Midnight Fever

by Lisa Marie Rice

  Panic hormones flooded his body. Worse, much worse than being caught in a firefight. In a firefight, he could focus like a laser beam, turn himself into a combat bot, an emotionless killer. This? This was pure pain, knives in his chest.

  Was he too late? Had the spray that had killed Hammer somehow gotten to her, too, in some kind of delayed reaction?

  “Kay?” He kept his voice low with effort as he spun completely around. It was a storage area, boxes neatly stacked along one wall. He gently kicked one box next to him. It shifted. Empty.

  “Kay?” A little louder. Where the fuck was she? Had she moved to another location? Had someone come in and she’d been forced to move? If so, she’d have turned her cell on. He pulled his phone from his pocket. He was sweating lightly.

  There was a dead guy outside. Had the people who’d killed him killed Kay, too? He couldn’t even stay in the same place as that thought, and moved quickly across the big space.

  He swallowed the huge lump in his throat. “Kay!”

  Something bumped into him, and his arms were open before his brain had a chance to recognize her. He held her close, grip tight and fierce.

  “Nick!” Kay’s face burrowed into his shoulder. That was okay. He didn’t want her to see his face right now. He hid his face in her hair and breathed in deeply. He smelled terror and Kay.

  He’d take care of the terror as long as he had Kay.

  “It’s okay.” He tightened his hold. It was. He had her in his arms and whatever it was that she was facing, she was facing it with him by her side. And ASI. “Everything will be okay.”

  She pulled back and he finally saw her face. She’d cried. She wasn’t crying now, but there were tear tracks on her beautiful face. Pale and frightened and distraught, and just seeing her made his heart turn over in his chest.

  He was still sort of mad at her for walking out on him and facing whatever it was she was facing on her own. But his relief overrode the anger.

  Kay held on to his arms. “Nick, he’s dead! That drone somehow killed him, I don’t know how.” She looked down at herself. The pants of her turquoise suit were dirty, like his were. They’d both kneeled next to the dead guy. He didn’t care. She was alive, and so was he, and they were going to stay that way. “I think they might come after me, too. They must have the area under surveillance. What do we do?”

  “We get to the garage as fast as we can. Our guys are waiting for us.”

  “Our guys?”

  “Metal and Jacko and Joe. And Felicity’s coordinating.” He smiled slightly to see some of the worry drain from her face. “We’re not alone, honey. We have a team at our back.”

  Kay let out a breath and a sob and her knees buckled slightly. He held her. He’d always hold her. “Thank God,” she whispered, her voice raw. “I left. I didn’t want you involved, and yet here you are. I was so afraid I’d drag you into this and bring you into danger and I was right. We’re still at risk, but—”

  “But with our guys on our side, we’ll come out alive. We have to hurry, though, sweetheart. There’s a plan but it’s tight.” He lifted his hands. “You okay?” Meaning—could she move? He’d felt her deep trembling, had felt her knees go. She was in shock. If she couldn’t stand, he’d carry her, but it would slow them down.

  She huffed out a breath, another, straightened. “Yeah. I’m okay. Good to go.” She forced herself to stop trembling, looked him straight in the eyes. “But I think I’m in deep trouble.”

  Kay was a scientist. She lived in a world of data and research. This was not her world at all—a man had been killed before her very eyes—but she was doing her best to be brave.

  Somewhere inside, he was still mad at her for leaving him to walk straight into danger. At some point in the future he was going to make sure that never happened again. At the same time, he was nearly weak in the knees from relief at finding her unharmed.

  He snapped himself out of this mess of emotions back to that cold place. Emotions wouldn’t help, cool mission planning would. There was still danger and he had the most important mission of his life ahead of him—getting Kay away even though enemies were probably still after her.

  A mission—he could do missions, even if Kay was involved. His whole life was a mission. He forced the protector inside him into a combat mindset—a tight, narrow focus on staying alive while doing whatever needed doing.

  “Put on that hat.”

  Her eyes widened. “What?”

  He gestured to a wide-brimmed straw hat she was holding between two fingers. She looked down at it as if seeing it for the first time. She shook herself, placed the hat on her head. “I completely forgot about it.”

  It was possible that hat had kept her from being photographed.

  “Let’s go.” He took off for the garage stairs, making sure she could keep up.

  “There’s a plan?” Kay was taking two steps to his one but she was with him.

  He mentally crossed his fingers. “Yeah, there’s a plan.” They reached the stairwell, the elevator right beside it. No way they’d take it, elevators could be death traps.

  He looked her in the eyes. “We’re going to disappear. And stay disappeared until we figure this thing out.”

  She met his eyes, hers that beautiful sky blue, slightly bloodshot, somber. “I’m sorry, Nick,” she whispered, voice raw. “So very sorry.”

  He shook his head sharply. Nothing to be sorry about. It was what it was. Warriors dealt in reality, not in what should be. They jogged down the stairs, Nick on full alert, until they came to the doors to level 1 of the parking area. He went first and—God yes. There they were.

  The cavalry. Or rather, Jacko, Metal and Joe, standing next to three identical black Suburban SUVs. Better than the cavalry. Better than a battalion.

  He could hear Kay let out a sigh of relief. Damn right.

  All three men straightened, Jacko holding out a key fob. He pressed it and one of the SUVs lit up. “That’s yours,” he said to Nick. Good old Jacko—all business. No hi how are you? Or tell me what trouble you’re in.

  Jacko didn’t really need a blow-by-blow explanation, though. If trouble came knocking, he answered the door. He was built for trouble.

  Kay stood on tiptoe to embrace Metal, then nodded to Jacko and Joe. She held out her hand with a flash drive on her open palm.

  “This is heavily encrypted,” she said to Metal. “Do you think Felicity can decrypt it?”

  “Sure.” Metal shrugged. If Kay had said, do you think Felicity can stop the world from spinning, he would have said the same thing. He believed fiercely in his fiancée’s powers.

  “I don’t know what’s on it,” Kay said, her lovely face frowning. She closed his hand around the flash drive, then opened her fist again. “But I do know that a man was just now killed right in front of me because of it. Because of what’s on it. So, Felicity will need protection until we—” Kay’s voice cracked and she looked around at them, meeting each man’s eyes. “We figure out what this is and how to deal with it. There’s danger not only to Felicity, but to all of us.” Her eyes welled. “I am so sorry—”

  “Wait.” Metal held up a huge hand, palm out. “Just stop right there, Kay. You don’t need to apologize. The fuckers who killed the guy should be the ones to apologize. No one is going to get to Felicity, guaranteed. And you have Nick by your side. You guys are going to a secure place and we’ll all work on this together, okay?”

  She swallowed. Her throat felt raw with unshed tears.

  “Okay?” Metal insisted.

  “Okay.” Her voice was a thread but she smiled. Tried to smile. Metal put the flash drive in a pocket inside his jacket.

  “SUVs have temporary plates on them,” Jacko said to Nick. Which was a polite way of saying they were fake plates. ASI had a vast collection of them. “That drone is still up there, we checked. They won’t know where Kay is. We’ll drive out at 15-minute intervals, you’ll be second. We’ll both drive a complicated route back to HQ and we’ll mak
e sure we’re not followed. You head on out to the Grange. We have secure comms.”

  He handed Nick an earpiece, an encrypted satphone and took out a tablet. He switched the tablet on and swiped until he found what he was looking for. He tilted the tablet so Nick and Kay could see it. For a second, Nick couldn’t figure out what he was looking at, then his mind made the necessary adjustments. Felicity had hacked into a satellite feed. He was looking at the rooftop of the building they were in, slightly out of focus, as if from a long-distance lens. “What—”

  “Our drone,” Joe answered. “From a Keyhole.”

  Nick bent over the tablet and watched for a minute. The drone above the building was slowly circling. “Shit,” he breathed.

  “Yeah,” Joe answered. Metal and Jacko nodded grimly. That drone was looking for Kay…and it had some kind of weapon that had already killed a man.

  “Luckily, you and Kay are about to disappear.” Joe held out a remote control. “The keys to the kingdom. Access codes are in the phone.” It was access to the Grange, a secure facility ASI was building on the foothills of Mt. Hood.

  “Guys. There’s a dead man outside,” Kay said quietly. “We can’t just leave him there.”

  “How did he die?” Metal asked.

  Her shoulders lifted on a sigh. She looked sad and troubled. “I—I don’t know. That drone came at us. It sprayed something. Mike pushed my head down, I didn’t see it very well. He wouldn’t let me look at it directly.”

  “That might have saved your life,” Nick said.

  “No. Whatever was in that spray affected only Mike. My life wasn’t in danger.” She sounded troubled.

  “Mike?” Metal asked.

  “Mike Hammer. You know him?” Metal and Joe had reacted to the name.

  “Yeah,” Metal said. “He worked on something with Jack’s wife, Summer.” Summer Redding had run a famous political blog, Area 8. Now she directed an environmental e-zine. “Good guy. He’s the stiff?”

  Kay nodded. “The drone came in close and sprayed him with something. An odorless liquid, some kind of solution. The spray caught me, too, but I suffered no effects. There was clearly some kind of agent in the liquid that compromised his breathing catastrophically, but not mine. I could actually hear his lungs filling up with fluid.” She turned to Metal. “Can you get word to the medical examiner to test for cytokine levels? And do you think it might be possible to get the results of the autopsy? I have a horrible feeling we’re looking at a powerful bio-weapon, maybe weaponized Spanish flu. Certainly, whatever killed Mike did it in a minute, a minute and a half. Ricin and anthrax take much longer, so this is something new. We’ll know once we unlock the files in that flash drive. I fear that’s why Mike was killed, because word leaked to the wrong people that he was working on an article on exactly this. But I still don’t understand why I didn’t die, too.”

  Nick’s heart took a wild leap in his chest as the image of a dead Kay, lying boneless on the filthy alley asphalt, blossomed in his head. He turned to his guys. “Can we read Bud Morrison into this? He’ll be involved in the investigation anyway. Once we call it in.”

  Captain Bud Morrison was his boss’s friend, and a man widely assumed to be in the running for next Chief of Police. Bud wouldn’t break the law for them but he might be persuaded to bend it a little if there were national security implications. And bio-weaponry definitely qualified as a national security issue.

  “Yeah.” Jacko checked his watch, spun his index finger in the air. “Ladies,” he looked at Kay, “and lady, time to go. Metal and I exit, heading west. Nick, you exit after 15 mikes and head north, Joe will head east. We’ve all got secure comms. Nick, you have a lot of tactical gear in your vehicle, including a DD. Fucker’s using a drone, we’ll fuck with him.” Jacko’s eyes slid to Kay. “Sorry.”

  Her mouth thinned. “Whoever the fucker is who killed Mike deserves to be fucked. I don’t know what a DD is, but if it works to bring down a drone, that’s great.”

  Nick held open the passenger door for her. “It’s sort of a ray gun, called a DroneDefender. Will bring a drone down within 400 yards.” And man, was he glad to have it in the back of the vehicle.

  Kay stood in the vee of the open passenger door and looked at Metal, Jacko, and Joe. “I don’t know how to thank you guys,” she said quietly.

  Metal shrugged. “Felicity would have my head—or worse, my balls—if I didn’t help you. And as far as these other guys,” he indicated Jacko and Joe with a long finger, “we’re a team. Where Nick goes, we go.”

  Joe handed out comms to Metal and Jacko. Nick put his earbud in, tapped it. “Felicity, you online?”

  “Yes. And I’ve got the overhead drone in sight. I’ll guide you. Give my love to Kay. We’ll be in touch once you guys are at the Grange.” Suddenly, Nick could hear a smile in her voice. “Let me know what Kay thinks of it. Watch your back, Nick. I’m holding you directly responsible for Kay’s safety.”

  “You got it,” Nick said, glancing at Kay. Scared, but standing straight, ready to face danger. He held her gaze as he added, “Nothing’s going to happen to Kay on my watch.”

  Metal got into his vehicle, Jacko behind the wheel. They were all good drivers, had all taken combat driving courses, but Jacko was in a class of his own. He would be the first out, Felicity guiding him. If there were problems, if they were ambushed, Jacko would take care of it. All their vehicles were armored and had run-flat tires.

  Jacko’s vehicle headed out, up the ramp and out of sight. Three minutes later, they heard Felicity’s voice over the comms. “Drone’s still there, guys. High enough to keep an eye on all exits. If they are looking for her, they’ll probably expect her to be on foot.”

  “Roger that,” Nick said, and Kay looked at him sharply. She didn’t have a comms unit. She wasn’t part of the tactical team, Nick and the crew was. Her part would come later, up at the Grange, trying to figure the clusterfuck out. Nick’s job was to get her there and keep her safe.

  “The drone still there?” she asked softly.

  Nick nodded. “Yeah. Buckle up.”

  They waited in silence until Nick heard Felicity’s voice in his ear. “Nick, go. I’ve sent to your GPS a route out to the Grange that crosses some camera dead zones. Joe will follow you out in fifteen. Let’s mess with the drone’s head. We’ll talk when you and Kay get to the Grange. I’ll see how fast I can decrypt that flash drive. Avengers, assemble!”

  Nick took the earbud out. If anyone needed to communicate, they could text him. He looked over at Kay, pale and scared but holding herself together. He leaned over to buckle her in, pressed a quick kiss to her mouth and said, “Let’s roll.”

  She nodded.

  He drove the SUV up the ramp and out into the bright sunshine. Somewhere above them, a drone was seeking out Kay. Good luck with that, Nick thought. All ASI vehicle windows were coated with a special resin that blocked anyone from seeing inside. What looked like normal windows were as impenetrable as walls.

  He stopped for a second at the top of the ramp. Jacko and Metal had gone left. He took a right at the street and headed out.

  Oliver Baker studied the tablet resting against the steering wheel of his SUV. The screen was split, the left-hand side showing the aerial view above a city block comprising a hotel, restaurant, a conference center and a department store. The screen on the right-hand side showed a loop of video of the takedown of Jeremy Robsen, aka Mike Hammer.

  He’d gotten word that Hammer was expecting intel from inside the CDC that could blow Baker’s cash cow apart. That was not going to happen. It was a well-oiled machine that had earned him upwards of fifty million dollars in one year, plus earned his inside guy five million. It was clean and perfect and Baker aimed on using the system for years to come.

  No skinny-ass web journalist was going to mess up his life. No way. Baker was going to defend his perfect murder delivery system with everything at his disposal.

  There were others who could commit murder on command,
but no one who could do so with such little risk, without using a team and without murder even being suspected. Not to mention the fact that the murderer could be miles away. It was perfect, and he wasn’t letting it go.

  It would take years for someone to put the clues together and by that time, even exhuming the bodies wouldn’t prove anything. The virus degraded within 24 hours. All anyone could ever have was a string of unconnected sudden deaths.

  Baker could continue for decades, and he had every intention of doing so.

  Mike Hammer had to go.

  He watched the loop again. The drone’s video camera was less than perfect, damn it. He was going to have one of his techs change the camera system. Though, luckily, the virus delivery system worked perfectly.

  The drone had hovered high in the air at the end of the alleyway. A camera drone had followed Hammer’s taxi from the airport to near Pioneer Square, where Hammer got off and walked for an hour and a half. Hammer clearly had some training, because he’d have shaken off any human tailing him. He went into buildings at the front, exited from the rear and backtracked several times. The drone had no problems, invisible above his head. It simply circled above the buildings until he exited, then continued following him.

  Finally, Hammer stopped in a back alley behind a big department store. The drone watched as he leaned over the lock of a door, picking it. He opened it slightly. That was supposed to be his exit route after meeting with the informant.

  He had a flight back to Washington DC at 7 p.m., which of course he would never make.

  Thank God Baker had gotten word and had been able to obtain Hammer’s toothbrush, and have his inside man prepare a small batch of edited and bio-weaponized H1N1 keyed to Hammer’s DNA. Splicing in Hammer’s DNA to the weaponized virus meant that the virus could only affect Hammer himself and no one else. Of course, with his DNA now part of the virus, it would be lethal to Hammer and any members of his family, but he wasn’t meeting with a brother or a sister. He was meeting with an informant.