The Panic Zone

by Rick Mofina

  No response.

  Gannon called the WPA’s Nassau Bureau. Prior to his Bahamas assignment, the Nassau chief had run the Amsterdam Bureau.

  “WPA, Peter DeGroote.”

  “Jack Gannon. I just arrived.”

  “Ah, yes, Jack. New York advised us to expect your call. We’ll support you in every way possible. I trust you had a good flight?”

  “Yes, thanks. Are you hearing anything at all related to a police action on a day-care center anywhere?”

  “No, but we are monitoring police emergency radio chatter on our scanners and we’ll alert you on your mobile phone.”

  “Do you have a photographer ready?”

  “We have two. One is a freelancer. Both are in Nassau waiting to be dispatched.”

  After the call, Gannon went to the next building to find Lancer.

  Alone in her room, Emma studied her color photograph of Tyler and Joe, taken a week before the crash. She’d downloaded it to her cell phone. She traced her finger over their faces, smiling back at them before starting to unpack. That’s when she noticed the resort’s leather-bound directory of services on the desk. Paging through it she saw that the resort offered child-care service at the Blue Tortoise Kids’ Hideaway.

  Gannon’s source had said police were going to get warrants for a child-care center and had advised Gannon to come to this specific hotel. She hurried to Gannon’s room and knocked hard on his door.

  No answer.

  She’d go alone.

  At her desk in the offices of the Blue Tortoise Kids’ Hideaway, Lucy Walsh quickly read over the letter she was leaving for her employer.

  “It is with the great regret that I must inform you that I am resigning from my position as chief executive assistant to Dr. Auden…”

  The truth was Lucy had to leave the Bahamas because she was afraid.

  When she finished with the letter, she printed a copy, signed it, put it in an envelope and slid it under Dr. Sutsoff’s door. The office was always locked when the doctor was away. It was just as well Lucy did it this way; she never felt totally comfortable in the doctor’s presence.

  She returned to her desk and resumed packing her personal items.

  Her growing fears that this company was a front for something evil had deepened. Last night she’d received stunning news from her church friend in Ireland, who had been forwarding her secret reports to an ex-cop who was working with a human rights organization.

  “My contact on this case has been killed. I got word from London he may have been murdered in Morocco. It’s dangerous for you. Take precautions, Lucy.”

  Something was horribly wrong at this place.

  Lucy glanced at her computer from which she’d duplicated every file she could to a private online folder. She had also copied them to a blue memory card, no bigger than a stick of gum. Maybe she would send the information anonymously to the Irish Times? Somehow she had to alert the outside world.

  As the computer beeped and lights flashed, she noticed through the glass walls that a woman was standing in the playroom staring at the children. The other staff members had not seen her.

  Lucy went to her.

  “May I help you?”

  The woman turned, telegraphing an intense unease behind faded bruises and desperate eyes that failed to brighten as she tried to smile.

  “Yes. My name is Emma Lane and I’m looking for my son.”

  “Lane?”

  “Yes, my son is Tyler Lane.”

  “Lane, that name’s familiar but we have about 104 children currently registered. Some are out on excursions. Follow me.” Lucy led Emma to her office and sat before her computer monitor and started typing. “L-A-N-E?”

  “Yes.” Emma twisted the straps of her purse. “Tyler is spelled T-Y-L-E-R. He’s a year old.”

  “When did you bring him in?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Oh, his father brought him in?”

  “His father’s dead. I think my son was abducted and brought here.”

  All the blood drained from Lucy’s face.

  “Please,” Emma whispered. “Please help me.”

  After knocking on Lancer’s door in vain, Gannon called Lancer’s cell-phone number.

  It was futile.

  Dammit. Where was he?

  Walking from Blue Reef Tower D across the complex, Gannon froze. Almost hidden at the base of a grove of coconut palms, he glimpsed a shoulder flash, dark military overalls and a leather holster.

  A cop. A SWAT member in tactical gear.

  As Gannon’s eyes adjusted, he noticed a second cop in the grove.

  Then, through the courtyard in the distance, he saw a cube van, obviously a police equipment truck. Next to it, he saw an ambulance.

  They were setting up for a takedown somewhere.

  Was this Lancer’s target? It had to be near.

  Walking quickly through the vast courtyard, Gannon looked in every direction for any sign of Lancer, for any clue. Guests lounged around the pool, oblivious to what was coming. Gannon knew from his crime reporting days how police would soon seal the area with inner and outer perimeters as they prepared to move in.

  Where were they going?

  Gannon scanned everything until he saw the entrance of a low-roofed building almost hidden by tropical vegetation. He strained to read the wooden sign amid a garden of flowers: Blue Tortoise Kids’ Hideaway.

  Yes, it all fit.

  Lancer’s information

  We’re going to execute warrants…Grand Blue Tortoise Resort…a child-care center.

  Gannon started trotting to the building.

  Lucy Walsh stared at Emma not knowing what to say.

  “Please,” Emma said, “I know it’s crazy, sometimes I think it’s all a bad dream, but it’s real. Please, I’m begging for your help.”

  Lucy said nothing and Emma continued.

  “I sense you’re a good person and by your reaction, I think you know something. Please.” Emma struggled as she cued up the photo of Joe and Tyler on her cell phone and showed it to Lucy, her voice soft. “My husband died beside me and my son is missing—please!”

  Maybe it was fate, maybe it was the timing, but Lucy did not have to search Emma’s eyes long before she found a reason to follow her convictions.

  She got up, glanced around to be sure they were alone, then locked her door and returned to her computer.

  “Where are you from, Emma?”

  “Wyoming.”

  Lucy entered her database of secret files she’d been copying.

  “Emma, are you from Big Cloud?”

  “Yes!”

  Lucy caught her bottom lip between her teeth, then continued checking files. Her concentration sharpened as she pulled up more information.

  “You have to swear that you’ll never tell anyone you got this from me.”

  “Yes, yes! Please, do you have something?”

  Lucy jotted information on a slip of paper.

  “Your son is here.”

  Emma’s hands flew to her face. Her body started shaking.

  “Here? Oh, God! Where? Do you have him?”

  “No, he’s not here at the center.”

  “Where? Who has him? Tell me!”

  “Listen carefully. Two people, their names are Valmir and Elena Leeka, are traveling on Albanian passports or U.S passports. Tyler is identified as their son Alek on an Albanian passport. They will say that they adopted him through an international agency and are staying here on vacation.”

  “How do you know all this? What’s going on?”

  “Just listen. I’ve just learned that they’re supposed to leave for New York City today, at any moment. They are registered here, at the resort in Main Sail Tower A, Room 1658.” Lucy thrust the paper with the information into Emma’s hand. “You have to swear not to say how you found out.”

  “Yes. Room 1658, Main Sail Tower A.”

  “Go before it’s too late.”

  “Thank you.”
>
  “It could be dangerous. Don’t go alone.”

  “God bless you, thank you!”

  “Wait! Wait, there’s something else!” Lucy snatched the tiny blue memory card from her desk and handed it to Emma. “Don’t lose this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Information. Don’t say where you got it, just look at it later. It’ll help explain everything.”

  Emma stared at the memory card, then jammed it into her bag.

  “One more thing.”

  Emma waited.

  “I had no part in this.”

  “Thank you for helping me.”

  Emma hurried from the center. Once outside, she began running across the courtyard when she spotted Gannon heading in her direction.

  “Jack!” Emma held up the slip of paper like it was a winning lottery ticket. “He’s here. Tyler’s here!”

  “What? How did you find out?”

  Emma updated him as they hurried through the complex, following the direction signs to Main Sail Tower A. They found a private corner in the busy lobby to come up with a strategy. To confirm if the Leekas and Tyler were in the room and to gauge what they might be facing, Gannon would knock on the door alone in case the couple had Emma’s picture. If they were there, then Gannon and Emma would summon police.

  “What do we do if they’re not there?” Emma asked as they stepped into the elevator.

  “I’ve got a plan,” Gannon said.

  On the sixteenth floor, Emma stayed down the hall out of sight while Gannon knocked at room 1658. He tried for thirty seconds. He placed his ear to the door but heard nothing, then signaled to Emma.

  “Follow my lead on this,” he said as they walked down the hall and around a corner until they found a chambermaid’s cart parked outside a room.

  “Excuse us,” Gannon said.

  An older slender Bahamian woman emerged from the bathroom wearing rubber gloves.

  “I am so sorry to trouble you but we just stepped out of our room and realized we left our room keys and camera inside.”

  The woman eyed them both.

  “We’re running a little late—we don’t have time to go to the desk in the main lobby. Is there a chance you could let us in?” Gannon reached for his wallet and produced an American twenty-dollar bill.

  The woman sighed and waved off the money.

  “This happens all the time, which room?”

  “Thank you. This way.” Emma pointed and started ahead of them, smiling at Gannon, then checking the woman’s tag, “Oh, thank you, Matilda.”

  “No need to thank me. All the time people are forgettin’ this and forgettin’ that.”

  Matilda inserted her plastic keycard in the key slot, a small light winked green, the locks clicked and she cracked the door a few inches for Gannon.

  “Please, Matilda, we insist.” He pushed the twenty in her hand.

  “Well, with all my grandchildren I have to get a birthday present every other week. Thank you.” She smiled and returned to her work humming.

  Gannon allowed her to get a safe distance away before they entered.

  Nothing prepared them for what was waiting.

  Blood.

  The room was drenched in blood.

  On the ceiling, walls, curtains, the floor, the lamps, the mirror, the furniture and the bed, where two meaty mounds rested on the blood-soaked sheets. It was as if something had exploded, leaving two sets of adult arms and legs reaching out from the visceral matter.

  Emma’s groan morphed into a stifled scream.

  She cupped one hand over her mouth and searched the room, bathroom and closet.

  “Tyler!”

  There was no sign of her son.

  She began rummaging through the documents on the desk.

  Gannon stood before the wall over the bed transfixed, for amid the splatter he discerned a message scrawled in the blood: “Erase them all!”

  62

  Deus Island, Exuma Sound

  At that moment, sweat beaded on the upper lip of the American military scientist working in Dr. Sutsoff’s secret laboratory.

  The biochemistry engineer was part of the elite rapid response team rushed overnight to the island to investigate Sutsoff’s clandestine research.

  Working in protective pressure suits, team members took painstaking care. The lab housed such material as rabies, small pox and the Marburg and Ebola viruses. They’d come upon glass cases housing snakes—the deadliest snakes on earth. A venom expert identified them as a black mamba, a king cobra, a Russell’s viper, a taipan and a krait. All could be milked for their lethal neurotoxins, cardiotoxins and hemotoxins.

  They also discovered a large clear container with a cluster of roosting pariah bats, a species thought to be extinct. They found containers of autopsied bats and evidence of newly engineered super-lethal agents. The scientist felt her scalp prickle when a team member’s voice crackled over the radio.

  He said, “Sutsoff may have booby-trapped this place. Stay calm, be careful.”

  The female scientist constantly checked the floor and ceiling in case a snake or bat had escaped its hold.

  It was like viewing live coverage of a space mission, Lancer thought, watching via closed-circuit TV in an outer room crowded with U.S. and Bahamian law enforcement agents.

  Within the past forty-eight hours, security agencies in the U.S., the Bahamas and around the world had been working full bore. The telephone numbers and information Lancer got from Jack Gannon had broken the case open with several significant leads. Gannon’s first number enabled them to obtain warrants on the Blue Tortoise Kids’ Hideaway. Lancer glanced at his watch, figuring that that operation should be happening right about now on Paradise Island.

  The second number, the satellite phone number, led to a post-office box in the Cable Beach area of Nassau, which led to a numbered company. Some criminal intelligence work by detectives from the Royal Bahamas Police Force confirmed a link to the Blue Tortoise child-care center and Gretchen Sutsoff. Interviews with seaplane pilots confirmed her flights from Deus Island. Other Bahamian government departments helped with property, tax and other records, which prompted calls through Interpol and help from police in France, Spain and Portugal.

  It all led to securing emergency warrants to hit Deus Island with support from the Royal Bahamas Defense Force and the U.S. Coast Guard. Overnight, each group had sent ships to the island, while other resources were flown in by seaplane.

  They’d failed to find Sutsoff but after questioning her island staff and searching Sutsoff’s lab and her residence, Lancer knew they were gaining on her. For in a short time this had become an international investigation with new leads coming nearly every fifteen minutes.

  Would they get her in time?

  Lancer’s attention went back to the slow, meticulous probe of Sutsoff’s lab, which was being transmitted live via satellite to the Crucible scientists and other experts at Fort Detrick in Maryland.

  Analysis under the microscope in Sutsoff’s lab was being shared with the former CIA scientists via secured U.S. military laptop computers and secured satellite Internet links.

  “We can’t identify what’s been created down here. What does the team at Fort Detrick think?”

  “Foster Winfield here. We conclude from our analysis that what you’ve got there was applied in the death of the cruise passenger.”

  “Are you certain that was a homicide, Doctor?” Lancer asked.

  “Absolutely, and we can also say the lethal agent used has its foundation in material from Crucible.”

  “Stolen material?” someone from Defense Intelligence asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Would you testify to that in court, Dr. Winfield?” Lancer said.

  “If I live long enough, yes, but I’m sure Phil and the others would, as well.”

  “Then,” Lancer said to the others, “we have enough to put out a warrant for Sutsoff’s arrest and deem her a fugitive suspect.”

  “One moment
, gentlemen,” Winfield said. “You must understand that based upon the new material found in her lab, it is clear that Gretchen has created an even more powerful lethal agent than what was used on the cruise-ship victim. She remains well ahead of us. Again, we stress the critical need for more analysis on this newer agent. We don’t know how, or when, or if she intends to introduce it or even if we can stop it.”

  Frustration rippled among the investigators in the crowded room. A moment later, one of the men nudged Lancer to look out a window at someone pointing at him.

  “They need you outside.”

  Lancer welcomed the fresh air and Caribbean sun as he headed toward a Jeep and the FBI agent waiting behind the wheel.

  “Bob, they found something in Sutsoff’s residence you should see.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know—they told me to get you.”

  “Any word on how they did with the warrants at the child-care center?”

  “We just heard that the operation went well but there may be more victims. Homicides.”

  “What?”

  “It just came in—we don’t have anything else.”

  Lancer climbed in and as the Jeep rumbled down the road, Lancer saw that his phone signal was strong now that he was outside of the sealed lab buildings. He called Hal Weldon, his supervisor at FBI Headquarters in Washington.

  “Hal, it’s Lancer. Have you heard anything on the takedown at the child-care center?”

  “It’s sketchy. The operation went well but there could be other victims. It’s all hot right now. We’re trying to get more. What do you have?”

  Lancer updated him and made the urgent request for warrants for Sutsoff’s arrest and to prepare her fugitive file.

  “We’re getting what we can,” Lancer said. “The CIA, the Bahamians, Interpol, the French, Portuguese and Spanish police are sending stuff on her passports. We should have recent photos.”

  “We’ll take care of it up here, Bob. Keep me posted and we’ll blast something out to Homeland and Customs and Border Protection ASAP to warn them to watch for entry while we track her aliases.”

  When Lancer arrived at the house, Bahamian and U.S. computer experts were searching Sutsoff’s private computer files and e-mails. They’d bypassed encrypted and password-protected files to find a list of some seventy names and addresses around the world.