His mind wandered as he imagined the small painting left in Jordan’s Audi. He tried to picture the golden-furred spaniel again. He thought it might have looked worried, maybe scared.
Chris racked his brain, trying to tie the picture to a specific memory or event that might have passed between him and Veronica. If the spaniel represented her, then the inspiration for the artwork would’ve been something that frightened her. A tingling sensation crept down his spine as the implications of her work elucidated themselves to him. He had been blinded by the idea she’d wanted to rejuvenate their relationship and make physical the wisps and shadows of what they’d once shared. The painting seemed like the keystone to reconstruct what once felt like an indestructible bridge connecting them, the relationship he had ruined.
But now, the only event he could recall in which she would have been as frightened as the spaniel appeared would have been the same scene inspiring the nightmares she often called to share. He struggled to understand how the two ships fit into the memory of her torture. Despite the summer heat, he shivered.
The pirate with the telescope stuck out in his mind, too. The buccaneer practically glowed on the canvas, dripping in an ethereal green haze. Veronica must have wanted his eyes to catch that detail. It must have been important to the story. But it confused him. It didn’t mesh with what he knew about her torture, either.
Maybe he was trying to fit a puzzle piece into a spot it didn’t belong.
He dabbed at the sweat on his forehead. Despite his worry for Veronica’s well-being, there were more pressing concerns. He needed to focus on solving the cancer issue with the enhancers and to avoid being caught by both the police and other criminals as he did so.
The sun beat down on him as he leaned against the chain-link fence. He eyed a spindly tree near a bus stop half a block away. The meager shade it provided over a dented metal bench drew him over. He slumped onto it, his eyes glued to the road. Several cars passed, most pocked with rust.
Jordan should have been here by now. Unless something had happened. Chris called him.
A black sedan slowed in front of the old Equest Advantage building. His heart thumped against his ribcage, and adrenaline surged through him, screaming at him to run. He resisted the urge and tried to make himself appear smaller, more inconspicuous, as he watched the vehicle from the corner of his eye.
“Chris? That you?” Jordan’s voice flowed out of the comm card.
He spoke in a low voice. “Yeah, it’s me.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m sitting at the bus stop down from Equest Advantage. Is that you in the car?”
“No. I’m two minutes away.”
“Damn it.” Chris glanced at the vehicle. A hulking man stepped out. “I think I’ve got trouble.”
“Can you hide? I’ll be there soon.”
He opened his mouth to speak as the oaf scanned the surrounding area. His eyes caught Chris. “He saw me.”
“Send me your card’s contact number,” Jordan said. “And give me approval to track your location.”
“Okay.” Chris stood. The man hadn’t come running after him yet. Maybe the guy didn’t recognize him. He meandered down the sidewalk as if he weren’t alarmed and hoped the man wouldn’t give chase. His pulse pounded in his ears as his stomach tied itself in knots. He pulled the card away from his ear and gestured over the holodisplay to connect it with Jordan’s. “You’ve got access now.”
“Hey! Stop!” a growling voice bellowed.
“Got to go.” Chris ended the call and ran. His feet slammed against the pavement. Glancing back, he saw the man break into a sprint.
It hit him. The painting. As soon as he’d left Veronica’s side, these men had followed him. The ship, the telescope. They—undoubtedly some criminal organization with a vested interest in the black-market trade of biotechnological wares—were spying on him; they were after him. They had used Veronica to find him or to track him. Damn it.
The squeal of the car’s tires accompanied the whir of its motor. He couldn’t outrun the vehicle, and there was nowhere to hide on these barren streets. He ran beside another warehouse complex and jumped onto the fence surrounding it. He scrambled up the side. His shirt caught on the barbed wire at the top, and it tore at his skin. He leapt down, the barbs ripping and cutting him. When he hit the ground, he tucked and rolled on the grass. The adrenaline pumping through him assuaged the pain as he ran.
A car door slammed, and he stole a quick glance back. The man stood on the sidewalk but made no move to scale the fence. Instead, he leveled a handgun at Chris.
Dread hit him like a runaway caravan of autodrive semi-trucks with a software malfunction. He froze for a moment as he recognized the brawny gunman. It was one of the men that had shot at him after the car accident. The man had escaped his confrontation with the Baltimore PD units. A brief vision of what must have become of the police in the gunfight flashed through his mind. They might’ve been left sprawled on the asphalt as their blood pooled out around them, their lives hanging by tenuous threads. And now his life might soon be over.
Chris dodged to the right as the man pulled the trigger. The resulting shot made no sound. A window near him spider webbed and cracked. The enhancer apparently had enough wit to silence the gun after his previous encounter. He ran along the building and picked up his pace.
He just needed to reach the corner. Then he’d be out of sight. The ping of metal against metal rattled him as the man fired off three more shots.
Something punched into his leg, and he crumpled. His body rolled forward, carried by momentum. He tried to stand but couldn’t support his own weight. Something slammed into his chest, and the impact sent him backward into the wall.
He slid down, grabbing at his ribs as his vision swam. He expected to feel blood pooling out into his fingers. Instead, he opened his palm and blinked. Just sweat and dirt. He looked down. A thick metal dart protruded from his chest. Another stuck out of his thigh. He pulled them out and grabbed at the aluminum siding of the warehouse to pull himself up.
His arms tingled and then went numb. His fingers slipped, and he fell forward, crashing down into the grass again. His eyelids grew heavy. His hunter, the pirate, climbed over the fence. The barbed wire tore into the man’s flesh, but he seemed not to notice. Rivulets of blood trickled across his skin as he barreled toward Chris.
His heart slowed, though he willed himself to stand. Both legs splayed behind him, unmoving as if the limbs belonged to someone else. His body wouldn’t listen to his mind’s commands.
The man running toward him blurred together with the grass in one kaleidoscopic image. Then everything went black.
Chapter 24
With Chris’s last words echoing in his mind, Jordan heaved Hugh’s unconscious body into the passenger seat. He took the lab tech’s spot and turned off the car’s autodrive. Each passing second meant more distance between himself and Chris.
He pressed hard on the gas pedal and didn’t let up around a turn. Hugh flopped against him as Jordan leaned into the curve. Rubber screamed against asphalt.
A red dot on the car’s projection display showed Chris’s location. The dot started speeding away from the old Equest facilities.
“Come on, baby. Let’s go.” He swerved around a slower car just taking off as a light turned from red to green. The flash of a camera reflected in the car’s rearview display. Hugh would be getting a speeding ticket sent straight to his comm card.
Already, Jordan’s card had filled up with speeding notifications from Chris’s joyride in his Audi. Not to mention, a recent notification indicated police had found and identified his totaled vehicle at the scene of a shootout on the Eighty-Three expressway.
Each notification added to the burgeoning worry the police would come pounding down his door and accuse him of being an accomplice to Chris’s involvement in this chaotic event. The red dot on the display stopped. Jordan held his breath as he glanced between it and the street ahead.
Row houses crammed together with small green yards gave way to the chain-link fences and sweeping brick walls of the industrial district. The familiar low-slung gray building that had once housed Equest Advantage flew by as he closed in on Chris’s location.
Jordan wondered why they had stopped. Had they already tired of Chris, gotten whatever they wanted from him and discarded his useless body? His pulse quickened, and his fingers clenched tighter around the steering wheel.
His comm card buzzed as the red letters projected above the device reported an incoming call from Baltimore PD. Right on cue. He didn’t need their interference now, their questions about his wrecked Audi, or the arrest he might be facing for the samples stolen from the hospital. He needed to find Chris.
Passing by the dilapidated houses, he was almost on top of the red dot now. He took a service road leading to a strip mall. Half of the storefronts lay vacant and dark. Others, lit up with neon signs, advertised seedy massage parlors offering more than a backrub or liquor stores with self-serve lottery ticket vending units. All were protected by barred windows.
Once in the virtually empty parking lot, Jordan gestured over the holomap to zoom in on Chris’s position. The dot indicated a location beyond the storefronts. He swung the car around to the delivery access road behind the strip mall and raced toward the spot. Ahead of him, two smaller sedans sat next to a larger semi-truck with an attached trailer.
Jordan hopped out of the car, the stunner in hand. Neither Chris nor his abductors appeared anywhere between the vehicles resting on the hot asphalt. He sprinted toward the two sedans. Sweat dripped down his back. He worried he was too late.
At the first car, he cupped his hands to shade his eyes as he peered into the windows. Empty. He moved to the second. No one inside that one, either.
He leapt up to the side of the semi’s cab. Again, he found no one. His heart pounded against his rib cage. He ran to the back of the truck’s trailer.
He yanked on the release lever, but the retractable door wouldn’t budge. Locked.
Jordan cursed and paced around. After slipping the stunner into his waistband, he hopped up on the diamond-tread stepping plate and kicked the trailer’s door. Throwing his body weight into it, he clutched the door handle and tried to pull it up. The door groaned but did not give.
“Hey, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” A man, lanky except for a prominent belly, sidled up to the trailer. “You need to move on or I’m calling the cops.” He drew out a comm card.
Jordan held up his hands. “This your truck?”
The pot-bellied man nodded. “Sure is.” He began dialing. “I’m calling.”
Jordan hopped off. “What’s in the trailer?”
“Nothing. Just finished my last delivery this morning.”
The red glare of Chris’s reported location burned bright in Jordan’s mind. His brow furrowed in skepticism as he stared the man down. The truck driver’s forehead glistened in sweat, and his eyes shifted away.
“What are you doing around here?” Jordan reached behind his back. His hand hovered over the stunner’s pistol grip. Despite his insistence, the man seemed reluctant to call the cops. Maybe it was an idle threat because he had something to hide.
The truck operator’s face turned red momentarily. “What business is that of yours?”
“Visiting one of those massage parlors, huh?” Jordan smirked. If the driver hadn’t called the police by now, he wasn’t going to. He walked up the man and whipped the stunner out. “I’m going to need you to open up the back of the truck.”
The man backed away, dropped his comm card, and held his hands up defensively. “All right. I don’t need no trouble. There’s nothing there. I promise you. I’ve got to get my comm card.”
“I’ll do it,” Jordan said. He scooped the card off the asphalt. “Unlock it.”
With his eye on the card, he let the operator press his thumb to the screen. The trailer door clicked and slid open. True to the operator’s word, the interior was devoid of anything, much less Chris’s body.
“Are you happy? Can I go now?”
Jordan raised an eyebrow. He couldn’t risk the man calling the police, and he didn’t have time to waste. “Get up in the trailer.”
“What?”
With a nod, Jordan indicated the trailer. “Go on.”
The man hesitated until Jordan waved the stunner at him. “Fine, fine,” he said, holding his hands up. “What the hell are you going to do? You can’t kill me.”
Jordan shook his head. “I won’t.”
The man hoisted himself into the trailer and stood in the middle of the empty floor. “Now what?”
As Jordan squeezed the trigger, the stunner let out a jolt of electricity. The operator fell limp and unconscious. Jordan threw the comm card in and pulled the trailer door shut. The man would wake hours later and at least have a lifeline to the outside world. When he regained consciousness, he’d call the police and they’d let him out—sweaty and disoriented, but alive.
Jordan jogged back to the two other cars. Walking up to each in turn, he pressed his ears to the trunk of the vehicles. He hoped he might hear breathing or someone scratching from inside, desperate to be let loose.
“Chris?”
No response.
Then he saw the dumpsters lined up against the gray rear wall of the strip mall. He raced up to the first and flipped the lid. Nothing but broken bottles and soggy cardboard boxes. He tore open the next. The scent of rotten food decaying in the sweltering heat overwhelmed him. Remnants of unidentifiable meat and vegetable matter spilled from ripped plastic bags. He gagged as he withdrew from the refuse container and ran to the next. At the third, he found only sacks of torn paper and more flattened cardboard.
Something glinted atop one of the clear sacks. He leaned over the dumpster’s edge and picked it up.
He examined the fractured plastic in his hand. It was half of a comm card. The small GPS chip wasn’t separated from the card’s power source, and it had led him here to this dead end. He threw it back into the dumpster and jogged back to Hugh’s car, levying a heap of curses all the while.
He had lost Chris’s trail.
Hugh still lay across the passenger seat, his eyes closed and his breathing slow. If the man hadn’t delayed him, Chris wouldn’t have been abducted, and Jordan could’ve reached his friend before these other people. He had no clear idea what he would do next but did know one thing: Hugh was not getting a raise anytime soon.
Jordan plugged a random destination into the car’s navigation system. He didn’t want to stay around here in case someone had witnessed his interactions with the truck operator and called the police. But he could not figure out where he should go next.
As the car wound out of the delivery area behind the strip mall and joined up with traffic, he scanned through his comm card. Worry filled him.
No clues presented themselves to him, no ideas burst forth to point him even in a general direction. He massaged his temple. He stood at an impasse and only knew of one other person that might have any idea of what was going on.
He called Baltimore PD.
A mechanical voice answered. “Baltimore Police Department. How can I direct your call?”
“Detective Ana Dellaporta. Mark the call as urgent.”
“Understood. You are now connecting with Detective Dellaporta.”
The line rang as Jordan rubbed his hand over his head. He thought about the samples in the trunk of the car. From his experience in enhancement manufacturing, he had gotten to know his competition in Baltimore by discreetly acquiring their products. He’d analyzed their favorite delivery techniques and vectors, along with their genetic sequence designs. Each had a signature delivery method they preferred. One organization employed traditional retroviral transfection. A couple utilized nanoparticles with attached molecules to target specific cells. Another fabricated synthetic liposomes, mimicking the natural membrane serving as cells’ “skin.”
J
ordan’s favorite analogy was that the delivery vector—whatever it was made out of—was like the box, envelope, or plastic carton used to “mail” the contents—in this case, new genetic modifications. Every group involved in enhancements had its favorite method of packaging to protect the special cargo within, and finding out if the vectors in Novak’s blood were the equivalent of cardboard boxes, shrink-wrapped plastic, or plain old manila envelopes would help him find the sender, the manufacturer of the enhancement.
And if evidence of a particular delivery method still resided in those tissues, this might provide linkage to the group responsible for the cancerous enhancements. His pulse quickened at the prospect of tracking down the bastards. He might actually find the breadcrumb trail that would unravel this mystery before the crows swooped in to peck it apart.
“This is Detective Dellaporta.”
“Hello. It’s Jordan Thompson, Chris Morgan’s associate.”
“Ah, yes. I know who you are. Do you happen to know where Morgan is?”
“No. I hoped you knew.” He drummed his fingers on the car’s dash.
“I sent a couple of squad cars out to meet him. All we found was a wrecked Audi. Your car.”
“That would be accurate,” Jordan said. “Chris told me you’re interested in keeping him out of prison. Is that true?”
“Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Thompson. I’m not trying to keep him out if he screws up. But I don’t believe he’s behind the rash of deaths we’re seeing in the enhancer community. I do believe he can help us figure out who’s responsible.”
Jordan exhaled slowly. “I don’t think that’ll be so easy. I’m afraid whoever you’re looking for got to Chris already. They’ve taken him.”
“You’re sure? He isn’t just running away?”
“No, he’s not on the lam,” Jordan snapped. “He was trying to help you. And now I’m hoping you’ll help me. I have no idea where he went.”
“That makes two of us,” Dellaporta said. “I’m not sure I have much to offer.” She lowered her voice. “He’s not the only person connected to this case to have gone missing in the past two days. Did he tell you about the doctor he was supposed to work with at the Maryland Medical Center?”
The Black Market DNA Series: Books 1-3 Page 39