Out of Time r5-2

by Cliff Ryder

  Brin stared at him and then nodded. Alex could tell that she knew it had to be done, but she didn’t have to like it. As much as she loved him, she still couldn’t be sure whether his loyalties were with her or with Room 59. It hung in the air between them, in a place where nothing had ever hung before.

  “Give me a second, then,” she said. “I’ll make sure none of it’s viable before we—” She trailed off then, not wanting to put such a horrible thing into words.

  Brin opened the container and withdrew a sample, got it under the microscope fast. She felt Alex’s eyes on her and she wanted to spin on him, rage at him for all of this, the lies, the danger, the fear, the scent of gunpowder that still filled her nostrils. Instead, she stared into the microscope, focused and inspected the slide, checking carefully to be absolutely certain that the cultures were dead.

  “We’re good to go,” she said at last, lifting her head. “Whatever we have to do, we can do it without releasing any of this into the air.”

  “Okay.” Alex shoved the laptop off the table and began pounding furiously at it with the leg of the chair. He smashed at it until the case shattered, spraying little bits of motherboard about the room.

  When he managed to free the hard drive, he gathered it up in one hand and snagged a pair of tongs with another. Once he had the drive gripped tightly in the tongs, it was a simple matter to drop it into a large beaker.

  “You have anything we can pour in here that will eat through plastic?” he asked. “The drives on the inside are layered, like thick CDs stacked one on top of another. To really get all the data out of there, we need to destroy the interior disks.”

  Brin glanced around the room, then said, “How about sulfuric acid?” She crossed the lab and grabbed the container and returned, twisting off the top to bypass the nozzle they normally used to apply the solution a bit at a time. She poured the contents over the drive. As the clear liquid made contact with the surface of the hard drive’s case, the solution began to bubble and froth. Then she took down another bottle and said, “Stand back.”

  “What’s in that?” Alex asked.

  “Water,” she said. She poured a small quantity of water over the acid and it began to spit and boil.

  “Sulfuric acid is exothermic,” she explained.

  “There won’t be anything but plastic soup left inside.”

  The beaker sizzled and bubbled, threatening to spill acid all over the tabletop. Alex watched it carefully. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Brin—he wanted to see the damned thing melt. When he was sure it was done, he turned to her and tried a half grin.

  “You ready?” he asked.

  “Yeah.” Her voice had a hollow, sad sound to it.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Home. First we blow this place off the face of the planet, and then we go home.”

  “Good,” she replied. “You have one hell of a lot of explaining to do, and you’d better start thinking about it now.”

  Alex stepped forward and pulled her to him.

  Despite the slight resistance she gave him, he hugged her tightly. He didn’t want to let go, but he knew they weren’t finished. “Get us out of here,”

  he said softly.

  Brin stepped to the cipher lock, entered the code, and the door swung wide a final time. She set it to lock behind them, and they stepped through into the hall.

  Alex knew that the security cameras were still watching, but somehow he thought no one was home. If Dayne had backup, he’d have called on it when things started to go south. They must have kicked the entire security staff out for the night, or fired them outright. It was crazy, and Alex saw the desperation behind it. He wondered if maybe Dayne had come on his own, sort of a last-shot desperation tactic.

  The one thing he knew he had to include in his final report was the Chinese Mafia’s involvement.

  Some additional cleanup would have to be done to ensure that they weren’t expanding their operations into completely new realms of crime like bioterrorism. It made sense, though, considering the market for weapons, that the organized-crime groups of the world would seek to profit from it all.

  Alex led Brin down the maintenance elevator and out through the service doors. His duffel bag was right where he left it next to the Dumpster, and he retrieved it while she watched. He had a bad moment when he thought this left leg was going to collapse. He leaned against the trash receptacle, waiting to see if the leg would come back, or if he’d tumble to the ground.

  The spasm in his leg passed and he snagged the duffel bag’s handle and opened it. There were six separate charges inside. He gripped the bag tightly and turned back to the building.

  “I can do this myself,” he said softly. “I can tell you where the car is and you can wait for me. I have to place all six around the perimeter on the inside. I don’t want the building flying all over town—I want it come down on itself, and to do that I have to get the placement just right.”

  She hesitated.

  “But I could really use someone who knows the interior layout better than I do.”

  Brin nodded and they slipped back in the service doors and got to work. The building was laid out in a cross pattern, four wings shooting out from a square central lobby area. Alex chose two wings, the one directly below Brin’s office and the wing opposite, to place the first two charges. He attached them carefully to the wall at the far end of each, then returned to the center. Next he did the same for the remaining two wings, leaving two charges.

  “What about those?” Brin asked, perplexed. “If there are only four wings, why do we need more than four—what are they, bombs?”

  “Simple,” Alex explained. “We’ll place these two near the center, and we’ll set them off first.

  Then we’ll trigger the outer charges a few seconds later. This will cause the center to begin crumbling, and when the force from the outer explo-sions pushes in, it will crumble the walls inward.

  If it works right, the parking lot outside might get some debris, but no one nearby will be hurt. I doubt they’ll ever find Rand or Dayne, though.”

  “Dayne,” Brin repeated. “That was his name?

  Alex, he was in those videos. He had a knife, and they had you—”

  “Later,” Alex said, giving her another short hug.

  “There will be time later, and I’ll tell you everything. He was a bad man, though, the worst.”

  “What about you?” she asked softly. “Is that what you are? Are you a bad man?”

  “I hope not,” Alex replied, turning back to his work. “They tell me I’m the good guy.”

  He worked as quickly as he could. When she saw him struggle once or twice, Brin took the duffel bag without saying a word. Alex did his best to resist each time his body betrayed him because he knew that when she saw it, she was reminded of his own betrayal, or at least his failure to be honest. One lie led to the next, and it was a wonder that she still stood beside him, or waited for him at all. As close as they’d always been, he now saw what a wall of secrets he’d built between them, and despaired of ever tearing it down completely.

  Finally, the charges were set. Alex checked his watch. It was nearly four-thirty in the morning.

  “How soon until people start getting here?” he asked.

  Brin thought for a moment.

  “The main lobby opens at eight, but there are a lot of people in before that. The earliest I’ve been in is about five-thirty, and I only saw a couple of others at that hour. We have a little bit of time.”

  Alex nodded. “I want to make sure we have time to get out of here and back to the car before I set this off, and I don’t want anyone wandering in in the meantime.”

  When the final two charges were set, he pulled a small black box from the pack. Alex attached it to the first charge, flipped up a small antenna and then pressed a button. A series of lights flashed, flickered and then burned green and steady. He crossed to the second charge and repeated the action with a second box.

/>   “The others are set to respond to the shock of the initial blast,” he explained. “It was the best I could do on short notice.”

  She stared at him and he flushed. Everything he said made his life of lies more clear to her. More than anything, he wanted to try to explain, but what could he possibly say that would mend the rift between them? He turned away to hide his frustration and adjusted the receiver.

  “We’d better get going,” he said at last.

  They turned together, leaving the empty duffel bag on the floor behind them. Alex stumbled, nearly fell, and found that Brin had caught him.

  She slipped under his arm and supported him without comment as they hurried out the service exit, across the parking lot and down the street to where Alex had parked. Then Brin stopped.

  “Alex, I have to get my car,” she said quickly.

  “I have mine,” he said, not understanding, and she slipped out from under his arm, nearly dropping him to the pavement.

  “My car is in the parking lot, Alex. Why would it be there if I’m not inside? If I’m inside, and the building blows up, they’ll think I’m dead, and they’ll come around with condolences. If they find me, they’ll wonder why my car was in the parking lot of a building that went up in a flaming ball, but I wasn’t killed.” She hesitated for a moment, then turned back. “I’ll be right back.” She started to walk away, then called back over her shoulder, “I thought you were supposed to be good at this.”

  Alex watched her go in numb disbelief. She was right, of course, and it was another indication of how tired he was, and how far off his form. He’d almost made a blunder that a first-year agent would laugh at, and his wife had just saved his ass.

  Again.

  THERE WASN’T A BONE in Alex’s body that didn’t hurt. The fight with Dayne had left his arms weak, his legs even more unstable than they had been in the past few days. His shoulder was so sore that his arm hung limp and nearly useless. His head burned like fire and he’d sweated through the bandages and smacked it on something during the night’s adventure. It throbbed and felt as if it might burst through its bandages and explode. He couldn’t tell if that was why he had trouble focusing, or if it was the MS. He had been through hell for the past few days and he had trouble sorting out what was a symptom, what was fatigue and what was a normal casualty of the job. Not knowing made him crazy and he shook it off, trying to concentrate.

  He fought the urge to doze off as he waited, and he knew it was only a few moments before he heard the engine of Brin’s SUV idling beside him, though it felt like hours. She parked, but left her engine running, came around and slid into the passenger side of the Porsche.

  “Okay,” she said.

  Alex nodded. He pulled a black box out from under his seat and placed it in his lap. It was simple, three switches and a few status lights. He flipped the first button and the lights flickered.

  One light glowed amber, and the others flickered, then grew steady. Each was green, like the indica-tors on the receivers had been.

  “They’ve found the signal,” he explained.

  “You ready?”

  “No, but do it and get it over with,” Brin said. Her eyes were dark, hovering somewhere between fear over what was to come, and anticipation. Alex nodded, closed his eyes and flipped the two switches.

  For the first couple of seconds, nothing seemed to happen. Brin turned to look over her shoulder toward the building, started to speak and was cut short by a flash of light. There was no sound at first, then the explosion registered and the car shook. Brin screamed and Alex put an arm around her to steady her. They turned together and watched.

  What looked like a pillar of light shot up the center of the building then, seconds after the initial blast, the other four charges went off. They weren’t exactly in sync, and it sounded like a string of giant, out-of-control firecrackers. There was no hint of sunrise on the horizon, so when the flash died, all that remained was a white cloud illuminated from within, and then, nothing.

  “Wha—” Brin started to speak again, and it was that moment that a cloud of dust and silt began raining down on them. Another wave of energy washed over the Porsche and around it, blowing outward and shaking the windows. The small vehicle shuddered. Brin clutched at her armrest on the right and Alex’s thigh on the left until the moment passed.

  It was hard to see out the windows more than a foot or so.

  “Wait for the dust to clear,” Alex said. “It will be hard to breathe out there for a few minutes. As soon as we can see, we’ll go.”

  “I’ll have to come back,” Brin said.

  He stared at her again. “There’s nothing to come back to,” he said softly.

  She turned to him, glaring. “I know that, Alex.

  I’m sitting right here. I have to come back. I’m the manager of the research lab. If I just don’t show up, how is that going to look? When my people show up for work, and the building is gone, they’re going to be looking to me for guidance. Maybe you’ve seen this kind of thing too much. You sure don’t seem to see the people behind your actions—

  not even when I’m one of them. I have to come back and help try to make sense of this.”

  Alex sat back as if he’d been slapped. It felt that way, actually. She was right, and not for the first time in a very short span his respect for her grew and his confidence in himself dwindled. He was starting to feel very weak and small, and he hated the sensation almost as much as he hated seeing the hurt in her eyes.

  They sat in silence for a few minutes longer, then Brin opened her door and stepped out. She leaned in and caught the stricken look in his eyes, leaned over to kiss his cheek. “I’ll see you at home,” she called as she closed the door.

  Alex sat and waited until she was back behind her own wheel and pulling away from the curb, then he started the Porsche and sat a few minutes longer. He had a lot of things to sort out.

  He slapped the car into gear and pulled out onto the street, fighting the urge to gun it and race home.

  He wanted to, but the professional in him still held sway. If he drew attention to himself now, there might be questions. If they questioned him, they would find out who he was, and if they found out who he was, they’d find Brin, and everything she’d just reminded him of would become a serious problem.

  Of all the times in his long and dangerous career, Alex thought that the next few hours, or days, were going to prove to be the trickiest and most difficult. He hoped he had the strength left to see it through.

  Behind him the last of the dust settled over the rubble that had been the MRIS complex.

  Alex pulled into the driveway and parked beside Brin’s vehicle. He’d taken his time on the way, running the car through an automatic car wash while fighting fatigue and doing his best to just concentrate on getting home. He hadn’t wanted to risk a ticket, and that meant driving with steady control when he felt anything but steady. Fatigue had begun to claim him. His wounds ached, and he felt his shoulder seeping blood into the bandage.

  His legs trembled and made working the gas, the clutch and the brake a challenge.

  Brin had obviously taken less time on the trip.

  Her SUV was dark, and the lights in the living room were lit. He didn’t know what would be waiting for him inside, but he knew he had to get in and face it. If he sat in the Porsche any longer, he thought he’d pass out, and the ache in his heart matched any that his body could serve up.

  He climbed out of the Porsche without bothering to lock it. He staggered to the front door and fell against it for a moment, then gathered his strength and turned the knob. As he entered, he saw that Brin was waiting on the couch. She sat very still, and very stiff. Her back was straight, and she held a bottle of beer. There was another bottle resting on a coaster on the coffee table. Alex took the hint. He limped across the floor, trying to keep his face from registering the pain. She never looked up, never offered to help him, and didn’t wince when he gasped. She sat, and she waited, and somehow
he knew this was part of what was to come, and he took it in stride.

  Alex tried to sit down carefully, but at last, it was too much. His legs trembled and he collapsed, crashing to the couch and nearly causing Brin to spill her drink.

  Finally, she moved. She put her beer on the table and turned to him, tears in her eyes and wrapped herself around him. He started to speak, but she shook her head, and he fell silent. For a long time, she held him, and as she did, he felt some of the tension drain from his limbs, though the pain remained, a dull ache that pounded with his pulse.

  His eyes were heavy, but he fought for control of his thoughts.

  Brin pulled back and studied him. She seemed to be searching for something, and he didn’t know what she wanted to see, but he couldn’t have given her anything but the honest truth of his pain and his love. He had no strength, no ability to think, so he let it all go, hoping she’d sense the truth. They’d always been able to communicate without words.

  It seemed like an eternity that she watched him, then, like lightning, she hauled back and slapped him hard. Alex didn’t pull back, but he was shocked. His head rang from the blow, and he felt a flush of pain on his cheek, newer and sharper than the thousand other pains. She fell on him then, pounding, one fist, then the other, beating against his chest, his arms, until one blow glanced off his shoulder and he cried out from the pain.

  It brought her under control. Her eyes went wide and stricken, and she fell into his arms. She didn’t speak, but he felt wet tears soak his hair and his cheek, running down his neck. When she finally pulled back slightly, he started to speak but she silenced him, this time with a hand over his mouth.

  “Never again,” she said softly. “I trusted you, Alex, trusted you with everything I am, everything I care about—my home, my family, our daughter.

  You lied to me. Not a little lie, or the kind that you can forgive, but the deep, bottomless kind of lie that will always be there, just out of sight. I won’t let that happen twice.”