Project Apollo

Chapter 10

"Aww congratulations!" Ashton, just for a moment, turned to a girlfriend, admiring the ring's sparkle. Fiona smiled as she surveyed her fellow Spartans – all appeared to be water under the bridge. The one thing the group had learned through their training at Project Sparta and their life in clandestine operations was to expect the unexpected. Fiona Whitt walking through the door of the Compound qualified as the unexpected.

Fiona approached the glass cell before them.

"I hear you have a game for us?!" Fiona sized up Ezra. "Let's play." Her playful demeanor dropped to a stiff business approach.

"Alright... Now everyone else.... leave," Ezra instructed.

"If you think I'm going to leave her here with you alone, you are crazy," Xander explained.

"Oh but Xander, you have so much work to do. Remember you're the hero in the field..." Ezra spoke patronizingly.

"I'll be alright. He's just a two-bit terrorist, I can take him." She smiled back at her husband, excited to be back. A glint behind her glacier blue eyes flashed her focus on the mission.

"Alright.... Let's head out team." The Spartans turned and headed for the bay doors.

On the other side of them Xander looked back at his wife and the terrorist they once called a friend. Breaking his gaze, the Compound doors shut them in.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

"Wait wait wait! Fiona is alive?!" Mac asked indignantly. The Spartans had convened at Mac's apartment. He didn't seem as open to the news as the others had been. Behind the controls of the computers, he was used to knowing everything about everyone – no one had secrets from him.

"Yeah..." Xander admitted, the others in the room confirmed the confession.

"You asshole!"

"We had to fake her death to get her out of this life... we wanted to get married and we did. But we couldn't live in this life together..." Xander explained. Mac shifted in his feet's stance, consulted the floor and rubbed the back of his neck. After processing the news through great consternation, he surrendered, applauding Xander for his ability to make someone invisible to his all-watching eye.

"I get it... you're still an asshole, though... and remember when I took you to lunch to check on your grieving, like the good friend that I am?" Mac led Xander.

"Yeah..." Xander responded.

"I take back everything I said and you're paying me back for that!"A chorus of laughter broke the tension. Xander nodded agreement and turned the focus back to the mission at hand.

"We need to ready ourselves for anything." Xander brandished his phone and dialed Tobias.

"How's it going?" He held the phone close to his ear.

"F....F....Fine.... But X...Xander its hard t....t...to do anything without a sample. I've got n...n...nothing to test!" Xander could hear Tobias rooting around his messy lab.

"I'm sure there will be something to test soon."

"I n...n...need someone w....who knows w...w...what this thing is!"

"Don't worry about that, I've got a plan. Prepare your hazmats and set up a safe environment in your lab, we're working on it."

"You g....got it, boss.... Is it Ezra?" Tobias's voice dropped.

"Yeah it's him..." Xander heard Tobias stutter an obscenity. "We'll be in touch." He ended the call and turned to the computer monitors.

"Whatcha got?" Mac punched a set of keys and brought up the surveillance feed from the NIH break in.

"Okay, so we know this guy is Azir. But who is that?" He pointed at the figure huddled in a ball, rocking back and forth. He rewound the tape to its beginning to catch the woman walking back to her workstation, facing the vantage point of the camera.

He zoomed in the feed to focus on her face, which was distorted through her protective suit.

"Can't really see her face through that plastic suit. Can you?"

"No, I can't," Cusick offered. "Did you try hacking into the NIH security logs to find her access swipe?"

"Good point, Damien, but... of course I did, here's who we've got." He pulled Catherine Mueller's digital file on a monitor for everyone to see.

"Catherine Mueller, Oxford graduate, she started in Immunological Studies, Parasitology and Epidemiology, her thesis was on the fragility of mitotic division. She graduated with highest honors. During a short stint at the CDC she published dozens of papers: Multifactorial Analysis of Variance, Sequence Determination, Electron Microscopy... She's done it all. Now, she works at the NIH and lives in Bethesda and is noted for her continued work oversees in the field as a contamination expert," Mac explained, astonished. His eyes found the personal notes of the file. "Divorced parents, deceased sister... Judging by the surveillance feed she worked on the bacteria for two hours before the heist. She's the only person who has seen it."

"Where is she now?" Seamus asked – Xander remained silent.

"She has been admitted to George Washington University Hospital. No medical records. But after hacking into hospital security I can see her room is guarded."

"Why would it be guarded?" Ashton voiced her wonder.

"I don't know, but those aren't military, their US Marshals."

"Protecting her, keeping people out," Ashton posited.

"Or keeping her in..." Xander's voice trailed as his vision fixated on her picture.

Her face was dominated by her hook nose and thick black glasses. Her honey colored hair was pulled back for the photo. She wasn't an attractive woman but her smile was authentic with a goofy sparkle about it. Xander consulted the yearbook of headshots in his head and when his scanning mind found its match it rested on the memory of a woman. His mouth dropped.

"I've met her...."

"What?!" Mac asked.

"Yeah, she was my doctor..." Xander recalled his last annual checkup. Mac turned back to Xander from his chair.

"Like your agency issued physician or what..." Xander transfixed on the profile.

"She was at the CIA medical center in Great Falls..."

"How long have you been her patient?" Mac asked.

"I wasn't really, she filled in for Dr. Stansbury for my monthly blood work up in once when he went on vacation. I remembered she mentioned that her primary field was infectious diseases," he recalled.

"We need to extract her and bring her in... she's the only one who knows this bacteria." Xander gazed at the screen of a new player for his team. He remembered Ezra's words.

You can have as much help as you want. You are sure going to need it