“I’m okay,” she said. “A little scared, but okay. The exit lights are on. Can I just follow them?”
“You can. But you need to follow all safety protocols, even in the dark. Chemical shower for the suit, regular shower for you – all of it. Otherwise, if you feel like you can’t follow protocol, we need to wait until I can send someone in there, or until we get the power back up.”
Her voice shook a tiny amount. “Tom, my air hose went off. If it goes off again… Let’s just say I don’t want to be in here without my air hose. I can follow the protocols in my sleep. But I need to get out of here.”
“That’s fine. All procedures to the letter, though. I trust you. But I don’t have any lights. It looks like it’s going to be dark everywhere, the whole way out. The airlock was off for a minute, but it just came back on. It’s probably best if we get you out of there. Once you’re through the airlock, you shouldn’t have any problems. Let me know when you’re through, okay? I want to shut it down again to conserve power.”
“I will,” she said.
She moved slowly through the darkness toward the exit door to the airlock, the vial of Ebola still cupped in her gloved right hand. It would take twenty or thirty minutes to follow all procedures on her way out. That wasn’t going to happen. She planned to cut corners from here on out. This would be the fastest lab exit they had ever seen.
Tom was still talking to her. “Also, please make sure you secure all materials and equipment before you exit. We wouldn’t want anything dangerous floating around.”
She opened the first door and slid through. Just before it closed, she heard his voice for the last time.
“Aabha?” he said.
Aabha drove the BMW Z4 convertible with the top down.
It was a warm night, and she wanted to feel the wind in her hair. It was her last night in Galveston. It was her last night as Aabha. She had accomplished her mission, and after five long years undercover, this part of her life was over.
It was an amazing feeling, to cast off an identity as though it were a suit of clothes. It was freedom, it was exhilaration. She felt like she could be the protagonist in a television advertisement.
She had grown tired of studious, serious Aabha a long time ago. Who would she become next? It was a delicious question.
The drive to the marina was brief, just a few miles. She pulled off the highway and down the ramp to the parking lot. She took her overnight bag and her purse out of the trunk and left the keys in the glove compartment. In an hour a woman she had never seen, but who had similar features to Aabha, would get in and drive it away. The car would be two hundred miles away by the morning.
This made her a touch sad because she had loved this car so much.
But what was a car? Nothing more than many individual parts, welded and screwed and fastened together. An abstraction, really.
She walked on high heels through the marina. Her shoes clacked on the tiled ground. She passed the swimming pool, closed at this time of night, but lit up from below by an unearthly blue light. The thatched roofs of the little picnic sun shelters rustled in the breeze. She walked down a ramp to the first dock.
From here, she could see the great boat lighting up the night out on the water, well beyond the farthest reach of a Byzantine maze of interconnected docks. The boat, a 250-foot oceangoing yacht, was far too large to bring in close to the marina. It was a floating hotel, complete with disco, pool and hot tub, workout room, and its own four-person helicopter and helipad. It was a mobile castle, fit for a modern king.
Here at the dock, a small motorboat waited for her. A man offered his hand and helped her cross from the dock to the gunwale and then down into the cockpit. She sat in the back as the man untied and pushed off, and the driver put the boat in gear.
Approaching the yacht in the speedboat was like piloting a tiny space capsule to dock with the most gigantic star destroyer in the universe. They didn’t even dock. The speedboat pulled behind the yacht, and another man helped her climb a five-rung ladder to the deck. This man was Ismail, the notorious assistant.
“Do you have the agent?” he said when she had climbed on board.
She smirked. “Hi, Aabha, how are you?” she said. “Nice to see you. I’m glad you escaped unscathed.”
He made a motion with his hand as if a wheel were turning. Let’s go, let’s go. “Hi, Aabha. Whatever you just said. Do you have the agent?”
She reached into her purse and pulled out the vial full of Ebola virus. For a split second, she had a funny urge to toss it into the ocean. She held it up for his inspection instead. He stared at it.
“That tiny container,” he said. “Incredible.”
“I gave five years of my life for this container,” Aabha said.
Ismail smiled. “Yes, but a hundred years from now, people will still sing songs of the heroic girl called Aabha.”
He held his hand out as if Aabha were going to put the vial in his palm.
“I’ll give it to him,” she said.
Ismail shrugged. “As you wish.”
She climbed a flight of green-lit stairs and entered the main cabin through a glass door. The giant cabin had a long bar against one wall, several tables along the walls, and a dance floor in the middle. Her boss used the room for entertaining. Aabha had been in this room when it was like a club in Berlin – standing room only, music pumping so loud the walls seemed to pulsate with it, lights strobing, bodies pressed together on the dance floor. Now the room was silent and empty.
She moved along a red carpeted hallway with half a dozen staterooms on either side, and then she climbed another flight of stairs. At the top of the stairs was another hall. She was deep inside the boat now, moving deeper. Most guests never came this far. She reached the end of this hall and knocked on the wide double doors she found there.
“Come in,” a man’s voice said.
She opened the left-hand door and went in. The room never ceased to amaze her. It was the master bedroom, located directly below the pilot house. Across the room from her, a curved, floor to ceiling, 180-degree window gave a view of what the boat was approaching, as well as much of what was to its right and left. Often, these views were of wide-open ocean.
On the left side of the room was a sitting area with a large sectional sofa formed into a party pit. There were also two easy chairs, a four-seat dining table, and a huge flat panel television on the wall, with a long sound bar mounted just below it. A tall, glass-faced liquor case stood near the wall in the corner.
To her right was the custom-built double-king-sized bed, complete with mirror mounted on the ceiling above it. The owner of this boat enjoyed his entertaining, and the bed could easily accommodate four people, sometimes five.
Standing in front of the bed was the owner himself. He wore a pair of white silk drawstring pants, a pair of sandals on his feet, and nothing else. He was tall and dark. He was perhaps forty years old, his hair peppered with gray, and his short beard just starting to turn white. He was very handsome, with deep brown eyes.
His body was lean, muscular, and perfectly proportioned in an inverted triangle – broad shoulders and chest tapering down to six-pack abs and a narrow waist, with well-muscled legs below. On his left pectoral was a tattoo of a giant black horse, an Arabian charger. The man owned a string of chargers, and he took them as his personal symbol. They were strong, virile, regal, as he was.
He appeared fit, healthy, and well-rested, in the way of a vastly wealthy man with easy access to skilled personal trainers, the best foods, and doctors ready to administer the precise hormone