“Oh my God—”
“—and he’s waiting for you to come back to the hotel room. He’s thinking he’s going to make it look like a murder-suicide as soon as his associate gets there.”
Sydney’s gaze shot to the hotel, the window on the third floor. Griffin was alive.
And she’d left him there alone.
“I’ve got to go get him.”
“Slow down there, Pollyanna. There’s a team en route.”
“An ATLAS team? And if they arrest Griffin on that trumped-up warrant?”
“Better than Griffin dying. You know if there was any other way, Tex would have found it.”
A small price to pay if they got him out alive, and she looked up at the curtained window, tried to imagine what might happen if she waited for a team to arrive. Miles Cavanaugh, who it seemed had been involved in this mess from the beginning, was dead because someone else wanted him out of the way. And now she was supposed to sit back while some unknown entity brought Griffin in and booked him on charges that probably originated with whatever backroom deal Cavanaugh had been running with the Network? Not a chance. And what if this associate of Bose’s got there first? “An hour is a long time,” she told Carillo. “What if it’s too late?”
“Pearson will have my ass, and I swear I’ll kick yours if you go in there and try to play hero.”
“I promise I won’t go in and play hero,” she said, staring up at the hotel room. In fact, the idea forming in her head was anything but heroic.
Chapter 50
December 12
Brazil
The jungle never slept. The sound of toads and birds continued on into the night, and Marc was grateful, since it helped mask some of their movement. Marc and Lisette waited for the sentry to pass, then crawled through the low-lying shrubs to the fence. Lifting the bottom, Marc allowed Lisette to slither through, before he followed. On the other side, they hid for a few minutes in the shadows, their black clothing helping to conceal them. As Marc had suspected, there were no outdoor lights on the compound grounds, lights which could be seen by anyone flying overhead should they be looking. And in South America, someone was always looking for jungle compounds in the hunt for drug smugglers.
Marc watched the area for a few minutes, checking his watch. By his estimation, the next sentry was due in about ten minutes. Most of the activity, from what he’d seen earlier, and even now at night, seemed to be occurring at the other end of the building. People came and went through what Marc presumed were the main doors. A guard stood just outside, which meant they’d need to find another way in. There were other doors closer to them, with the nearby windows dark, leading Marc to believe that the rooms were unoccupied. “I might have a lock pick in my wallet,” he told Lisette. “Or we could see about climbing up onto the balcony and finding something up there.”
“Maybe we should first check the door to see if it’s unlocked.”
“Why would they keep it unlocked?”
“Because the place is surrounded by miles of swamp, anacondas as large as a house, and guards with big guns. If they aren’t worried about tree roots displacing fences so that someone could crawl beneath, they must feel secure that any threat will come from a different direction.”
She had a point, and, when he was certain that the guard near the front wasn’t looking their way, he sidled against the building, tried the knob. It turned and he opened the door so that it was slightly ajar. All inside was dark and he heard nothing to indicate anyone was within. He waved her over. Together, they stood pressed against the building, Marc watching the guard up front, before opening the door. They slipped inside, and she whispered, “What was it you wanted to mention?”
“I hate it when you’re right.”
“You must hate it an awful lot. Now let’s find a phone to call home.”
He flicked on the lighter he’d taken from the boat driver, discovering that the door was merely a hallway that led to another door, this one locked. “Ha!” he said. “You’re only half right.”
“Are we keeping score now?” she said, her gun out, trained on the door they’d just entered.
He moved down the short hall, holding up the lighter looking for any sign of an alarm system. Seeing none, he used his knife, sliding the blade into the jamb, circumventing the basic lock. He pocketed the lighter, kept his knife in his right hand, his gun in his left. The knife would be their first choice, the gun their last resort. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
Another hall, this one appearing to lead to the main area of the complex. This end was dark, apparently not occupied at night. There were several doors on either side, each one unlocked. They were empty, which confirmed that this wing wasn’t being used. And then they came to a door that not only was locked, but also was emblazoned with a biohazard sign on it.
“We have to go in,” Lisette whispered.
“Our priority is the phone.”
“We have a boat filled with dead people and a mysterious virus that they alluded to being kept here when we were kidnapped. I need to see in there.”
“Your hazmat suit is buried in the swamp.”
“We open the door and I make an assessment.”
“An assessment of what? That they’re practicing safe virus containment? When do you determine that? When you figure out what the incubation period is, as you start bleeding from every orifice?”
Lisette took a deep breath, her tone filled with exasperation. “Why must you be so dramatic? Just open the damned door and let me take a look. I don’t need to go in. If there are viruses floating around, we are dead anyway. There is no seal on the bottom of this door.”
“Fine.” He holstered his gun, then used his knife to bypass the lock. Unfortunately the lock was of a better quality, no doubt because of the biohazard danger, and he was forced to dig out his pick from his wallet. It took longer than he liked, Lisette holding the lighter for him as he slid the instrument into the locking mechanism, teasing each of the pins into place. He opened it, and Lisette, with the lighter, stood on the threshold looking in, while he kept watch. As he was thinking that she was taking her damned time, he heard the shuffling of feet, a loud laugh, then the sound of keys unlocking the very door they’d used to enter the hallway. Someone was coming. Two someones, by the sound of the voices. The sentries were about to walk in on them.
Marc pushed Lisette into the biohazard room, stepped in after her, and shut the door as quickly and quietly as possible.
“Shh,” he said into her ear. She let the lighter extinguish, and the two of them stood there in the dark, while the sound of booted feet traipsed up the hallway past them. He relaxed slightly as the two men continued their conversation in a language he couldn’t understand, Portuguese, he thought, their laughter telling him that they were relaxed and going about their routine, never realizing there were any intruders. Still, he and Lisette didn’t move for a minute, maybe more, on the off chance that any other guards might pass by in the opposite direction.
When they heard no more sounds, she flicked on the lighter again, saying, “We are well and truly in the frying pan, we might as well make use of our time here.”
He looked around, seeing an office that was plainly furnished. The drop ceiling was paneled with large acoustic tiles, and a few overhead fluorescent lamps, which they didn’t dare turn on. Against one wall he saw two desks, industrial gray, that looked as though they’d been bought in a surplus warehouse, their surfaces covered with papers. To the right he saw a large window set next to another door, and on the other side, a working lab filled with beakers and vials and petri dishes, as well as some stainless steel equipment including what he thought might be a cryogenic freezer.
He knew next to nothing about chemistry or anything related. That was Lisette’s expertise, and he trusted that she knew what or where she could search. That at least gave him some reli
ef that they weren’t going to die from walking in. Lisette saw a box of latex gloves on one of the desks, pulled two out, hitting a container of empty vials next to it. She moved the vials away from the edge of the desk, put on the gloves, then started going through the papers, handing the lighter to Marc, while she searched.
“What would you like me to do?” he asked.
“Stand guard. This search could take a while.”
He liked that idea. Less chance to pick up any stray diseases that might crawl beneath that lab door, which, he noted, also wasn’t sealed. Lisette shuffled through files in the desk drawer, while he stood sentry. When he looked over at her, she was reading something.
“This is Dr. Fedorov’s paperwork,” Lisette said, flipping through the documents. “This is why they stole the AUV. Why the kids were murdered on that boat. They weren’t pirates searching for gold. They weren’t even looking in the same area. They just didn’t want any witnesses to the actual location, which was much farther out, much deeper.”
“Witnesses to what?”
“To them lowering that AUV down to the world’s deepest hydrothermal vent . . .” She was scanning each document, excited, talking more to herself than him. “This makes perfect sense. If one wanted to search for new, as of yet undiscovered viruses, perhaps to genetically alter current viruses, one would want to look where life first formed.”
“The primordial soup theory?”
“Not quite. The new theory is that life began at hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor. To put it simply, a chemical reaction which produces a form of energy that can be harnessed by other processes,” she said, even though he had no idea what she was talking about. “They’re taking viruses emerging from the mouth of the vent where temperatures exceed six hundred degrees Fahrenheit . . .”
“With an AUV? How does it survive temps that high?”
“They don’t need to get that close. They follow the vent stream up. The very fact the viruses can exist in such extreme temperature changes as it leaves the vent, then cools . . .” She folded the set of documents, handed them to him, then started digging through the desk again, this time reaching beneath the desktop, then inside the drawers, looking, undoubtedly, for something that might be hidden. “I think,” she said, getting down on her knees to peer into the drawers, “Fedorov was combining these with known weapons viruses to withstand heat, to better control them.”
And that he did understand. A virus that could survive extreme heat sources was far more effective as a bioweapon than any known virus that had been used for weaponization thus far. “Combining? How?”
“Fedorov’s specialty was chimera viruses,” she said, pushing aside several file folders, then shoving her hand beneath them. She found something and pulled it out. A small black book.
Mark peered over her shoulder as she opened it and saw its pages were filled with handwriting in both blue and black ink. He recognized a few Russian words, but wasn’t as fluent as Lisette. “Fedorov’s journal?”
“I believe so . . .” She turned the page. “I’m hoping to find his own notes on chimera viruses, something he may not have documented specifically in his research papers. I suspect it’s what killed the men on the Zenobia. Their outward symptoms appeared to be blackpox.”
“Like smallpox?”
“Only worse. Deadlier. A recombinant virus made from smallpox spliced with Ebola. Something the Vector scientists in Russia cooked up a couple decades ago.”
“I thought they killed that program? Too dangerous?”
“It is, which is why I’m trying to find more on what happened. No one, even Fedorov, would want to unleash something that deadly and uncontrollable onto the world. Not unless you had some safeguards built in, which, now that I think about it, our captors alluded to . . .” She paused to read further, turned several pages in rapid succession. “Apparently creating a deadlier strain wasn’t his intent. He hoped to harness the viruses found at the mouth of the vent where life began . . .” She ran her finger across one of the lines, narrowing her gaze, as though trying to translate the Russian. “Normally you’d make a DNA copy from the one, and graft it into the other. The RNA of the—”
“Remember who you’re talking to, here.”
“The virus from the vent is like a master key, with more than one place to insert genetic code, allowing him to manipulate the viruses in ways he couldn’t do if he was working with the originals, which would limit the amount of splicing. His goal was to create a virus that had its own shutoff switch, so that one could use it for a weapon, wait for the fallout, then move in safely without danger, like we did on the Zenobia. It was brilliant.”
“Was?”
“He decided to destroy it.”
That Marc didn’t expect.
She ran her gloved finger along the page, then looked up at him, before turning back to the book. “According to his notes, he was infected by his own virus . . . Dropped a beaker and cut his finger . . .” She paused, clearly absorbed in what she was reading. “Seventy-two hours until the onset of symptoms . . . He figured he had five days to destroy all of it before he . . . Oh my God . . . You don’t want to die this way.”
“I don’t want to die period. What about the virus? Did he destroy it?”
“All but three vials, which went missing right before his accident. Well, two, actually. One of those three was tested on the ship, which is part of what made him change his mind . . . The devastation . . .” Her voice faded as she apparently absorbed the enormity of what she was reading. “He said it wasn’t what he intended it for. He did not tell them he destroyed it. The pages run out. His notes, I mean. I assume because he died.”
“So how did he destroy it?”
She got up from the desk, walked over to the windows that gave them a view into the actual lab, then pointed to a massive work bench that had instruments mounted across the surface, as well as within a metal box. “He used that. A high-intensity, ultrashort pulse titanium-sapphire laser.”
He recognized that some of the instruments were used to direct laser beams. “Way too Star Trek for me,” he said, then stilled when he thought he heard a sound in the hall. He put his finger to his lips, handed her the papers she’d given him earlier, then stepped softly toward the door. Opening it slightly, he peeked out, saw nothing. “We should really get the hell out of here.”
She slipped Fedorov’s journal and the papers into the thigh pocket of her fatigues, gave one last look around, then stopped suddenly. “A telephone!”
He turned from the door, saw the phone on the wall. Something about its placement bothered him. A compound this far out in the jungle probably wasn’t going to have phone lines strung up somewhere. Anything beyond that would require a sat phone. He was an idiot to think they could march in here, pick up some extension on a desk, and call HQ. And the moment that thought crossed his mind, Lisette grabbed the receiver, put it to her ear, then slammed it home, recognition of what she’d done written on her face. “They answered the line,” she said.
“Time to leave.” Marc looked at the door to the hall. They were outmanned and outgunned, and he didn’t like the odds. The other door led straight to the lab, where countless vials and beakers reminded him of the men who had bled to death from some as of yet unknown hemorrhagic virus. He didn’t like those odds any better. He figured they might have a minute, maybe two. He pulled open the office door a slit, peered out, then quickly closed it. “We need to think of something and fast.”
Lisette checked the lab door, found it unlocked, then took a quick visual of the room. Marc glanced in, saw several UV light units mounted on the walls. Aside from the cryogenic freezer, and the workbench with the laser, there was a stainless steel worktable and on the wall above it, glass cabinets that held even more lab equipment. Lisette closed the door, saying, “You remember that operation we worked in Morocco?”
He looked up at the dr
op ceiling, the large acoustic tiles, then back at her. “The one where I broke my arm?”
“At least it was your left arm.”
Marc climbed up onto the desk, removed one of the tiles. “Couldn’t you think of an operation where I didn’t get hurt?”
No sooner had he gotten into position, the lab office door burst open, slammed into the wall, then bounced back into the side of the guard who entered first. He was quickly followed by three other men, all carrying M4s. They stopped, their guns swinging around as they checked the room. “There’s no one here,” the first guard said. Unlike the other guards Marc had overheard, this one spoke clear French, no Portuguese thrown in, making it easier for Marc to understand.
“Check the lab,” the second guard said.
The first guard walked over, glanced into the window. He did not open the door. “There’s no one there.”
“Someone picked up that phone.”
The first guard turned, looked at the phone, then noticed the desk, the papers that seemed askew. He looked up, saw one of the tiles displaced slightly, swung his gun upward. “There. In the ceiling.”
Marc watched the guard push the tile aside with his gun, then pop his head in after. Classic mistake. Perfect opportunity to take a head shot—had Marc actually been up there. The guard ducked, then jumped off the desk. “They must have escaped through the ceiling.”
“Where does it go to?”
“The entire complex. Entrance could be made into any room.”
“Entrance? Escape, you mean. We check them all.”
“What about the lab? What about the virus?”
The first guard looked over. “Who would be stupid enough to go in there? If they did, it will kill them. Alvaro, you stand guard here in case they return. We’ll check the other rooms.”
Alvaro, the shortest of the three men looked around. “I don’t like this place. Too dangerous.”
“Then stand outside the door, you coward,” he said, then walked out with the other guard.
The Dark Hour Page 25