"Rich?"
"Yup."
"Let me guess," Nick said dryly. "New car, snazzy wardrobe, vacations in St. Lucia."
She nodded. "And let's not forget the new penthouse in Chapel Tower. A luxury condo skyscraper in the heart of Atlanta. Expensive and flashy and terminally stupid for someone on a researcher's salary to buy."
"That's major league new wealth. Someone die and he inherited?"
"That's what he said. But Priyanka is-damn! was-cynical and untrusting. I just loved that about her. She looked his family up and there was no one within a thousand miles who could die and leave him that kind of money. His mother lived off social security and his only brother was in jail for drugs. Bill was brilliant at science, but really dumb at life. He didn't even manage to make up a good excuse for his sudden money. And he was also bad at social relations-wasn't discreet. Everyone on the research floor knew he suddenly had access to a lot of money, big time. Priyanka was really worried because of his current research project. If he'd sold out to someone, his field was dangerous."
A rogue scientist who was an expert on bio-warfare, showing clear signs of corruption. What could possibly be wrong with that picture?
"What was his specialty?" Nick asked, dreading the answer. As both a SEAL and an FBI special agent, he'd had extensive training on bio-weapons, though thank God he'd never encountered any. Mainly he'd encountered bullets and bombs, which were fine. All you needed was bigger bullets and bigger bombs.
But he remembered briefings on sarin, ricin, anthrax. So scary his balls tried to crawl up into his body. There was one mission where they'd had to don MOPP suits because they hadn't known if there would be a bio-weapon.
There hadn't been a bio-weapon, but he remembered vividly the sweaty confines of the awkward and fiercely uncomfortable suit. A teammate had reminded everyone that if their fears were true, they were in suits in which a mere pinprick or slight invisible tear would be enough to guarantee them a horrendous death. He'd added that the suits had been delivered by manufacturers who'd been the lowest bidders.
Not a couple of hours he'd care to replicate.
Bombs and bullets were fine. Tiny particles he couldn't see that would make him puke his lungs and stomach out-not so much.
"He was studying the Spanish Flu."
Nick blanked. The flu? Next to what he'd read of the other diseases-Ebola, Lassa, smallpox-the flu didn't sound so bad.
Kay saw his expression. "We're not talking sniffles and a touch of fever here, Nick. The Spanish flu was a never-before-seen strain of flu that in 1918 wiped out half a billion people worldwide. More people died in one year than in four years of the plague in the 14th century. More people died than in World War I. Life expectancy dropped by twelve years. Bill was studying the virus taken from the lungs of a body frozen in the Antarctic. We still don't understand the mechanisms of the strain. But Priyanka thought that he'd figured it out, replicated it, and made it even more swift and deadly. A fast-acting and deadlier form of Spanish flu … " She shuddered.
"Hell, if Spanish flu 1.0 killed half a billion people … "
"Exactly."
He thought about that. It wasn't pretty. "Though-1918. That was before antibiotics, right?"
"There's no antibiotic on earth that can combat H1N1. And most antibiotics are unfortunately becoming ineffective. Anyway, that's why I called off that weekend. Priyanka was supposed to come over to my place and we were going to go over the information she'd gathered."
"You're a bad liar," Nick said. "I thought you were having an affair."
She was a terrible liar. She'd stammered and stuttered and made up three stories, each more ridiculous than the next. They'd Skyped and she might as well have grown a Pinocchio nose in front of his very eyes. You didn't need to be an FBI behavioral analyst to tell she was lying. She'd turned beet red in the face and her eyes had constantly shifted to the left.
He'd have said that was that, except for the fact that just before signing off, she'd said she was going to be in Portland the next weekend to see Felicity.
And fuck, he'd said, wasn't that a coincidence, he was going to be there too. Except Nick knew how to lie. There wasn't one tell on his face, he knew. After Joe Harris, who was The Man at poker, he was second best at bluffing. And it sort of wasn't a lie. If you squinted.
He'd been thinking more and more about joining ASI. First, because they were all buddies of his from way back. Second, he'd worked for the government all his adult life. He'd had good men commanding him and bad. His last two bosses at the FBI had been cover-your-ass types. What in military-speak had been known as REMFs. Rear echelon motherfuckers. Men who rode desks. More intent on snaking their way up the career ladder than on doing their job putting away fuckheads.