After Damone had left, Lily and Swain returned to the van and began dividing the charges between them. Her notes told them where the charges needed to go. Swain had shown her how to use the detonators; there was nothing to it. Destruction was always a lot easier than construction.
“Almost finished,” Swain said. “You okay? You almost lost it there at the beginning.”
So he’d noticed that her emotions were getting the best of her. “Yes,” she said, her eyes dry and her hands steady. “I’m ready.”
“Here we go, then. I’d kiss you for good luck, but your upper lip is hairy.”
“Just for that, I’m going to wear the mustache to bed tonight.” Joking felt strange, given what they were about to do, but in a way the humor anchored her. She just hoped that, come night, they both would be still alive and together.
“That’s a scary thought.” He shrugged his shoulders, as if working out the tension. His blue eyes were deadly serious as he surveyed her. “Be careful. Don’t let anything happen to you.”
“Same here.”
He looked at his watch. “Okay, let’s hustle. I want all of these planted within half an hour.”
They reentered the building and, after one long look, went in opposite directions. Neither of them looked back.
Chapter Thirty-One
Because Swain had numbered the rooms on the blueprint and marked the charges accordingly, Lily knew which charges went where. He’d shown her where to place them for maximum effect, but hidden well enough that they were likely to stay hidden until they could get the buildings evacuated.
It’s almost over. The thought kept running through her mind as she walked the hallways of the complex, not making any attempt to avoid detection. Almost no one paid her any attention, and no one questioned her. It was as if, just by being inside the complex, she’d proved her right to be there. The Nervis and Dr. Giordano had become acutely aware of security after the first incident, but for everyone else it seemed to be business as usual. The workforce was light, anyway, since it was the weekend. Those who were there were probably dedicated to the point of being blind to everything else, or tired and resentful that they were working when most others weren’t The end of the workday was growing near, and a lot of people were just killing time.
It’s almost over. For four long months she’d had one aim: vengeance. But this had grown into something larger than her personal vendetta against the Nervis, something more important. What Averill and Tina had started, she was about to finish, in honor of a young girl who had died while she was still trembling on the cusp between childhood and adolescence.
Lily’s own life had taken a bizarre turn when she was eighteen, but she’d hoped to see Zia live a normal, happy life: marry, have children, be in step with most of the world’s population. Those who went with the flow, who fit in with the crowd, often had no idea how very lucky they were. They belonged. She had wanted Zia to belong, to have the things she herself either had never had or had been forced to give up.
What a special child Zia had been! As if she had somehow known her life would be short, she had spent it in a fizz of effervescence. Everything had been a source of wonder and joy to her. And she’d been a chatterbox, trying to get everything said that could be said, talking at a mad pace until they’d had to laugh and tell her to slow down.
It was almost over, Lily’s quest. She placed a charge against the wall behind the filing cabinets that held Dr. Giordano’s documentation of his experiments and results, and stuck a detonator in the mound of Semtex. Soon all of this would be nothing but ashes.
Almost over, she thought as she placed the explosives in the office where all the records were put on computer disk and stored. A small charge under each computer, and another big-ger charge where the disks were stored. Everything had to go. There could be nothing left of Dr. Giordano’s research.
Swain was taking care of the doctor’s office, and the two laboratories in which the live virus was kept Unfortunately, that was also the area where the vaccine was being developed.
Lily wished there were some way the vaccine process could be saved, because in a year or so there could very well be a desperate need for it. There was nothing they could do, no way they could protect that part of Dr. Giordano’s research. She just hoped that when the time came, some other lab had been working on the same thing and would be able to step up to the plate.
She went down a long, steep flight of stairs to the basement and set the largest charges under critical walls, to make certain the destruction was complete. By the time she climbed back to the top, she was out of breath and her heart was pounding.
She could no longer tell herself she was still recovering her strength. There was no doubt about it: any exertion made her short of breath. She couldn’t tell if the breathlessness was getting any worse, but she faced the truth: when she was able she would have to find a good cardiac specialist somewhere and see about getting that pesky valve fixed.
A lot of what she would do next depended on Rodrigo Nervi. She would have to leave France; there was no question of that. Leave Europe, in fact. Swain hadn’t said anything about afterward, and neither had she. First they would see if there was an afterward. She tried to imagine a future by herself, and couldn’t. Whenever she saw herself now, she was with Swain.
Where would it be safe for him to go? Not back to South America, and neither of them would be safe going back to the United States. Mexico, perhaps, or Canada. That would get them close to home. Jamaica was a possibility. Swain didn’t like cold weather, so she didn’t think he would choose Canada, though that would have been her first choice. Perhaps they could summer in Canada and spend the winter farther south.