“You sound comfortable with that,” Jessie said.
“I am. Odds are, now that we’ve all sniffed each other out, Judah’s next move is to try and take us out. If an attack is coming, I want it on the battleground of my choice.”
The phone purred. Harmony listened to it ring, waiting.
“Maybe we should get a jump on that,” Jessie said, “circle back and put a few bullets in him.”
“Can’t. Not until we find out if that briefcase Bobby’s expecting really exists and what’s inside it. I’m not leaving a possible weapon of mass destruction floating around out there, up for grabs.”
April picked up the phone. “Harmony. Everything all right at dinner?”
“Besides, Agent Dominguez is still missing.” She turned to the phone. “We have some leads. What did we miss?”
“Just an update from forensics. They’ve started cracking into Nadine’s financials.”
“Anything good?” Jessie asked.
“‘Good’ isn’t the word I’d use,” April said. “‘Significant,’ perhaps. When she arrived at that office party, Nadine mentioned she wanted to double-check an important transaction, correct?”
“Something like that,” Jessie said.
“That morning, her accountant did authorize a sizable transfer of U.S. currency.”
“How sizable and to who?” Harmony asked.
“Five million dollars,” April replied. “It was sent to an escrow account at a bank in the Cayman Islands. No indication of what it was for, and we don’t have more information than that—not yet, anyway. The Caymans are a British territory, also a lucrative tax haven for less scrupulous American investors.”
Jessie whistled. “That…is money. Escrow account?”
“A third party,” Harmony said. “Sometimes a safeguard for a sketchy deal. Say I offer to pay you to do something for me, but I’m not a hundred percent sure you’ll get the job done, and you’re not sure I’ll pay up. So I put the money in an escrow account that neither of us controls. That’s proof that the money’s real. Once you show proof that you upheld your end of the bargain, the escrow holder sends you the cash.”
“So nobody gets screwed.”
“Exactly,” Harmony said. “Nadine’s not a bastion of trust, and anyone who deals with her knows she can’t be trusted. Probably not the first time she’s used a system like this.”
“Five mil, though? She’s a demon who can mess with people’s minds. Also, she has her own cult of assassins. What does she need to spend that kind of money on?”
“As soon as we know, I’ll pass the word along,” April said.
Harmony thanked her and broke the connection. Her next call was to the medical examiner.
“It’s Agent Black,” she said. “I hope I’m not calling too late.”
“Not at all, we tend to burn the midnight oil around here. I wanted to let you know that we started preliminary blood work on your shark-attack victim. Found something a little strange. I’m going to run more tests—”
“What did you find?”
“An enzyme called 5’-nucleotidase. Also, heightened levels of serotonin.”
“Serotonin?” Jessie said. “Isn’t that the happy chemical your brain makes? Like when you fall in love or look at cat pictures on the Internet?”
“Normally, yes. Serotonin in the brain creates positive neural feedback. But when it enters the bloodstream, the effects are quite different and…much less pleasant. A victim can lose control of their muscles, even go into violent seizures.”
Harmony’s lips tightened in a thin line. They knew Cooper had been tortured. They thought—hoped—that the brutal cuts marring every inch of her back had been the extent of it.
“Serotonin, in combination with that enzyme,” the medical examiner said, “is only found in one source I’m aware of. Stingray venom.”
“She was stung by a stingray?” Harmony said.
“That’s why I’m rerunning the tests. Because looking at these results, factoring in the falloff over time…it looks to me like she was stung repeatedly, over a course of at least three hours. And stingrays only attack when they feel threatened. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Thank you,” Harmony said, her voice flat. “Please call me as soon as you know more.”
She ended the call. She looked over at Jessie.
“We know one spot with sharks and stingrays,” Jessie said, “and Judah Cranston owns the place.”
“We didn’t see anything unusual the first time.”
“Yeah, well, some places look a little different after dark. What do you say we break in and organize our own private tour?”
15.
They weren’t the first to arrive.
The big wavy sheet-metal box looked like a melting ice cube in the Tampa dark. Above the barn doors, Nautilus Conservation Research was painted on a plank of weathered driftwood; with no lights in the parking lot, the faded script became untraceable glyphs, wet and foreign.
The door was open, just a crack.
Jessie killed the headlights. She pulled into the parking lot at the far edge, silenced the engine, and pointed.
“Either somebody forgot to lock up when they left, making this the luckiest and easiest break-in we’ve ever committed, or—”
Harmony unbuckled her seatbelt. “We’re never that lucky and things are never that easy.”
“Agreed.”
Jessie reached up and tapped the dome light, making sure it wouldn’t turn on when they opened the car doors. Light was the enemy now. She bent forward and carefully touched her eyes, taking out her amber contact lenses. Her true color, wolf-turquoise, gleamed like smoldering sapphires.
They moved in silence, gently opening the car doors, not shutting them all the way as they stepped out into the lot. Harmony took point, crouched low, skirting the long way around so that anyone inside the building wouldn’t catch a glimpse of movement through the cracked barn door. At the corner of the wavy steel box, Harmony paused. She pointed two fingers in the other direction, toward the long and windowless side of the building. Jessie nodded.
They hadn’t seen any other ways in or out on the tour, but that didn’t mean they didn’t exist. While Jessie held her post out front, watching the door, Harmony jogged a long circuit along the research lab’s outer wall. Her shoes were light on loose dirt and gravel, rustling soft as the hot night winds.
No side doors. No back doors either. Nautilus was a killing box with a single point of entry. She didn’t like that. They’d have to open the door wide enough to get through. That meant making noise and giving whoever was inside one, maybe two seconds of advance warning. She could empty her gun in two seconds. Any competent shooter could.
She circled around and met up with Jessie, flanking the barn door. Jessie crouched and leaned in, squinting; her eyes let her see in the dark as well as any natural-born predator. She waved the flat of her hand from side to side. No movement. Then again, with the bulky tanks taking up most of the research lab floor, someone could still be in there. Either they’d already left or they were lying low, lurking behind cover.
A flurry of hand signals laid out the order of battle. Harmony grabbed hold of the barn door with both hands, fingers curling around the warm metal, as Jessie’s pistol slithered from its calfskin holster. Three. Two.
One. The door groaned on its unoiled track as Harmony hauled it backward. It shuddered to a stop and Jessie was already moving, charging inside and darting left, Harmony on her heels but hooking around to go right. The doorway was a perfect shooter’s alley illuminated by moonlight, and their silhouettes were moving targets. First priority was getting clear and grabbing cover.
Harmony ran and slid, her shoes hissing on the water-spotted concrete as she dropped, landing on one knee with her head down behind the rounded brick of the stingray pool. She turned into a statue, gun braced in a two-hand grip, ears perked.
Water rippled, languid as the stingrays glided sleepily through their sandy
pool. A generator thrummed softly in the dark.
She poked her head up, just a fraction of an inch.
Gentle beacons of light dotted the laboratory floor. Monitors on the sleek glass workstations, processing data from the tanks through the night, pumped out feedback in scrolling neon graphs. The tall glass tanks caught the light and tossed it between themselves and multiplied it, turning the chamber into an inky hall of mirrors. One of the sharks swam close to the glass, transformed by the darkness, a blurry and alien behemoth.
Harmony stepped out, slow and easy. Jessie was ten feet away, hunkered down behind a workstation, using an office chair for flimsy cover. She pointed upward. Harmony followed her line of sight to the security camera over the entrance. The camera dangled from its mounting, plastic box shattered and leaking its guts on a tattered wire. Crude, but effective. Higher up on the wall, over to the left, it looked like another camera had gotten the same treatment courtesy of a bullet.
Harmony moved in, circling the first tanks, trying to stay clear of the monitor screens and keep her profile turned so anyone hiding would have less to shoot at. Jessie’s waving hand snagged her attention. She’d spotted the intruder.
They weren’t hiding at all. They were just distracted.
Up on the balcony at the back of the lab, where the server racks and biggest workstations were kept safely away from the water below, a figure stood hunched over one of the monitors. The intruder was dressed for a race, face hidden behind the opaque shroud of a motorcycle helmet, form sheathed in a full black leather bodysuit with armored joints and lime-green piping. The biker’s gloved hands whispered out keyboard commands. Then they plucked a USB stick from the system’s tower, making it vanish.
The twin open staircases to the top were bare metal. No chance of sneaking up on the intruder without being heard. Instead they fanned out, Harmony blocking the left staircase, Jessie taking the right. Then Jessie cleared her throat.
“No doubt about it,” she said. “Something fishy is going on here.”
“Show us your hands,” Harmony called out. “Step back from the computer, and keep your hands raised and empty.”
As the biker obeyed, leather gloves tentatively going up, Harmony shot Jessie a sidelong glance.
“‘Something fishy’? Really?”
“Hey, I’ve been wanting to say that since we got here. You should be amazed I showed that much restraint.”
The biker turned, standing on the balcony above. Harmony saw herself and Jessie reflected as featureless blobs in the helmet’s visor.
“Now come downstairs.” Harmony framed the biker in her sights. “Toward me.”
The biker paused, helmet slightly tilted, as if making a decision.
Then the biker charged. Straight toward the balcony railing, flipping up and over and plummeting twelve feet down to the concrete floor. They hit the ground, tucked and rolled, then sprang to their feet. Harmony’s finger brushed her trigger. No shot. The biker had landed squarely between her and Jessie, making sure neither would open fire.
Metal flashed between the biker’s fingers. Not a gun. A brass disk, about the size of a soup-can lid. It trailed a hot-pink neon glow as it whipped downward in the figure’s grip. The biker’s other hand was bent back, baring a little skin between their glove and the wrist of their bodysuit. The edge of the disk ripped across the exposed flesh, slicing like a razor, spattering blood onto their boots.
The intruder threw the disk like a ninja star, straight down at the water-stained concrete.
Everything went white. Harmony felt herself falling back, landing hard as an explosion washed out the world with a crump of raw sound like a concert speaker blowing out. All she could hear after that was the ringing of an endless bell.
Her vision swam back, blurry, images overlapping and sliding in and out of focus. Jessie was pushing herself to her feet. She shouted something. Harmony shook her head, couldn’t hear a word. She got up, stumbling, following in Jessie’s wake.
The biker was on the run, charging out the barn door. Their twin was out in the parking lot: another rider in black leather, straddling a revved-up motorbike. The runner jumped into the saddle behind the pilot, slapped his shoulder, and the bike lurched into action. It shot across the parking lot like a bullet, bounced as it hit a rough patch of gravel and swung out into the street, rocketing out of sight behind a line of swaying palm trees.
Jessie leaned with one palm against the barn door, catching her breath. Harmony staggered up behind her. Jessie said something. She almost caught it, her hearing coming back to her in throbbing waves as the impact faded, but she couldn’t make it out.
“What?” Harmony asked, louder than she meant to.
“I said I’ve got an ongoing list of people who need their asses kicked,” Jessie snarled, turning, “and it just got longer. C’mon, let’s check the balcony and see if we can figure out what kind of data they were after. Might tell us who they are.”
* * *
“Shipping records,” Kevin said, hunched over his terminal in the belly of the Imperator. The biker had left the balcony workstation unlocked when they were interrupted, and Jessie fired over a full rundown of every file accessed after the break-in.
Harmony’s voice echoed over his headphones. “For the research lab?”
“Yeah, going back about a year. Everything that’s been shipped to and from…wait a second.”
“What is it?” Harmony asked.
He clicked his mouse, highlighting a few isolated lines in neon yellow.
“Not just the lab. A few of these shipments—a couple of new centrifuges, a Unisys mainframe—were directed to Judah Cranston’s house. Also, I don’t know if this is weird, but they make a lot of purchases from chemical companies—”
“It’s a research facility.”
“Yeah, but…” Kevin frowned at the screen. He started copying and pasting, rearranging the data into a new picture. “A lot of companies. Small orders with a lot of overlap, placed on different days, and these aren’t super-specialized firms; just one company could probably provide ninety percent of whatever they need.”
No response. A pensive silence filled his headset.
“Boss?”
“They’re spreading the purchases out,” Harmony said. “Makes it harder to build a paper trail. We’ve seen that before. Do we know what they ordered? Specific chemicals and quantities?”
“Not from this. But the records do tell us exactly who they do business with. Tomorrow morning I can make some calls, do a little social engineering. Are you looking for anything in particular?”
“Find out what they bought from different suppliers, and how those chemicals potentially interact,” Harmony said. “Like I said, we’ve seen that kind of purchasing pattern before, mostly from people trying to stay under ATF’s radar. Terrorist cells.”
“You think Judah’s building a bomb?” Kevin asked.
“I think we need to find out for certain. You’ve done all you can for tonight. Tell everybody to pack it in, go to the hotel, and get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow’s going to be a busy day.”
“What about you and Jessie?”
“We’ve got a little more work to do,” she said.
16.
Harmony had recovered the brass disk from the scene of the crime. It nestled in a plastic baggie, one razored edge still flecked with the biker’s blood. Both sides were carefully engraved with a jagged seven-pointed star, its angles uneven and twisted glyphs etched between each of its points. Before the magical weapon went off, it had gleamed in the dark. Now the metal was tarnished, sooty like a burned-out light bulb.
“We’ve seen this before, too,” she said to Jessie.
They’d taken the mystery back to the hotel. The pink Mediterranean tower of the Vinoy Renaissance loomed over the oceanside, where sleeping yachts and ivory sailboats bobbed in the resort’s private marina. They ended up at a cozy side table in Marchand’s Bar and Grill. The hotel’s rococo flair and quiet ele
gance spread from the central bar, crimson upholstery under dangling glass-dome chandeliers, to the tall, thin windows framed in geometric leading.
Harmony carefully slipped the wrapped-up disk into her breast pocket as a waiter in a trim vest swung by. Jessie glanced up from her menu.
“I’ll have…ooh. A Black Manhattan.”
“We’re still working,” Harmony said.
“Two Black Manhattans.”
“Seriously,” Harmony said as the waiter swooped away. “There’s a chance Neptune might show up looking for me tonight. I need a clear head.”
“You need to relax. Especially if your new girlfriend shows up. One drink.”
“We’ve seen this disk before,” Harmony said, steering the subject into a more comfortable lane.
“The Bogeyman case,” Jessie said. “When we faced off with the Gresham brothers, they dropped one of those on us.”
“One of the many, many occult relics that wandered away from our evidence vaults twenty minutes after we turned it in.”
“You think it’s the same disk?”
Harmony shook her head. “No. You saw the before-and-after. It burned itself out after it went off; this is a one-shot deal. They might have been crafted by the same magician, though. The Gresham brothers were working for Fontaine.”
“Our favorite demonic bounty hunter.”
“He supplied them their gear. Now he gets his gear from all over the place—”
“But we saw that biker take a twelve-foot fall like it was nothing,” Jessie said. “No pure-blooded human can pull that off.”
“And they were armed with demon tech. Somebody from the courts of hell is nosing around Judah Cranston’s business.”
“Not sure who that complicates things for: us or him. Might be able to use that, if we can figure out what their angle is. Tell you one thing I know for certain.”
The waiter returned. He set down a pair of Old Fashioned glasses, filled with an inky black cocktail. Harmony reluctantly sniffed hers, then took a sip. The barrel-aged whiskey had a robust, rough, burnt-wood flavor as it seared down her throat, tinged with sweet caramel from a splash of Averna liqueur.
Right to the Kill (Harmony Black Book 5) Page 11