Page 36 of Hot Intent

She gestured to the doorway. “Is there anything we can do for them?”

“If I’m right, we can make them comfortable until they die.”

Her stomach dropped like a rock.

“In the morning, you and I are taking a trip,” he said grimly.

“Let me guess. Up the coast?”

“Brilliant deduction, Sherlock.”

“Should we tell somebody what you suspect?” she breathed.

He opened his mouth to answer, but Sylvia called his name. Her voice was urgent and he bolted from the closet. Katie locked the door carefully and headed toward the sound of a commotion. Alex and Sylvia knelt over a thrashing patient, but they seemed to have protecting the patient from his convulsions under control. She retreated from the gruesome scene.

Thoughtfully, she went to Alex’s backpack in the corner of the operating room and pulled out the satellite phone he stored there for emergencies. She turned it on and punched in André Fortinay’s private number. It was something like three in the morning in Washington, but André would get over it when he heard what she had to say.

A sleepy voice answered on the second ring. “Hey, Alex. What’s up?”

“It’s Katie,” she said low. “We just got in a batch of patients. Alex thinks they’ve been exposed to some sort of chemical agent.”

Abruptly André sounded entirely alert. “Like a chemicalweapon?”

“Yes.”

A short pause and then, “Tell him to get me proof. At all costs, get me proof. As soon as you’ve got it, execute the exit protocol and get that proof back here. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“At all costs. You hear?”

“Got it.”

She thought he might be suggesting something sinister along the lines of theft, murder, and mayhem if it became necessary. But she didn’t speak spy-doubletalk nearly as well as Alex.

“Katie!” Sylvia called.

“Gotta go,” she murmured into the phone.

“Keep in touch—" She cut off her boss and stuffed the phone back in Alex’s pack.

Several patients went into various stages of collapse over the next few hours, keeping her, Alex, and Sylvia hopping. A man in his sixties died, and an elderly woman followed him soon after. It was, in a word, awful.

Sylvia was beside herself that whatever the patients had might be contagious and was agonizing over whether or not to shut down her little clinic and deny the locals any more care.

Finally, as the sun rose, Alex told the nurse, “Keep your clinic open for now. Katie and I will go investigate this illness further.”

He sent the overwrought woman to bed for a few hours’ badly needed sleep while he went looking for the man who’d driven the farm truck into the village last night. The guy was sleeping off a hangover a few huts down and roused slowly.

Alex had Katie fetch coffee from the communal eatery the locals had set up to pool their food resources. They poured the strong, hot brew down the man and, when he was lucid, informed him he was taking them to the source of the sick patients. Now.

The hungover driver climbed back in his truck silently. Alex slid over to the middle of the cab and Katie mashed up next tothe door. The vehicle bumped out of town on the ruined road and Katie groaned under her breath. Banging around in this truck was better than walking, but not by much.

The driver was taciturn. He was probably nursing a monster headache, which had to suck for him on these awful roads. Alex was equally grim, and that worried her. He was a brilliant physician. She seriously doubted his suspicions were wrong about what had sickened those poor people.

Lord, the implications of it, though. If chemical weapons were stored right in America’s back yard, Uncle Sam was going to go crazy. Memory of studying the Cuban Missile Crisis in a history class came to mind. Were the Russians involved this time, too?

Where else would tiny Cuba acquire the technology to make such weapons? Sure, places like China, Iran, and North Korea made chemical agents, but would they risk sharing their secrets with Cuba and earning the ire of—and probable retaliation by—the United States?

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