Adrian had organized a caterer for a wake to be held after the service at the Resnicks’ house. Pip wanted Cindy reunited with her family as quickly as possible and then she could figure out her next move and fully mourn her friend. Pip put her hand on her chest, hoping to shift the weight of grief, but it was wedged in like cardiac damage following a heart attack.
The funeral arrangements somehow seemed too easy. Death should be more difficult than this—especially when it ripped your insides out through your mouth.
Getting the word out and tracking down Cindy’s advisor had been the only hiccup, barring someone shooting at her yesterday. The more she thought about that, the more she accepted that it probably had something to do with her job as a journalist rather than her questions about who Cindy might have been sleeping with. She had no doubt Agent Fuller would let her know when the FBI caught the shooter. The agent was too cocky not to come crowing like a rooster.
“I can promise to pass on the information, but Professor Everson is no more likely to pick up his phone at the cabin for me than for you. Trevor likes to disappear sometimes.” Spalding smiled, not unsympathetically.
“That’s fine.” Pip didn’t admit it but she knew where Everson’s cabin was. She’d been in the car when Cindy had had to drop off a chapter of her thesis over Christmas. Pip would take a run up there and see if she could talk to the guy.
Pip cleared her throat. “I’ve asked some of her other friends if they’d be pallbearers. And the school secretary said she’d post a notice so everyone knows about the service.” Sally-Anne’s funeral had been planned for Wednesday next week.
Spalding frowned. “Maybe some of the people who used to work here might also want to pay their respects. I’ll send out an email to the people I know to spread the word. I am sorry you’re having to deal with this. Such a tragedy…”
Spalding’s phone rang and she glanced at it and sighed. “The FBI.” A small smile creased her cheeks. “I spoke to a very handsome agent on Monday morning. The highlight of a difficult week.”
Pip frowned. “Monday morning?”
Spalding nodded, distractedly. “WMD coordinator for the Bureau. He was here when I heard about Cindy actually. I imagine he wants to finish his tour of the rest of the facility and speak to the other researchers.”
Hunt. It had to be Hunt. Pip’s heart gave a little leap of excitement. WMD coordinator. That’s why he’d been called on to investigate Cindy’s death.
Spalding was looking at her and the box she’d been carrying, clearly eager to get on with her day. Pip backed away. “Thanks for your help. Anyone else who you think might want to know about the funeral I’d appreciate you passing on that information.”
“I’m sorry about Cindy. I liked her. She was going to do great things in the world and now all that potential is cut short. Maybe we can get her Ph.D. awarded posthumously.” Spalding pressed her lips together and shook her head. “It’s a damned shame.”
Pip said goodbye.
At the entrance to the building she paused. It was overcast and raining and she was exhausted. Probably because she’d spent the night having fabulous sex with that very hot FBI agent everyone liked to admire.
Hunt Kincaid.
She mulled the name over. It was a good name. Strong. Unpretentious. To the point. It suited him. She wondered how the FBI agent in question was feeling today. And what he wanted with Karen Spalding.
She shivered. Last night it seemed like they had an emotional connection but often in the light of day men seemed able to extinguish that connection with either carelessness or ignorance. This time it seemed she was the one doing it. Him telling her not to run away from whatever was between them had just about melted her resistance. And that wasn’t good.
Was he regretting what happened now he had a little distance? She wouldn’t blame him.
She probably shouldn’t see him again. They weren’t dating. They’d just hooked up after a completely shitty day. Agent Fuller had made it clear she should avoid him for his sake as much as hers.
To hell with Agent Fuller.
She dialed his cell, disappointed when it bounced to voicemail. He was probably still talking to Professor Spalding. She didn’t leave a voice message.
She drew in a tight breath and decided to walk back to her hotel rather than get a cab. The exercise would do her good and then she could drive up and drop by the professor’s cabin.
“Ms. West. Pippa!”
She looked over her shoulder in surprise and there was Adrian Lightfoot hurrying toward her. He was wearing an expensive-looking dark suit that made his blond hair shine. He really was a very attractive man.
“I have to go talk to some people here about a pending patent on Cindy’s work. Do you want to join me?”
Pip’s eyes were gritty from exhaustion and she had to suppress a yawn. “Not unless I have to.”
He herded her in the circle of his arm and urged her toward a nearby coffee shop. “You and Cindy are very alike. She wasn’t a morning person either.”
“You knew her for a long time,” she realized.
He nodded and gave her shoulders a quick squeeze before letting go. “Our families were friends. I was often dragged along as a teenager to barbecues at the Resnicks. I remember her as a little girl. Ridiculously smart even at a young age. But I was only interested in escaping the parentals and going to hang out with my buddies.”
She smiled and touched his arm. “I was hoping you’d do a reading at the funeral.”
He looked stricken all of a sudden and shook his head. “It doesn’t feel right. I’m sure there are people who knew her better than I did.” His voice caught and he looked away, almost embarrassed.
Pip ordered her coffee, a little disconcerted she’d overstepped some invisible boundary between attorney and client.
“I understand.” But she really didn’t. “Do you really think I need to come to this meeting with you?”
Adrian shrugged. “You don’t have to, but…I’m fighting for Cindy’s best interests, which are now also your best interests, so I thought you might want to be involved.”
When he put it like that, how could she refuse?
Chapter Twenty-Four
It was almost noon. Hunt sat in the SACs office waiting for McKenzie and Frazer to come on screen. He’d investigated Raz Perez, an employee of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. The guy had worked as a mail handler for nearly seven years and was married to a nurse and they had two young children. No priors, no degree in microbiology, no known affiliations with any terrorist groups, no weird internet activity except for a propensity for streaming really bad sitcoms.
ASAC Levi sat in one corner of Bourne’s office, taking everything in with a bleak expression. He already had people checking out the co-pilot’s movements last night, his house, car, and gathering as much background information on the other passengers as possible.
Most of the agents in the FO had been pulled off their other cases in the short-term to work BLACKCLOUD. Luckily the white-collar crime sting had been wrapped up at the beginning of the week and most of the evidence had already been collected and submitted to the DA’s office. Fuller had been ordered to stay on the shooting incident because that was an attack on a federal agent, but she was on her own now and pissed to be missing out on such a big case.
Ironically, considering the guy had questioned his professionalism, Will was also pissed Hunt hadn’t confided more details about BLACKCLOUD.
McKenzie had mentioned sending more agents down to Atlanta, maybe even coming himself and basing the task force out of their office. McKenzie was more and more convinced the bad guys were in this part of the world.
Hunt wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Worried because the UNSUBs could release deadly microbes in Atlanta or the surrounds, and pumped because he had the opportunity to make a difference and take these assholes down.
The video screens went live and McKenzie wasted no time. “We’re not picking up a
ny positive readings for anthrax in our rapid field tests anywhere on that commercial aircraft, but the co-pilot just died. Military doctor believes he died of anthrax.”
Hunt swore.
“Anyone else sick?” Frazer asked.
“No,” McKenzie said. “We’ve isolated the passengers in an old Quonset hut. They don’t know about the co-pilot yet.”
“Are we going to tell them about the anthrax threat?”
McKenzie pulled a face. “No. As far as they know there was a medical issue with one of the pilots and they had to make an emergency landing. We were able to get the man off the plane with the help of the other pilot and an air steward. Because we didn’t find any contamination on the aircraft itself, the plan is to ask for saliva swabs as a precaution before getting the passengers back onboard and on their way.”
“Hopefully they’ll feel sorry enough about the co-pilot that they won’t cause too much grief,” said Bourne.
“Do we have any clear suspects?” asked ASAC Levi.
“What happened to that lead with the keycard being used at Blake to access the labs two years after the student left?” asked Bourne.
Hunt pulled a face. “I found Pete Dexter’s keycard in the sun visor of Cindy Resnick’s SUV. It checks out with his story.”
The SAC shot him a dark look.
“Pip West said Cindy Resnick worked in the lab over the Christmas vacation though I haven’t firmed any times.”
The dark look turned into a glare. “She gave you permission to search for the keycard?”
“I didn’t tell her what I was looking for.” Hunt hesitated. “Pip West refuses to believe her friend was foolish enough to take drugs. She thinks Cindy was date raped and the drugs were somehow forced on her friend. Pip was hoping I might find evidence to confirm that if I looked around.” He ignored the guilt he felt for lying to Pip about what he was searching for. He kept his expression neutral, aware he’d spent hours last night getting to know Pip in intimate detail strictly against his boss’s wishes. He was finding it hard to regret anything, except the fact their time together had been cut short. His work was important to him. He didn’t resent it often.
“That’s interesting.” Frowning, McKenzie quickly rummaged through a pile of papers on his desk. “We just received Ms. Resnick’s lab results. There’re some peculiarities…”
“I’d like to hear it,” Frazer said impatiently. He checked his watch. “CDC better come through with some results soon or I’m getting on a flight down there today.”
They were waiting on the anthrax strain DNA results. Everyone was getting impatient.
“All right, all right,” McKenzie muttered, pulling out another file. “Okay. A few things. One, there was a minute trace of Rohypnol in a water bottle at the scene and a small amount of cocaine in the champagne bottle.”
Hunt blinked. What…? Had Pip been correct in her suspicions?
McKenzie carried on reading. “Neither male DNA profiles found at the scene were in CODIS nor were the fingerprints found in AFIS.”
“Why would there be a sedative in her water bottle or cocaine in the alcohol?” asked Hunt.
“It’s possible she used it to sleep? She was under a lot of stress, right?” the SAC suggested.
No one looked convinced.
“Here’s the other thing that really bothered me. The files on her laptop are corrupted. Technicians are trying to restore the data,” McKenzie told them.
“Maybe she had a system crash and didn’t have a backup. Maybe losing a bunch of work made her decide to end it all,” said Bourne.
“She sent the file to her printer back home, and I suspect she has cloud storage somehow,” Hunt said thoughtfully, but he didn’t know if anyone had checked it out.
“Doesn’t really explain the Rohypnol,” Frazer commented.
“So you think the reporter is on to something?” Bourne asked. “Maybe she’s involved in something she’s not telling us about? Someone tried to shoot her yesterday. Maybe she sold her friend’s research—maybe they were in on it together?”
Hunt bristled. “Except her alibi for the death of her best friend is solid. And she’s the one who’s been pushing the fact her friend’s death wasn’t accidental, despite what we’ve been telling her.”
The SAC shot him a look that made Hunt stop talking but he was pissed. Bottom line was, Pip couldn’t win. Had Cindy’s death been a murder staged to look like an overdose?
What about Sally-Anne? The drug dealer? Were they collateral damage? A diversion?
Hell of a fucking diversion, and no proof.
There was a knock on the door and Jez Place burst into the room wiping the sweat off his brow and looking generally harassed. His clothes were the same ones he’d worn yesterday and his hair stood on end.
He shut the door on the secretary who stood behind him. “Is this room shielded from electronic communications?”
That didn’t sound good.
Bourne nodded.
The professor threw himself into a chair and opened the file in front of him. “We figured out the strain.” He dabbed his forehead with a tissue.
“And?” McKenzie asked impatiently.
The scientist let out a gusty sigh. “It’s one of ours.”
Shit.
Everyone started talking at once.
“What do you mean, ‘one of ours’?” McKenzie said loudly.
Frazer gritted out, “If you tell me we have a government weapons program I’m going to—”
Jez cut him off. “No, nothing like that, but prior to 1969? Definitely.”
“I thought those strains were destroyed?” Hunt said carefully.
“Stockpiles were.” Dr. Place nodded. “Most of the work done at USAMRIID was in reaction to the work of hostile nations around the world. But when we pulled the plug we didn’t hamstring ourselves in the process. I mean we stopped developing new strains or better strains but we did keep some reference stocks we’d found in Nazi Germany and Japan after WWII.”
The man looked around. “The parent strain of the bioweapon uncovered in BLACKCLOUD is called SAHCAM45. It was isolated from a camel in the Sahara in 1945 at the tail end of the war. It was unlike any native varieties found in the region and the allies believed the Nazis had been testing it and wanted to observe it in the wild.”
“We didn’t know how fast it killed, but we didn’t find just one dead camel, we found over a hundred. And not only the camels, but their owners and the Nazi guards. All found dead. Suggesting it acted so quickly everyone who came into contact with it died.”
“Luckily we’d caught a prominent Nazi bioweapon scientist nearby and he was recognized. Soldiers from the US Army 12th Air Force wore protective suits when they went in. They took samples. The scientist tried to poison his guards and was shot dead before the Allies could debrief him.”
“Samples went to USAMRIID and bodies were burnt and the ashes buried. At USAMRIID the strain was further enhanced as a bioweapon.”
“Dear God,” ASAC Levi said quietly.
“It’s not a history to be proud of, but after WWII everyone was racing to find a balance of power between the east and west. Nuclear annihilation would have destroyed the planet.”
“Whereas germ warfare only destroys living creatures,” Frazer said dryly.
“I’m not agreeing with what happened but I think we need to remember they were different times back then,” Jez said sharply. “Pandora’s box was open and we couldn’t simply ignore what was happening elsewhere. We still can’t unless we want to risk getting wiped out by terrorists or rogue nations.”
With sarin gas being used on civilians in Syria and nerve agents used for targeted assassinations around the world, Hunt wasn’t sure where he stood on this stuff anymore. Except locking up forever anyone who used WMDs and hitting countries hard if they started releasing this shit.
“The specific enhanced strain that this anthrax came from was SAHCAM45-65 and was worked on by a government scientist tryin
g to develop a vaccine to protect against it. He spent his entire life looking for something but never found it. His name was Vernon Grossman and he moved from Fort Detrick to the CDC and worked there from 1967 to 1981. He retired when he was sixty-eight years old and died in 2013. To my knowledge he never found a vaccine.” Place looked deadly serious as he spoke.
“I’ll get my people investigating everything there is to know about Vernon Grossman.” McKenzie passed a note to an agent in the room.
“The thing is,” Dr. Place continued, looking excited, “Grossman’s widow, Elsa, is still alive. She’s ninety-two and lives out in Decatur.”
Hunt was out of his chair and heading for the door.
“I’m coming with you, Agent Kincaid,” Jez said. “It’s possible he stored samples at home and if that’s so, I’ll be able to assess the scene.”
“Take Will Griffin with you,” Bourne instructed.
“Yes, sir.” Hunt nodded. “Send us the address.”
He was secretly relieved they were moving away from Pip as a suspect although she might not forgive him for ignoring and discounting her theories about her friend’s death. He realized he actually wanted to see where this thing with Pip went. He didn’t want his bosses interfering with that just because none of them liked journalists. The Bureau demanded enough from him already.
He checked his cell. A missed call from Pip, but he didn’t have time to call her back. He didn’t intend to bend the rules, but he wasn’t ready to give her up.
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