by Hinze, Vicki
“Exactly how big?”
“Five levels above ground, four—in places, three—levels underground and 17,000 feet of tunnels. I haven’t been spared a moment for proper recon.”
“Is the lab secure?”
“The detonated charges have taken out a lot of rock, but I don’t see a breach. Lighting down here is weak at best, but the rear wall of the lab appears intact. Beyond the lab, toward the outside and above the tunnel, is now open all the way to ground level. There’s about two feet of rock between the tunnel opening and the lab’s rear wall. Cracks are evident, Liz.” Emma worried. Her stomach did a little flip. “Concern about a Venturi effect is warranted. It was relatively light but evident in the tunnels—low-grade—and storm winds aren’t yet at full strength. If they get much higher, the wind could exploit the cracks and break through the lab wall.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
Emma had been weighing potential solutions on just that. “Options being limited, about all we can do is fill the cracks, and add a snow pack.”
“Reasonable,” Liz said. “I’ll need photos to ID the subjects of interest and whatever you got off them. Also, I need any footage of the scene. I’ll get the gurus to do a damage assessment. If they have any brilliant ideas, I’ll pass them on to you.”
“All of that should be sitting in your in-box,” Emma said. “I transmitted just before I called.”
“Have you done a gut-check?”
Emma didn’t hesitate to share her instinctive reactions. “A hotel connects to the airport, just beyond Terminal C. That’s the logical place they would have been holed up, and below Terminal C, there’s a couple hundred feet of unrestricted tunnels. That’d be their easiest and most direct access point. Passports and identification weren’t on them, so they had to stash them somewhere. Our best bet is at the hotel.”
Airport lockers were a possibility, of course, but as crowded as it was right now, lockers would be difficult to acquire. And there’d be too many eyes watching. “I recommend you cross-check the hotel security footage and compare it to the photos I sent,” Emma continued. “The attack was well-coordinated and well-funded. They have top-notch equipment, and a lot of it. Their explosives expert wasn’t great, but he was good enough to get the job done. If we hadn’t been here, he would have. I seriously doubt they’d come in on this kind of operation with such a small footprint.”
“In other words, you think there’s more of them and they’ll come after the lab again.”
“Exactly.” And that certainty had Emma praying to be ready on her end. “We’re short on weapons, so we’ll surely be out-gunned. The airport’s director, Graystone, is in the hospital. He had an unrelated surgery yesterday. The second in command is after his job and media friendly. She isn’t trusted. Mason pulled rank and ordered the Security Chief to not inform her of the attempted attack. National Security priority.”
“Sounds wise, under the circumstances.”
“I thought so, too,” Emma agreed. Mason and John Taylor were speaking softly, and John Taylor relayed a few orders through a two-way radio.
“There’s no way we can get back-up to you, Emma—personnel or supplies. The storm has everything grounded. Even emergency services have shut down.”
She figured that. Still, hearing it put knots in her stomach. “We’ll do all we can,” Emma said, praying it’d be enough. “Let me know who these people are as soon as you pin them down. Everything you can get on them.”
If she stood half a chance, she needed to know their identities and histories to know what they were capable of doing.
“From your visuals, any clue if they’re foreign or domestic?” Liz asked.
“Could be either or both.” Their mixed messages on uniforms, weapons and personal effects had no doubt been intentional. “No idea. I also suspect they have a safe-house nearby. Someone, somewhere to hand off the pathogens to for further distribution.”
“In addition to the hotel.”
“Yes.”
“Seems prudent.”
“No identification, passports, transportation tickets or receipts on any of them.”
John Taylor and Mason walked over to her. “Just a second, Liz.” She covered the receiver with her hand. “Don’t touch anything but take a look at them,” she said, nodding toward the bodies, “and see if you recognize anyone.”
They went to look, and she continued talking to Liz.
When both returned to Emma, she asked, “Anything?”
Both men shook their heads, no, they didn’t recognize any of them.
“It’s a bust on the identities,” she said into the phone, then ended the call and spoke to John Taylor. “There’s no one on the hole yet. You need to get someone above so no one or nothing falls down here, accidentally or deliberately. It’s open straight through from the street now.”
“Radioed my men on that a bit ago. They’ve got the area sealed off. I’ll get an eyes-on guard on it.” John Taylor peered at her through his oval-shaped glasses, his dark brown hair standing on end and falling in clumps on his forehead. He motioned to the rifle, then the Glock. “Can I have one of those weapons back?”
She passed him the Glock. “We need a couple guards on this back wall.”
“I’ll take care of it.” John Taylor nodded. “We should document the damage.”
“I did,” she said, knowing he’d watched her do it. He was asking for a copy without asking—a professional courtesy. “I’ll send you what I’ve got, and you can see if you need anything further.”
“Sounds good.” After relaying his email, mobile and text information to her, John Taylor started back the way he’d come, already issuing orders on his radio. “I need a guard down here now. Come fast and come armed.”
“Make sure he’s trustworthy,” Emma said.
“If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t work for me.” John Taylor paused, looked back at Emma and sniffed. “I screen very carefully.”
“Excellent.” She looked at John Taylor’s retreating back. “I need to run some recon. Can you stay until your guys get here?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said, his jaw set. “Do what you need to do.”
“Thanks.” Emma turned to Mason. “I need to check the tunnels. See if I can identify their approach. I’ll meet you back in the lab.”
“Okay,” Mason said, his voice a little unsteady. “David says everything is testing out okay, but I need to inspect the systems myself.” Worry settled into his expression, lining his face. “But I don’t like leaving you alone in the tunnels.”
She didn’t like sending him back to the lab on his own either. “I’ll be fine. You let me know when you get to the lab, and make sure the pathogens are secure. Otherwise, whatever else we do will be futile.”
Mason still looked torn. “If you’re sure…”
“I am. No arguing with me, remember?”
“I remember. Okay, then.” Mason touched her shoulder. “Be careful, Emma.”
The concern in his eyes was genuine. Her heart skipped a little beat. “You, too.”
He took a step, then glanced back at her. “One day, when I ask you who you work for, I’m going to ask you about all your special skills, too.”
“But not today.”
“No, not today.” He swiped at the back of his neck. “Though I have to say, I’m glad you’ve got them.”
“Today, so am I.” Emma nodded to clear her mind of what could have happened if she hadn’t. A shudder coursed through her entire body. “Get going now. We’ve got a lot to do, and we need to do it quickly.”
Before the attacker’s backup team activated…
Chapter Ten
Tuesday, December 17th
1947 (7:47 PM)
Emma met Mason in the outer ring of the lab. “Everything okay?”
He looked as relieved to see her as she felt on seeing him. “Let’s go to my office.” He nodded toward the kids, who were taking turns dribbling a basketball along
a fifteen-foot stretch between the outer door and the one to the vault. “Sophia’s in the kitchen and David’s at the computer in his office.”
The TV was on and Janette Wilson was speaking to the media. To Darcy Keller, to be precise. “The outer perimeter of the main terminal has suffered minor damage,” Janette said. “But it’s nothing that affects the integrity of the facility’s structure.”
She sounded reassuring. Calm and in control. That told Emma, John Taylor’s orders to his staff to keep her out of the need-to-know loop on the breach had been followed, which meant his men trusted him, and Janette wasn’t checking out the damage on her own. Graystone, being more experienced, would have. Janette Wilson might want Graystone’s job, and she might look the part, but she wasn’t ready for his job. That said, at the moment, she was good for the 5,000 stranded passengers upstairs who had to be edgy and hanging onto her every word seeking reassurance.
Darcy turned the conversation to the weather. “Hail and blinding snow…”
While Janette looked as if she’d just stepped off the pages of a fashion magazine, Emma was splotched with dust and grime. Her black slacks and jacket hid a lot but streaks on her once-white blouse were unforgiving. She swiped at one, smearing it, and then focused on Mason.
He signaled her with a head tilt and then started walking toward his office. She followed him to it, and when she stepped inside, he closed the door to the hallway.
“I ran a full security sweep on the HC lab,” he told Emma. “Everything appears intact. There’s no evidence of broken seals or of the cracks in the rear wall actually penetrating through it into the lab.”
“That’s good news.” Emma scanned his utilitarian office. There was nothing personal in it. Clear desktop, blank white walls, blank concrete floor. A computer terminal rested on a side desk. Its screen was black. Its CPU disconnected. “Do you actually work in here?” she asked, having a hard time reconciling this space with the Mason she had known growing up.
“Not much now.” He smiled and sat down behind his desk. “I told you. We were geared up for the move.”
“That’s right.” That made her feel a little better. It boggled her mind to picture Mason working long hours in such a sterile environment. Oh, it’d be functional, but there was nothing of him in it at all. He’d always been neck-deep in stacks of papers and open books. A clutter bug, yet somehow organized to him.
“Sit.” He motioned to a straight-back visitor’s chair. It looked unused, and likely had been in his time here. The lab didn’t get visitors, he’d said. “Did you find any answers down tunnel?”
She had found nothing. Not a thing. “They didn’t come in that way.”
“You think they came in from the outside wall? Moved in as they blasted?”
“I don’t know yet.” She frowned and sat down in his visitor’s chair, shoving the rifle stock slung over her shoulder out of the way. “That’s unlikely though. In that kind of infiltration, they’d generally have at least one man already inside, positioned just beyond the blast zone.”
Mason rocked back. His chair squeaked. “You’re convinced they were professionals.”
“Definitely.” She worked a kink out of her shoulder. “An amateur wouldn’t recognize half their equipment much less be able to use it.” The explosives guy wasn’t at the top of his game, but he was competent enough to get the job done. The charge wiring had been pretty rudimentary. His choices would not have been the first choices of someone really good with explosives.
Mason lifted a hand. “So, what do we do now?”
“I check out all the tunnels,” she said. “I’m having John Taylor and his team review security footage to see if they spotted the entry. And specifically, the elevator, which would have biometric information on at least one of them.”
“Why?” Mason asked, folding his hands atop his desk. “They’re all dead.”
“To crossmatch them, if possible. We need to know who we’re dealing with so we know their capabilities. Different groups, shall we say, have different strengths and weaknesses. We identify even one of them and associate them to a specific group, we’ll better know what to expect from the rest of them, and what vulnerabilities of theirs to exploit.”
“Sensible, but not urgent, since they’re dead,” he reiterated. “So why is this as significant as it would be if any had survived? You’re as tense as before you killed them all.”
She could answer that, but she’d rather not if she could avoid it. It hadn’t yet occurred to him that the first wave of invaders was exactly that—the first wave. “Let’s say, I want to make sure there are no more surprises.” She shot him a loaded look.
“Oh, no. I know that look. It’s not over.” He rocked forward and clasped his folded hands atop the desk. “You think there are more of them.”
Well, that didn’t take long. He always had been too good at reading her and too quick at projecting and deducing the obvious. Emma didn’t respond.
“You can speak freely in here. My office is sound-proof and white noise is on all the time to avoid any intercept attempts.”
“What about your computer terminal?”
He smiled. “Well protected.”
She smiled back. No computer with Internet access was ever well-protected, regardless of how secure it appeared to be. But it was totally disabled, so his false sense of security was justified. Truly, they should be fine. “Then let’s say, as best I am able, I want to be sure there aren’t any more surprises.”
“But you do think there are more of them coming.” He gently rocked, studying her. “I know you, Emma. I told you, I know that look.”
“Okay. Your ears only.” When he nodded, she added, “I’d be shocked if there aren’t more of them.”
“Because…?”
She squirmed on her seat. “It would be atypical.”
The gravity of that disclosure wasn’t lost on Mason. He stood up. “I know you started checking the tunnels, but we need to check them all.”
“We do.”
“Let’s go then.”
She walked with him toward the outer door, stopped when he paused to speak to David.
“Keep a sharp watch,” Mason told him. “Anything comes up, you call me on the radio right way.”
Mason looked at Emma. “Radios are more reliable than phones down here.”
“Do you have a spare?” she asked. The rich scent of spicy spaghetti sauce wafted from the kitchen down the hallway. Her stomach growled. “I should preserve my phone.”
“I do,” Mason said. He went back to his office to retrieve one, then returned and passed it to her. “Channel is set. You’re good to go.” He also passed her a flashlight.
“Thanks.” She clipped the radio to the waistband of her slacks, then slung the rifle’s strap over her shoulder. “Let’s move.”
Flashlights on, they headed out into the tunnel, and she peered over at Mason. “On this end, I want to check the tunnels between here and the hotel first.”
“You think they were at the hotel?”
“I don’t know yet, Mason,” she said. Liz hadn’t yet reported back to her on the security footage from there, though she had secured it. “But it’s the logical place to start. Out of sight, off the airport security cameras, a private place to stow their equipment and identifications, passports… It’s logical they’d hideout there until they were ready to move.”
Mason kept pace with her and with the intense flashlights, they methodically swept the tunnel, ceiling to floor, left to right. “Look for scrape marks, footprints, scuffs. Anything to signal someone recently came through here.”
“There’s a lot of loose dust that wasn’t here before the blast,” Mason said. “And the wind is drafting this way.”
It was. Which meant any evidence likely would be beneath the dust. She kept moving. “For someone out of your element, you’re astute on what to observe.”
“It’s common sense.”
“Not exactly,” she countered. “But
you do have an advantage. Your work requires you to look for anomalies. Your mind works that way. It has since we were kids.”
“True.” He accepted her opinion graciously. “So, when are you going to tell me you’re not a reporter?” He stepped to her side, and his flashlight stilled. “You’re an anomaly, too.”
“Remember our marriage or death discussion?”
“I haven’t forgotten, and I’m not going there. But I am wondering at what point you’ll trust me enough to tell me the truth.”
“I do trust you,” she said, taking a second look at a smooth patch on the floor. It was nothing. “And I really am a reporter.”
He grunted, exaggerated it to make sure she hadn’t missed it. “Right.”
“It’s true. I am a reporter.” She lifted a hand. “How can you doubt it? You knew I’d been nominated for Loeb Award.”
“True.” He frowned and paused a minute. “Okay, then. When are you going to tell me your primary job, because it sure isn’t reporting or investigative journalism, which is what I thought it was until today?”
That comment earned him a sigh. For an astute man, a brilliant one in multiple areas, he wasn’t faring well on a simple-logic level. That wasn’t uncommon, unfortunately. Give a genius a complex pretzel and he or she would untwist it. But a simple one, and they got bogged down in unessential minutia. “You need to think, Mason. What did you request?”
“A security consultant.”
“Well…?”
“So, you really are a security consultant?” Mason seemed a little surprised. “I mean, you do act like one, and you have the skills and knowledge but… you’re Emma.”
“What does that mean?”
“I guess, I’m surprised. That’s all. Are you a security consultant? Seriously?”
“We’ll see,” she said.
His jaw snapped shut. “Diversionary tactics again?”
“Not really.” She stopped sweeping the light and looked right at him. “If I fail here, no. I am not,” she said. “If I succeed, then maybe. Either way, it’s not something I’m at liberty to discuss.” She dipped her chin. “You’re treading awfully close to the ‘who do you work for’ question, and you know what that means.”