He reached up and brushed some hair away from Alison’s face. “Not our finest moment, was it?”
She stared at him and wiped her eyes. With a sniff she said, “Well, I’m not sure if I’d go that far.”
She forced a small smile at Clay’s inquisitive look. “We did manage to find something. Something big.”
Ten minutes later, there was a knock on the door. Alison got up and walked across the room to open it, finding Caesare there, quiet and somber. He stepped in, wearing an arm sling and a grave face.
Clay had seen that look before. “How you doin’?”
Caesare shook his head. “Not all that great. How are you?”
“Better than I was.”
“I bet.” He stopped at the foot of the bed. “You hear about Juan, and Corso, and Anderson?”
“I did. I’m really sorry.”
Caesare nodded. “Not much went our way. Doesn’t look like too much went your way either.”
Clay forced a grin. “I guess it depends on how you look at it.”
“Well, it looks like you got beat up.”
“Yeah, but I think I intimidated the hell out of the other guys.”
A small smile spread across Caesare’s face. “Based on how bad you look, they must have been shaking in their boots.”
“I wish you could have been there.”
This time, Caesare laughed. “Gee, thanks.” He rounded the bed and dropped his large frame into the chair. “So what did happen?”
“I found Wei’s daughter, Li Na.”
“She was alive then?”
“Yes. Wei saved her life by injecting her with the bacterium from the plants.”
“Where is she now?”
Clay stared at him, still trying to piece his memory back together. No doubt made worse by the medication he was on. “I think she escaped.”
“Great.” Caesare leaned back. The room became silent before he took a breath and spoke again. “It’s gone, John. The whole thing is gone.”
“The vault?”
Caesare nodded. “They dropped a bomb and melted the whole damn top of that mountain. We survived by luck. And nothing more.”
“The Brazilians?”
“No.” Caesare shook his head. “The Chinese.”
“The Chinese?”
Caesare nodded with his eyes transfixed. “I guess if they couldn’t have it, they decided no one would.”
Clay was shocked. He gazed back out through the window, shaking his head. “How are the others?”
“Alive,” Caesare said. “Chris and Tiewater are both in the hospital. DeeAnn’s fine, but I’m sure she’s out –– this time, for good. If she was on the fence before, that fence doesn’t even exist anymore.”
Clay looked at Alison, now standing at the foot of his bed. “I guess we can’t blame her.”
“No,” Caesare said absently. “No, we can’t.”
Clay noticed Alison glance back at the door. It was the second time she had done it. “What’s wrong?”
“Me? Nothing.”
He watched Alison glance subtly at Caesare. They knew something he didn’t.
“What?”
The Queen’s Medical Center, still commonly referred to as Queen’s Hospital, was the largest in the state of Hawaii. Long since expanded beyond the hospital’s original footprint, the facility had grown to over 500 beds, 3,600 employees, and now served as the largest trauma center in the Pacific Basin.
On the bottom floor, beneath the light-green roof of the hospital’s main entrance, two automatic double doors promptly slid open as Admiral Langford and Secretary of Defense Miller strode in out of the warm, humid Hawaiian air. Both were dressed in casual clothes and walked purposefully toward the elevators. Behind them, three more individuals followed.
Langford slowed as he passed the large waiting room, noticing the feed on the giant television. It was an aerial shot of Transocean’s rig “Valant” in the mid-Atlantic. Onscreen, words overlaid the live video feed and read “Transocean loses millions to prevent disaster.”
With a bemused grin, Langford continued. He had to admit, between their two public relations teams, the story being fed to the public sounded downright heroic. The “disaster” portion was a stretch. The company hadn’t actually replaced the rig sooner than planned, nor was there a malfunction forcing the old rig to be stopped where it was. In truth, the incident was little more than a detour on the way to the scrapyard. The important thing was that it allowed the public to praise Transocean Ltd. on being proactive…before promptly forgetting the incident. Even more importantly, it provided the perfect excuse to now position an unused oil rig directly over Alison Shaw’s discovery for the next twelve months, accompanied, of course, by the U.S.S. Pathfinder.