need of frying. The biggest problem was that in order to bring him in, they were going to need physical evidence, which was something they sorely lacked.
There was no doubt in Mason’s mind that Avery Douglas was responsible for the nuclear threat, but he was insulated by so many layers of legal protection, accounting, and plausible deniability that they were going to need to find something irrefutable if they hoped to take a run at him. They’d only get one chance to do so before, like Slate Langbroek, he vanished into the wind.
“You need to stop pacing,” Layne said. “You’re making me nervous.”
She leaned against the wall, a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and her cell phone in the other, her eyes fixed upon the doctor through the gap between the curtains in the hospital room’s interior window. As soon as he stood from the foot of the bed and headed for the door, she set down her cup and crossed the hallway to meet him.
The doctor was a tall man in his early fifties, solidly built, cleanly shaven, and only starting to gray at the temples. He tucked his stethoscope into the pocket of his lab coat and braced himself for the conversation to come.
“She’s awake and alert,” he said, “but that doesn’t give you license to abuse her. Regardless of her alleged involvement, she’s endured a difficult ordeal. Not to mention the fact that she was shot in the chest and had to have emergency surgery to drain the blood from her thoracic cavity and repair her lung. As her physician, it’s my job to make sure that no harm comes to her. If I feel that you’re harassing her in any way, I’ll terminate the interview. If she asks you to leave, I’ll see you out myself. And if she requests a lawyer, we’re done. Are we all clear on the terms?”
Mason nodded, squeezed past the doctor into the room, and immediately met Valeria’s stare. Her head was propped on a pillow, her bed raised just high enough that she could look at him down the length of her nose, past the tubes snaking out of her nostrils. The corner of her mouth twitched, but otherwise she showed no appreciable reaction to his presence.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked.
Mason glanced at the monitor beside her bed, which displayed her vital signs as relayed by the cords running under her blanket and beneath her hospital gown. He gauged her baseline heart rate and blood pressure, watched for any sudden changes in either from the corner of his eye as he dragged over a chair and sat near the foot of her bed.
“Yes,” she said with no trace of an accent. “You’re FBI.”
Mason recalled the group photo of Konets Mira and the Dragon’s blurred hand as he reached for Kameko Nakamura’s. Valeria was physically stunning, the best of both of her parents. She had her father’s facial architecture and her mother’s skin tone and almond eyes. As the daughter of the Dragon and the Scarecrow, she’d never stood a chance of having a normal life.
Her eyes twitched toward the door when the others entered. Layne walked past him and leaned against the bulletproof screen in front of the outer window, while Archer and the doctor hovered at the back of the room.
“I need to ask you some questions and I need you to answer them honestly.”
“Only if you answer some for me first,” she said. “Perhaps if you are honest with me, I will show you the same courtesy.”
“That’s not how this works.”
“It is if you expect me to say a single word.”
Mason didn’t speak for several seconds. He made a rolling motion with his hand.
“Is my father dead?” she asked.
Mason glanced at Layne before answering.
“Yes,” he said.
“Did you kill him?”
“No.”
“How did he die?”
“He threw himself down a stairwell.”
Valeria closed her eyes and nodded to herself.
“We need to know about the man who hired your father to build the nuclear device,” Mason said.
When she opened them again, there was no sign of emotion. She stared straight through him with eyes that might as well have been dead.
“I know nothing about him,” she said.
“What happened to honesty?” Layne asked.
“We can protect you,” Mason said.
“Like you protected your congressmen?”
Valeria laughed and immediately regretted it. She looked down at the tube protruding from her chest, right above her dragon tattoo, to make sure it hadn’t suddenly filled with blood.
“You’ll be tried for multiple counts of first-degree murder, but there’s no point in threatening you with the death penalty. We both know you’ll never see trial. The Thirteen will make sure of that.”
She smiled at him as though he were a small child.
“If only you knew how right you are.”
“You think Avery Douglas is going to get you out of this?”
Her eyes hardened and her smile momentarily faltered. Her heart rate accelerated on the monitor.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Special Agent Mason. That is your name, isn’t it? It’s my understanding you recently lost your wife. Allow me to express my condolences.”
She was baiting him, which meant he was on the right track. He needed to press harder.
“Even as we speak, Mr. Douglas is calling in favors and promising others in return. He’s trying to find the perfect person to make his problem go away, because right now, Valeria? Right now you’re more than a headache; you’re a threat that needs to be eliminated. Permanently.”
Valeria’s pulse quickened and her monitor started to beep. Her impassive facade cracked, revealing a hint of the monster hidden underneath.
“Special Agent…” the doctor said.
“What about those poor people in Times Square?” Valeria said. “I watched them on TV, you know. I couldn’t believe how terribly they suffered.”
“You mean like your mother? I heard she went out hard, just like your father. Do you know the sound a head makes when it hits a marble staircase from three stories up?”
The bedside monitor beeped faster and faster. She bared her teeth like an animal and jerked at her cuffed wrist.
“That’s it,” the doctor said. “I want you all out of here.”
“How do you think they’ll do it?” Mason asked. “Will it be one of your nurses? Maybe a police officer or special agent like me? Someone will come when you least expect it and inject something into that IV over there. Or maybe smother you with a pillow—”
“Enough!” the doctor shouted.
He grabbed Mason by the shoulder and attempted to pry him from the chair.
The monitor alarmed and lit up with flashing lights.
“We can protect you,” Mason said. “Tell us everything you know about the Thirteen and I’ll make sure no harm comes to you.”
The doctor yelled for security and finally succeeded in hauling Mason out of the chair.
“You need to try to relax,” he said to Valeria. “Your body can’t handle this kind of stress right now. Not this soon after surgery, and especially not with—”
He cut himself off before he finished the sentence.
Mason stopped struggling and looked into Valeria’s eyes. Read the truth in them. And he knew … positively knew …
He heard her father’s voice …
I have made sure she is taken care of.
… And recalled something he’d said, which at the time Mason had assumed was just a turn of phrase, but he now realized was in fact quite literal.
It will be from her womb that a new, enlightened incarnation of mankind is born.
Valeria must have known he’d figured it out. She frantically shook her head back and forth. Screamed at the top of her lungs.
Mason straightened his shirt and headed for the door. He had everything he needed, at least for now.
“They’ll come for you, too!” she shouted after him. “You can’t stop them!”
Mason had barely stepped out into the hallway when Archer grabbed him and shoved him up against the wall.
“What the hell was that in there? She’s burned as a witness now. You know that, right?”
“We don’t need her to get Douglas,” Mason said. “All we need is a sample of her blood.”
“You think that even with a subpoena we’ll be able to get that now?”
“No, but I’d be happy to give you my sweatshirt without one.”