Warehouse 13: A Touch of Fever (18 page)

He shook his head. “I’m not ready to go there yet.” He and Myka lived dangerous lives, constantly placing themselves in jeopardy. He had already written his sister a letter, to be delivered to her someday when his luck finally ran out. That would have to be enough. “I’m not giving up. Just like we didn’t give up on you when you were dying of old age thanks to that freaky camera.”

“Don’t remind me,” she said. “I still cringe whenever I think I’ve found a gray hair.”

Pete remembered Myka lying on her deathbed, just like he was now, Man Ray’s camera having artificially aged her to the point of extinction. “The point is, we found a way to reverse the process. Just like you found a way to get that electro-scorpion off me way back when.”

This wasn’t the first time one or both of them had faced death. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be the last.

He flipped through another comic. A two-page spread depicted the Iron Shadow breaking free from a supposedly escape-proof death trap. With a little help from his allies, of course.

“Artie and Claudia will figure something out. They always do, right?”

WAREHOUSE 13

“Got him!”

Artie leaned back in his office chair and crossed his arms over his chest. He contemplated the computer monitor in front of him with grim satisfaction.
Now we’re making headway,
he thought.
Finally.

“Him who?” Claudia scurried over from her own desk. She and Artie had pulled an all-nighter trying to track down one or both of Clara Barton’s gloves. She peered over his shoulder.

“Who him?”

“Our mystery man, the one who infected Pete in Fairfield.” He nodded at the screen, which displayed an enlarged driver’s license photo of a gaunt, bald-headed fellow with sunken eyes and a sour expression. Ashen, waxy skin was stretched tight over a skull-like visage. He appeared much older than his birth date implied. “Meet Calvin Worrall, of the Palm Beach Worralls.”

“Jeepers!” Claudia recoiled from the photo on the screen. Her face curdled in disgust. “Dude looks like Nosferatu’s kid brother. On a bad day.”

Artie couldn’t disagree. Granted, DMV photos were seldom flattering, but Worrall’s bloodless, haggard visage was enough to give small children nightmares. More important, he also matched Pete and Myka’s description of the stranger who had assailed them outside the high school gymnasium. The one who was apparently in possession of Clara Barton’s left glove.

“We’ll need to transmit this photo to Myka for confirmation,” he stated, “but I’m pretty sure Calvin’s our guy. He fits the profile perfectly.” Artie kicked himself for not thinking of Worrall earlier. “I should have realized it was him.”

Claudia gave him a quizzical look. “You know this guy?”

“I know
of
him,” Artie clarified. “He’s a collector of rare curios, particularly those associated with healers and healing. I try to keep to keep tabs on various ‘amateur’ enthusiasts, just in case they stumble onto something dangerous. Worrall’s been in the game for a few years now. He once nearly outbid me on Rasputin’s prayer rope.” The object in question currently resided on Level 5 of the Warehouse, after being re-neutralized several weeks ago. “But I’d always chalked him up as a dilettante, with more money than expertise. He seemed harmless enough. More of an occasional nuisance than anything else.”

“Tell that to Pete,” Claudia said.

“Indeed. It seems I underestimated Calvin. Looks like he’s somehow managed to get his hands on a genuine artifact.” Artie scratched his beard. “I wonder where he found it.”

“Not sure that matters anymore,” Claudia said. “We need to find this guy, pronto.”

She had her priorities straight, Artie conceded. Myka’s most recent update from the hospital suggested that Pete was declining fast. Tracing the provenance of the gloves could wait. Right now they needed to find them and neutralize them.

He forwarded Worrall’s file over to Claudia’s computer. “Do a complete search on Calvin. Credit cards, secondary residences, magazine subscriptions . . . anything that might tell us where he is now.”

“You got it, chief!” She practically dived back into her seat at the other desk. Her nimble fingers danced over the keyboard. “I’m on this like wasabi on sushi.”

Artie was tempted to supervise, but resisted the impulse. Claudia could handle this. After all, she had managed to track down Warehouse 13 by herself, with only a little covert assistance from MacPherson. If anything, her investigative skills had only grown sharper since then.

Don’t be a backseat driver,
he scolded himself.
Let her take the wheel.

He glanced at his wrist watch. It was nearly six in the morning, which meant that it wasn’t even eight a.m. in Connecticut. Probably too early to run Worrall’s photo by Myka. She’d had a long night. He didn’t want to wake her if she was actually managing to get some sleep. ID’ing the photo could wait another hour or so. Hopefully, they would have some solid leads for her by then.

He poured himself a cup of coffee. A plate of leftover donuts served as breakfast.

Where are you, Calvin? What are you up to?

While Claudia searched online, Artie stared at the photo on the screen, trying to get into their quarry’s head. According to Myka, Worrall had been after Nadia’s glove as well, but why? Simply to complete his collection, or was there more to it than that? Reviewing the man’s file, he encountered a mother lode of old medical records and prescription refills.
That’s right,
he recalled. Calvin had always been a veritable catalog of ailments and infirmities. No wonder he was so obsessed with healing talismans. Did he think Clara Barton’s right glove could cure him for good?

Probably. But why was Worrall making people ill in the meantime?

He rested his chin on his knuckles, mulling it over. Artifacts had their own peculiar logic. You simply had to figure it out.

Fortunately, he’d had plenty of practice at that.

“Hold on,” he muttered. “Didn’t Pete and Myka say that they thought that healing people was making Nadia sick?”

Claudia looked up from her computer. “Yeah, I think so.”

“Suppose the other glove does just the opposite? Healing Worrall by making other people ill?”

“You may be onto something there, Marcus Welby,” she replied. “Sounds just twisted enough to be right.” She rolled her eyes. “And the fact that it makes sense to me just proves that I’ve been working here too long.”

“Just wait until you’re my age.” He ambled over to her desk. “Any progress?”

“Already?” She snorted. “Impatient much?”

“You have complete access to every database on the planet.” He glanced again at his watch, wondering if he should wake Myka to debrief her. He wanted to know if Worrall had looked healthier after he infected Pete. “How hard can it be to find one walking epidemic?”

“Harder than it sounds, actually,” she admitted, a trifle sheepishly. “He’s gone off the grid in a major way. From what I can tell, he withdrew a large sum of money a while ago and dropped out of sight. He hasn’t used his credit cards for months.”

Artie frowned. “What about his cell phone?”

“No recent calls. To be honest, I get the impression this guy isn’t much of a people person. He’s not even on Facebook.” She stubbornly bounced around the Internet, surfing from Web site to Web site. “He’s probably relying on disposable phones, if he’s talking to anyone at all.”

“Sounds like he’s being very careful,” Artie deduced, “which means he’s worried about being tracked or being linked to that chain of typhoid fever outbreaks.” He gave Worrall points for paranoia. “Very clever, Calvin. I should have been paying more attention to you.”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Claudia said. “It’s not like you haven’t been distracted lately, first by MacPherson, then by H. G. Wells. Not to mention the usual Warehouse wackiness.”

He refused to let himself off so lightly. “No excuses. Not when it might cost Pete his life.”

In his stint at the Warehouse, Artie had outlived most every other agent. He had seen far too many good men and women killed, driven insane, petrified, bifurcated, lost in space/time, or worse, all in the line of duty. Their diversely tragic fates weighed on him. He was in no hurry to add Pete to the Warehouse’s long list of casualties.

“You know,” Claudia said, “I have to ask: Don’t we have something on the shelves that might be able to fix Pete? Maybe Louis Pasteur’s milk bottle or something?”

Artie shook his head. “Too dangerous. Using one artifact to counteract another is never a good idea. Mixing their energies can produce random, wildly unpredictable results, like that time the disco ball accidentally triggered Lewis Carroll’s mirror. We could easily make Pete even worse.”

“Really?” Claudia asked. “I hate to say it, but I’m not sure he’s got a lot to lose.”

Artie gave her his sternest look. He couldn’t blame Claudia for grasping at straws, but this was something she needed to understand, especially if she was ever going take his or Mrs. Frederic’s place running the Warehouse.

“There was an agent once,” he said gravely, “who tried to keep his bones from dissolving by ingesting a rare vial of powdered ivory.”

“And?” Claudia prompted.

“You’ve heard of the Elephant Man?”

She looked appropriately appalled. “Oh. Ick.”

“Ick indeed.” He trusted he’d made his point. “We have enough on our hands with Clara Barton’s gloves, no pun intended. The last thing we—or Pete—needs is to throw another artifact at him.”

“Okay,” she said. “Message received, loud and clear. No shortcuts. It’s the gloves or nothing.”

She reapplied herself to the search, zipping through cyberspace almost faster than Artie could follow. Passport applications, tax returns, SAT scores, and library late notices flashed across the screen, one after another. Separate windows, each containing a different document or JPEG, fanned across the screen like playing cards dealt by a quick-fingered stage magician. She even called up a third-grade essay on how Worrall spent his summer vacation (getting his appendix removed, apparently). But all she found was dead ends.

“Frell!” she cursed in geek. She threw up her hands. “In the immortal words of the Shat, this guy needs to get a life. How am I supposed to find him unless he surfaces sometime soon? He’s a ghost!”

He shared her frustration. Every minute that passed decreased Pete’s odds of survival. “What about typhoid fever? When was the last outbreak?”

She had the answer at her fingertips—literally. “A football game in New Jersey, yesterday evening. A whole squadron of ambulances had to be dispatched.”

“Who exactly was infected?” Artie asked. “The audience or the team?”

“Both. Everybody.” She scanned the emergency dispatches and news bulletins. “Even the cheerleaders aren’t so cheery anymore.”

Artie was troubled by the reports, which he read over Claudia’s shoulder. “This is not good. The infection rate is escalating, as is the list of fatalities. Hospitals all along Worrall’s route are filling up with dying fever patients, none of whom are responding to treatment. Worrall could be approaching plague proportions soon.”

“Plague?” She made a face. “I’m guessing we want to avoid that?”

“By all means,” he stated. As much as they were all understandably worried about Pete, he couldn’t lose sight of the bigger picture. Worrall and the left-hand glove were a menace, and exactly the kind of threat Warehouse 13 was meant to contain. “Any clue as to where he’s heading next?”

“Nada,” she replied. “Nobody even remembers seeing him there. I think they’re all too busy groaning and puking their guts out.”