Black Friday by Alex Kava Read Free Book Online

seconds he was listening in on the mall’s security guards exchange information and curses.
    “Where are the cops?”
    “On their way.”
    “How frickin’ long does it take?”
    This time Asante couldn’t help but smile. Their wait was his gain. And now they would warn him when it was time for him to leave.
    The food court reminded him of a sidewalk café in Tel Aviv after it had been bombed. It had been in his student days when he was still studying the art of terror. Where better to learn than on the eternal battlefield. Now he looked around at tables and chairs that were strewn and broken like piles of pickup sticks. The walls were splattered with a combination of Chinese dumplings, pizza, coffee, flesh and blood. The floors glittered with glass. The mist from the ceiling sprinklers added to the haze, dampening those who ran away and soaking those who couldn’t.
    Asante followed the green blinking light on his GPS system, tapping it twice when it malfunctioned and indicated that his target was right in front of him. He pressed several buttons before he realized the computer had not malfunctioned at all. Where he expected to see the young Dixon Lee, he saw instead a young woman. She was curled up behind an overturned table, close to the rail that over-looked the mall’s atrium.
    She was no longer moving, but she was, indeed, the source of the blinking green light.
    Son of a bitch.
    This was his errant carrier?

CHAPTER
11
     
    Newburgh Heights, Virginia
     
    M aggie left them to pack. She insisted they stay.
    “Please don’t let all this food go to waste,” she told them. “Gwen and I worked too hard to prepare it.” Then with a smile, “Okay? Please stay.”
    Racine had been the first one to promise though it came out in typical Racine style. “Yeah, no problem. I’m starving. It takes more than a little holiday carnage to keep me from eating.”
    It was enough to break the ice and make the rest of them laugh.
    Still, Maggie wasn’t surprised to hear the knock on her bedroom door. She expected Gwen had one last word to get in.
    “Come on in.”
    “You sure?” Benjamin Platt stood in Maggie’s doorway looking more like a hesitant schoolboy than an army colonel.
    “Yes, of course. Come on in,” Maggie told him, trying to hide her surprise.
    He showed her the little black doctor’s bag he had in his hand. It had become a familiar object over the last two months. Ben had made several house calls after Maggie’s quarantine at USAMRIID. Inside the bag she knew he kept a phlebotomist kit for taking blood samples and at least two vials of the vaccine for the Ebola virus.
    “Still carrying that around, huh?”
    “Ever since I met you,” he said.
    “I have that effect on guys.”
    His eyes narrowed. He was serious now, ready to put aside their usual witty repartee.
    “You’re not due for another shot of the vaccine until late next week, but considering where you’re going,” he paused, and waited for her eyes, “and what you’ll encounter, I think it might be a good idea to give you the dose before you leave.”
    That he was concerned made Maggie concerned. This was a doctor, who all the while she was quarantined and restless for results, kept telling her to slow down and wait, that they would deal with whatever it was when they found out exactly what it was. The “whatever” they were dealing with ended up being Ebola Zaire, nicknamed “the slate sweeper.” Maggie had been exposed but didn’t show any signs of the virus. The incubation period for Ebola was up to twenty-one days. It had been fifty-six days since Maggie’s exposure. That she knew exactly how many days was a testament to how seriously she still took the threat.
    “You don’t think—”
    “No, of course not,” Ben interrupted. “Just a safety precaution. Your immune system has been through a hell of a lot.”
    “Okay,” she said and started to clear a place for him to set the bag on her dresser. Her Pullman was spread out