Black Rose (The Project Book 9)

by Alex Lukeman

  "Neat," Nick said. "Go."

  They scrambled over the wall and ran to the back of the windowless wing. The entry door was made of metal. It had no window. It was marked with a large triangle and the universal bio-hazard sign with its three sharp-pointed open circles.

  "Must be the right place," Lamont said.

  Ronnie knelt before the lock with his tools. In a moment it was open. They stepped inside and closed the door.

  "What is this place?" Selena said. "This doesn't look like a lab."

  They were in a large room lit by fluorescent lights set in a row along the middle of the ceiling. There was a closed door at the far end. A stack of six refrigerated lockers took up part of one wall. The lockers hummed. The room smelled of disinfectant and conditioned air. It was cold.

  Next to the lockers was a gleaming steel gurney wheels. A large, gray furnace with a steel door took up one corner. A chimney rose from the top and disappeared through the ceiling.

  "Why do they need a big furnace like that in here?" Ronnie said.

  "Explains the chimney outside," Nick said. "I don't know why."

  In the center of the room was a glass cubicle. Inside the cubicle was a stainless metal table bolted to the floor. There was a drain underneath it and a hose hanging on a pivoting rack above. A rolling tray with shiny steel implements was placed neatly by the table.

  "I think I know what this room is," Selena said. "It's a morgue. They must dispose of dead test animals in here. Do autopsies."

  Nick walked to the lockers and opened a door.

  "Shit," he said.

  Ronnie walked over next to him. "Not just animals," he said.

  Human feet lay behind the door. It was hard to tell if they belonged to a man or a woman. The feet were black and crusted, swollen and distorted. Several toes were missing.

  "Close the damn door," Nick said.

  "They're using humans as test subjects." Selena's face was white under the ski mask. "It explains the furnace. They must burn the bodies when they're done."

  "Are we exposed because we opened that locker?" Lamont asked.

  "I don't know," Nick said. "I don't think so. If the bodies were still contagious there'd be more safety protocols in place. It looks like they're only concerned when they open them up. In that cubicle." He pointed at the glass room.

  "Let's find those samples and get out of here," Ronnie said. "This place gives me the creeps."

  The door at the end of the room was unlocked. They stepped out of the morgue into a dimly lit hallway.

  "I don't see any cameras," Nick said.

  Ronnie took out a spray can from his bag and sent a long cloud of white dust into the hall. Halfway down the hall, a green line appeared at ankle height.

  "Laser trip wire," he said.

  Six doors lined this end of the hall, three on each side. A window was set in each door. They looked in the first room. It looked like a cubicle from an ICU in a modern hospital. The bed was surrounded by a clear plastic enclosure. The room was empty.

  "That looks like an isolation unit," Selena said.

  "These rooms must be where they keep their test subjects before they die," Nick said. His mouth was set in a tight line. They moved forward. Ronnie sprayed again and they stepped over the laser alarm.

  They came to a junction. The hall formed the top part of a T. Straight ahead led toward the front of the building. To the left was a short hall and another door marked with the triangle and pronged circles.

  "Bingo," Nick said. "We go in, verify it's the right place and ID the samples."

  "How do we do that?" Selena asked.

  "There has to be something. The Koreans called it E495. Whatever they call it here, it has to be labeled."

  Ronnie sprayed again. "Another one." He pointed at a laser line across the hall. "They should have stuck with cameras. I still don't see any."

  They stepped over the beam and entered the lab.

  *****

  The guard station for the laboratory building was located on the second floor, out of sight of prying eyes. There had never been a need for more than one man at night. It wasn't necessary. If there was a breach, a response in force was not far away.

  Hans Kepler was studying a photograph in a Swedish porn magazine and failed to notice when the cameras went dark at the far end of the building. It wasn't until the door to the disposal wing opened and a soft alarm signaled intruders that he realized there was a problem. The magazine fell to the floor, forgotten. Hans studied the images from the hidden cameras on his screen.

  Four pros. Armed.

  He picked up his phone and dialed the emergency number.

  "We have a breach," he said.

  "How many?" The voice at the other end was impersonal.

  "Four. They look military, black gear, machine pistols. They're carrying something in a pack. Right now they're in the disposal wing. They opened a locker."

  "All right. We'll be there in ten. Wait for us."

  "Don't worry. I'm not getting paid to be a hero."

  "Ten minutes," the voice said, and disconnected.

  CHAPTER 19

  The door with the bio-hazard sign opened onto a long room and a state of the art laboratory. Like the morgue, there were no windows. Florescent lights illuminated the room in a cold, harsh glow. Nick recognized centrifuges and something he was pretty sure was an electron microscope. There were other instruments whose purpose was a mystery to him. Three stainless steel refrigerators stood against one wall. Next to them was a bulky gray filing cabinet. At the back of the lab was a glass cabinet, a sealed airlock and a large viewing window.

  "Ronnie, you and Lamont start setting charges," Nick said. He took bricks of C-4 and a handful of detonators from his pack and handed them out. "Selena, you keep an eye on the door. I'm going to see what's in that filing cabinet."

  "What about the samples? You want to blow the place up if we don't find them?" Selena said.

  "Damn right I do. This has to be the right place. You saw that body back there."

  Selena went to the door and stood near it, her MP-5 held close and ready. Nick walked to the filing cabinet. He tried a drawer. It was locked.

  "Hey Ronnie. Let Lamont do the rest of that. I need you to open this lock."

  Ronnie came over and took out his picks. It took less than a minute. Nick opened the top drawer.

  "File folders," he said.

  "What did you expect? It's a filing cabinet."

  "They're labeled in German."

  He pulled one out. It was labeled Testpersonen.

  "You take the door," Nick said. "I need Selena to translate."

  When Selena came over she looked at the folder Nick held in his hand.

  "It says Test Subjects."

  "How about this one?"

  "Schwarze Rose. It means black rose."

  She took it from him and looked at the first page.

  "What does it say?"

  "Black rose is a codename. These are notes about the plague."

  "All right. We'll take these with us and read them later. See if there are any others you think we ought to grab. We can't take them all."

  Nick left her looking through the files and went to the glass window at the back of the room. On the other side of the window was a bio containment unit. An air hose hung in yellow spirals over a work table from a rack on the ceiling. There was a door to the side that Nick assumed led into a decontamination area. The work table was clear, empty.

  He walked over to the glass cabinet. The glass was thick and the cabinet door was secured with an electronic lock and keypad. Inside was a neat row of glass vials. He couldn't read the labels, but he could see that a second door on the other side of the cabinet opened into the containment room.

  He took out another pack of C-4 and molded it against the glass.

  "All done," Lamont said. "Ready to rock and roll."

  Nick took out the radio controller for the detonators. "I'm giving it ten minutes. Mark."

&
nbsp; He set the unit down by the containment room. Red numerals on the display began counting down the time.

  "Let's get out of here."

  He reached up to tug on his scarred left ear. It was beginning to itch. The itching got worse.

  Nick's ear was a psychic warning system, a genetic hand me down from his Irish Ancestors. His grandmother had what the old Irish called "the sight." She'd been able to know about things that hadn't happened, bad things, death, accidents, disaster. It had made her unpopular in her small village.

  Whatever it was or wherever it had come from, Nick had learned to trust it.

  Ronnie saw him pull on his ear. They all knew what it meant.

  "Oh, oh," he said.

  "Turn off the lights," Nick said.

  Selena swept her hand across a bank of switches on the wall next to the door. The room went dark. The only light was the red glow of the timer at the far end, counting down the minutes and seconds until this room would cease to exist.

  Nick cracked the door open. The hall outside was empty. His ear began burning.

  "Trouble coming," he said. He kept his voice low. "Time to boogie."

  They moved to the T where the hall met the longer corridor that led back to the morgue and forward to the front of the building. Nick heard a soft sound toward the front, the barest whisper of something. He signaled with his hand. That way. Someone coming.

  He signaled again. Ronnie, with me. Selena, Lamont, cover the way we came in. On three.

  Nick held up his hand and counted off with his fingers. One. Two. Three.

  He looked around the corner. Eight or nine men in dark blue uniforms, with MP-5s, coming from the front.

  The leader saw Nick and shouted. His gun came up. Nick fired first. The leader went down and Nick ducked back as the hall filled with the sharp sounds of the guns and the whisper of bullets passing.

  Lamont crouched low and fired around the corner. Selena reached her gun around the wall and fired blindly.

  Behind them, the counter ticked down toward the explosion.

  Ronnie reached into his bag and pulled out a flash bang.

  "This will help them think. Cover up," he said.

  He pulled the pin and tossed the grenade into the hall. It went off with a flat, hard sound. The shock wave beat against them in the narrow confines of the hall.

  After-images of light danced in front of Nick's eyes. They moved into the main corridor. Blue-clad attackers writhed on the floor, hands clapped over their ears. Two still stood, disoriented. They raised their weapons. Nick and Selena shot them.

  "Toward the back," Nick said.

  They ran down the hall and into the morgue. Nick pulled open the outer door and was met with a blast of cold air and snow. The weather had turned into a full blown winter storm. Nick looked at his watch.

  "Thirty seconds," he said.

  They ran through the door, silhouetted by the lights in the room behind. Sudden spurts of flame winked at them from the dark. A heavy blow knocked Nick down into a drift. The others dove for the ground. Ronnie fired at the muzzle blast of the unseen shooter. A cry of pain cut through the muffled sound of the storm and the flashes stopped.

  The charges went off.

  The night erupted with flame and noise and light that turned the falling snow bright yellow and orange. The roof lifted off the building. The tall chimney toppled and crashed to the ground near where Selena and Lamont lay flat in the snow. Debris fell back to earth, chunks of masonry, bits of metal and glass, unidentifiable pieces. A mangled centrifuge landed next to Nick and lay steaming in the snow.

  The light and noise faded. No one was shooting at them. A burning gas line sent a twenty foot column of bluish flame straight into the air from the ruined building behind them.

  Nick stood up, holding his side. His vest had taken the round. But it hurt.

  "Come on," he said.

  "You're all right?" Selena asked.

  "Yeah. Let's get out of here."

  They made it back to the car without trouble. Selena drove. Nick sat next to her. They looked at the burning building as they passed it.

  "They won't be using that for a while," Nick said.

  CHAPTER 20

  "What? Destroyed?"

  Krivi had been called out of a sound sleep to answer the phone. He held it close to his ear and pulled his silk bathrobe around him as he listened to the voice on the other end of the line. The green numerals on the clock by his bedside read 3:21. The voice repeated what it had said. Krivi rubbed his chest and took a deep breath.

  "All right. We'll put it out that it was a terrorist attack. That always satisfies everyone's need to know who was behind something. There must be plenty of evidence to support the idea. Look for anything that might tell us who did it. Anything at all."

  More noise on the telephone.

  "No. Stall the police. Access has to be controlled. Get our people there now. I'll talk to the commissioner and get his cooperation. Call me if there are problems."

  He hung up and thought for a moment. It was a secured line, no one would have intercepted the conversation. He picked up the phone and dialed a number known only to six others.

  "Yes." Gutenberg's voice was alert, though Krivi knew he'd been asleep. A call on this line at night meant trouble.

  "We have a problem."

  "Go on."

  "Someone raided the lab where we had the Korean samples. It was a professional operation. They eliminated my security team and blew up the building."

  "A military op?"

  "Possibly. My team was the best. The Russians, perhaps."

  "I would have been warned. It couldn't have been them," Gutenberg said.

  "Then we'd better find out who it was."

  "What about the vaccine? The test?"

  "I'm going to talk with Schmidt after we're done here," Krivi said. "He has backups of his research and more samples of the bacteria stored in another location. This is a setback, nothing more. It will delay implementation, but in the end it won't make any difference."

  "What about the police?"

  "They won't be a problem."

  "Let me know if you find anything to tell us who did it."

  "Of course."

  After a few more words, Krivi broke the connection. He leaned back in his chair and knew he'd never get back to sleep. He was offended that someone would dare to attack him. Eventually he'd discover who had done it and when he found out who they were, they were going to regret the day they were born.

  CHAPTER 21

  The snow was letting up by the time they got back to the safe house.

  "Man, I'm beat," Lamont said. He sat down on a couch.

  "You're getting old, Shadow," Ronnie said.

  "I wouldn't talk about old if I were you," Lamont said. "You look a little worn out yourself."

  Ronnie's face showed the strain of the raid. It hadn't been that long since he'd been lying in a hospital, near death.

  "How you feeling, Ronnie?" Nick said.

  "I'm fine."

  "Get some sleep. Unless the snow closes the airport, we're out of here in the morning."

  In their room, Selena helped Nick take off his vest.

  "Ow," he said.

  He unbuttoned his shirt. Selena helped him take it off, then worked his tee shirt up over his head. His side was a massive blotch of bruised color.

  "Rainbow man," Selena said. "Very impressive. Any ribs broken?"

  "I don't think so, but it feels like I got hit by a truck. Everything's stiffening up."

  "It will feel better in the morning," she said.

  "No it won't, but thanks for the thought."

  "You could have been killed."

  "That's what the vests are for. Good thing it was only one round, though."

  "Do you think we stopped them tonight?"

  "I don't know," Nick said. "We sure as hell slowed them down."

  "People like them shouldn't be allowed to exist," she said. Her voice was touched with
anger.

  "There's always someone like them."

  "That's the problem, isn't it? There's always someone who wants to run the world their way and who'll do anything to get what they want."

  "At least this time we know who they are and where they live. We didn't stop AEON before, but we didn't know as much. Maybe this time around we can finish it."

  "Adam and his group tried to stop them for centuries," Selena said. "They couldn't do it."

  "They didn't have us to help them out," Nick said.

  Selena laughed.

  "Ah, hell, I'm tired," Nick said. "All I want is to get under that nice warm quilt on the bed over there. With you."

  "That's all?"

  "Well, maybe not."

  He leaned over and kissed her. They held it for a long minute. She reached up and pulled him closer.

  "Ow," he said again.

  "You sure about the bed? I thought you said you were tired. And you're hurting."

  "What's a little pain between friends? And I'm not that tired."

  Later, after he was asleep, she stared at the ceiling for a long time. Next to her, his body radiated heat like a furnace. She thought about what he'd said about Adam, about his group not having the team to help in the past.

  He was serious, she thought. People have been trying to bring down AEON for a thousand years and he thinks that we're the ones to do it. He meant it, it's how he thinks of himself, of the team. He means to take them down.

  Outside the window of the bedroom, the wind was dying out. They'd be able to leave tomorrow and it couldn't be soon enough for her. She'd always loved the Alps, but after tonight she didn't think Switzerland would ever feel the same.

  How did I get here?