by Matt Lincoln
“Trash,” he sighed.
“Gross.” There went the feeling of joy at their accomplishment. “We’ll bring a garbage net next time.”
“Yeah. Look around over there. Maybe you’ll have better luck.”
Bridget spent a while picking through lumps under the silt and scanning the area with her dive light. They were the first divers but not the first visitors to make it to the bottom. Richard Branson worked with Fabien Cousteau and went to the bottom less than a year earlier with a submersible operator. They’d mapped the area and found a few things, including two of the three bodies they expected to find, a soda bottle, and a GoPro. Remembering that made her touch hers again. Yep, it was still safe and sound in its special case.
Something unusual poked up through the silt. Bridget swam over and poked at what looked like a thin towel. It was blue or teal, but it was hard to tell within the puff of silt she disturbed to pull it out. Unsurprising, maybe, but it was still disappointing to see everyday things in a seemingly untouched area.
“Shit…”
Bridget froze with towel in her hand. “Are you okay?” she asked.
Dare was slow to answer. “I have a leak in the suit…”
The connection crackled worse than before. Alarmed, she looked around for the telltale glow of his light. Everything was dark, and only her light penetrated the poison cloud.
“I don’t see you,” she ventured as she grabbed for her personal sonar. “Flash me, baby.”
He didn’t laugh, but she finally saw a dim spot a little way off. She pointed her sonar and was relieved when it pinged right where she’d seen the tiny glow.
“Coming.” Bridget kicked over to where she found Dare bent over and holding his gut. She played her light across his suit and possible areas for the hydrogen sulfide to penetrate but saw nothing out of the ordinary. “Where’s the leak?”
“Dunno,” he muttered. “My hands are burning, an’ m’ head hurts.”
His gloves appeared to be intact as she took a closer look. The little towel she’d found kept floating in the way, so she dropped it. Whatever was going on, she needed both hands free to help Dare.
“Haley, we’re starting ascent,” Bridget radioed. There was no reply. “Haley, do you copy?”
“Soundin’ crackly,” Dare said.
“You, too. Let’s get kicking,” she ordered. As she gave him her left hand, she could’ve sworn she felt a tingle, as well. She dismissed it as psychosomatic. “Think about tonight on the beach. It’ll make you feel better.”
“Aye-aye, ma’am.”
Bridget rolled her eyes. How she loved that man… and worried about him. This was the wrong time and place for something to go wrong.
Deep dives like this were for the best of the best only. The deeper a person dove, the more often and longer their stops on the way up. Barring an extreme emergency, decompression came first, and symptoms of poisoning came last. For Bridget and Dare, it was the most miserable ascent of their diving careers.
They got Haley back on the radio by the time they hit the first stop.
“I was getting worried,” the younger woman told them. “Did you forget mic checks?”
“We were fine talking with each other, but I guess we got distracted,” Bridget confessed. “Your uncle is having some issues with the H2S. I think it’s breached his gloves.”
“No way! Okay, I’ll have his bunk ready when you all get up here.”
After that, they maintained their check-ins. Halfway up, Bridget decided her hand really was burning, and her head and stomach didn’t feel so hot, either. Dare was in worse shape, though. He kept groaning, but he was able to stick to the planned stops. By the time they surfaced, both were ready for a good night’s sleep.
Haley helped the boat captain lug both of them out of the water, and then she tended to her uncle while Bridget rested at the back of the boat. Nausea came and went, but the headache and burning skin on her hand wouldn’t ease up. She got her gloves off and rinsed her hands several times to be sure there wasn’t any lingering poison. A thorough inspection showed no tears in her left glove.
“He’s out like a light,” Haley announced when she climbed up from the cabin. She crouched next to Bridget. “You don’t look much better.”
“I can’t figure how it got through,” Bridget told her.
Haley shook her head. “I’ll have to get a closer look back home. We’re running late already.”
The sun was low, and Bridget realized she and Dare were going to miss their usual post-dive beach date.
“You want us to stay another day or two?” she offered. “We can take a later flight and help examine the suits.”
Haley made a face. “I love you and Uncle Dare, but you two have got to get home.”
“And out of your condo?” Bridget asked with a laugh. She accepted Haley’s help with getting her gear off. “Got some hot university student waiting for us to clear out?”
Haley snorted. “I’ll take care of this stuff. There’s some broth down there if you want it.”
Bridget did find it, and the broth did ease her stomach. When they reached the condo later that night, she and Dare both felt better but not well enough to sneak out to the beach like when they were kids. Instead, they passed out for the night and made it to the airport with time to spare in the morning.
At bag check-in, Bridget noticed Dare still seemed a little pale.
“Do you want to wait a day?” She checked for a fever, but his cheeks were nice and cool. “If you’re not up to flying—”
“Let’s just go,” he snapped. He caught himself. “Sorry, love. Hey, I’ll feel better once we’re home.”
As they made their way through the metal detectors, a security person quietly took them aside.
“I apologize for the inconvenience, but I have a question for you,” the young man said. “One of your bags set off a radiation detector the first time it went through. When we sent it again, nothing happened.” He looked between them as if hoping they’d have answers. “Did you happen to go anywhere unusual?”
“We went on a few dives,” Bridget answered. “Last I checked, there weren’t any power stations down there.” She tried to keep a sense of humor in her tone, but she was so very tired that she wasn’t sure it sounded right. “No, honey, I don’t think so.”
“Okay. Well, we’ll send it through once more,” he decided. “If it’s clear, we’ll send it onto your plane.”
“Thank you,” Bridget said.
The bag sailed on through, and they boarded shortly after. Dare took the window seat, and Bridget used his upper arm for a pillow. She dozed off shortly after they hit cruising altitude.
Bridget woke up to someone placing an oxygen mask to her face. She didn’t remember getting out of her seat, but now she was on her back underneath the harsh sun and being rolled somewhere. Between the thunder of passenger planes coming and going and the wing they passed under, she realized she was on the tarmac of an airport far busier than in Belize City.
“Mrs. Lemon, can you hear me?” someone yelled over the noise of a jet engine. “Do you know where you are?”
Her throat hurt too much to speak, so she mouthed the word “airport.”
They reached an ambulance and loaded her in. One medic spoke on the radio while the other checked her vitals and talked with her.
“Do you know which airport?”
That seemed important, but the answer eluded her. All she recalled was snuggling into Dare’s shoulder on a plane. She shook her head. She didn’t know where she was, and she didn’t know where her husband was.
“Mrs. Lemon, you and your husband appear to be very ill and are going to the hospital,” the paramedic told her. “Welcome to Miami.”
2
My siren ripped through the late night, and my dashboard lights threw reds and blues against buildings as we raced past. The black Mustang ahead swerved around traffic and almost hit someone trying to cross the street.
“He�
��s gonna kill someone,” I growled. “Where’s air support?”
Holm checked the tracking app on his tablet and shook his head. “Too far out. We gotta stop this.”
A Miami Metro squad car dropped in behind us. Pretty soon, there’d be a posse of police cars out only making the situation worse. They had no idea we were chasing a human trafficker we’d been hunting for months. Calling them off wasn’t an option, though.
The car juked left, down a side street. He almost hit the oncoming cars, but the drivers stopped in time. As I turned and sped past, I heard the crunch of someone getting rear-ended.
“Robbie, get on the horn to that Metro guy. Have him stop for that collision.” That’d get one squad car out of the way. “How’s CGIS looking?”
“Parker’s almost caught up with us,” Holm reported. “He’s two blocks back. Why hasn’t TJ hacked this guy’s car yet?”
“It doesn’t work that way, partner. Not yet.”
The brake lights glowed for a second on the Mustang, but the driver decided to charge forward. Water splashed into the air as he hit a flooded street.
“Shit, shit, shit,” I swore as I floored it down the submerged road. “Robbie, is the tide coming or going?”
“High, and it gets deep in this neighborhood.”
“He better hope it doesn’t drown my car.” I followed the black muscle car around a corner, and the water didn’t get any better. “I’m gonna make him clean every damned inch of it!”
Holm’s dry laugh didn’t help. “Yeah, I’m sure that’s allowed.”
The Mustang dropped speed and lost control about the time my Charger’s engine sucked in water and died. Inertia kicked in, and we kept going forward as the car took to floating, like hydroplaning, only worse. My feet felt wet a second later.
I slammed the car into park, not that it’d do much good at that point, and grabbed my tactical helmet and rifle from the backseat as Holm kept an eye on the Mustang, and then we switched so Holm could gear up.
“He’s trying to restart it,” I laughed. “That’s not happening.”
I opened my door. Water crashed in, and the Charger dropped the two inches back to the ground. I jumped into the knee-deep slew of water and sewage and crouched behind my door with the rifle. The streetlights were patchy in that area, and our suspect, Grundy Walsh, was a tricky son of a bitch. Tricky other than not knowing how to deal with Miami’s streets at high tide.
“Hands out the window, Walsh,” I shouted over my car’s speaker.
The Mustang rocked around, which was never a good sign. A scream echoed across the stilled water and off the houses.
“Come on,” Holm tried. “Make a good choice here. Give it up.”
The Mustang bumped into an SUV parked at the edge of the street and came to a rest. The passenger door was trapped against the larger vehicle, which only left the driver’s door, and we couldn’t see through the heavy window tint. Fortunately, the steady whomp-whomp of the CGIS chopper announced the arrival of the ultra-bright spotlight.
“You’re not going anywhere, Walsh.” At that point, I wasn’t sure if the trafficker could hear me, but I needed to try. He had at least one hostage, maybe two.
As if on cue, the driver’s side door eased open. A young woman emerged first, but her right arm was clenched by our suspect. He exited the car while holding a handgun to her head.
“Back off, or she’s dead!” Walsh looked around with a wild set about his eyes. “Let me go, and you can have her.”
I leaned into my car to get Holm’s attention from his position behind the other door on the Charger.
“Robbie, have CGIS back the chopper off. Get Parker to go around a block away if he can. That Jeep’ll give him some cover.”
“On it.”
As the chopper backed off a little with the spotlight, I saw a shadow in the yard behind the Jeep. Then another. Looked like Parker and his partner, Yvonne Bell, were on my wavelength already.
Walsh shoved his hostage forward and surveyed the growing police and Fed presences in the area. This wasn’t going to end well for him, not if he didn’t drop it. SWAT would take his ass out if we didn’t first.
“There’s no way out, buddy,” I shouted over the commotion. “Work with us, and the prosecution might go lighter on you.”
“You assholes are supposed to negotiate!” Walsh pointed his gun in my direction and then waved it around. No one dared to fire and possibly hit the girl. “I swear I’ll kill her.”
“Do that, and you die,” I told him.
Something launched out of the car and into Walsh’s back. At first, I could’ve sworn it was a wildcat, but it was another girl, this one all fury and dressed in black. She slammed Walsh face-first into the floodwater, which shocked him into letting go of the first hostage and his gun.
I winced but didn’t feel bad for the goon as we rushed him. The girl in black screamed in at least two languages and had to be pulled off of his back before she drowned him. Not that I would have minded. Walsh was one of the traffickers we’d chased down since breaking up the Trader’s organization a few weeks earlier.
Our shadowy backup stayed on the dry lawn behind the Jeep, of course. Parker stepped into a streetlamp’s glow as I cuffed the drenched suspect.
“Is this your new thing, Marston?” Parker called out. “I heard you smelled like all sorts of roses on the first night of your last big case.”
I flipped him a friendly gesture as we dragged Walsh up to the grassy area. Bell rolled her eyes and turned away toward the trafficking survivors.
“This’ll take a couple of extra showers,” I admitted, but then I frowned. “These folks don’t get to wash it out of their neighborhood, though.” I nodded toward the growing crowd of onlookers.
Parker rubbed the back of his neck. “True. Anyway, I got word we’re taking Walsh. Some weird jurisdictional stuff.” He grinned. “I’ll see if my boss will buy you some new shoes for your trouble.”
I gladly handed Walsh over to the CGIS agents. My agency had more than enough work taking down the Trader’s trafficking network, thanks to a database our people recovered. Women and girls were being rescued almost every day throughout the Caribbean and southern East Coast.
“Get ATF on this guy,” Holm said as he walked up from the Mustang. “He has a friggin’ armory in the trunk.”
“And yet he turned his back on one girl. One. Girl.” I shook my head at Walsh, who looked away. “Guess you didn’t break that one’s spirit, after all. What a shame we had to stop her from drowning ya.”
The intense system of breaking their victims’ spirits and remolding them into perfectly obedient Stepford slaves had been a hardcore part of the Trader’s process, as was the branding process. The trident and flower tattoo was plainly visible on both of the survivors we rescued that night. One on the calf, and one on an upper arm.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. The boss, Miami MBLIS Director Diane Ramsey, was ringing. I stepped away.
“What’s up, Diane?”
“Ethan, we have a sensitive situation at Miami-Dade General,” she told me in a strained tone. “You and Robbie need to get over there. I’ll message you the details.”
I went over and told Holm about our new instructions.
“‘Sensitive situation’?” he echoed. “I hate when she says that.”
“Yeah. I got a bad feeling about it, partner.”
Little did I know it’d be more than a bad feeling in no time flat.
3
We arrived at the hospital after quick showers at our MBLIS field office. I doubted I’d ever get the reek of raw sewage out of my skin, but a thorough scrubbing worked for the time being. I was less happy about having to sign out a pool car to replace my Charger.
The Lemons shared a private room in a quiet section of Miami-Dade General. The hospital had only been open two years, but it had become the state-of-the-art lead in Southern Florida in no time. Holm and I followed Doctor Schvalla Hill to an empty waiting room near
our living victims. Living for now. Dr. Hill closed the door to the room and leaned back against it.
“Bridget and Darrel Lemon are suffering from acute radiation poisoning,” Dr. Hill informed us. “We have an idea of how they were exposed, but we can’t rule out other possibilities. They started showing symptoms during their flight home to Miami from a diving trip in Belize. Possibly earlier, but their memories are hazy, especially Mr. Lemon.”
I blinked, and my breath caught in my throat. That’s what Diane meant by “sensitive situation.”
“As in exposure to radioactive materials?” I asked in disbelief. “What about other passengers and people they were in contact with?”
“Everyone on the plane has gone through decontamination,” she told me. “The Lemons’ niece is going through it now in Belize. People are being quiet for now, but it’s going to get out.”
Next to me, Holm looked as lost as I felt. “How does this even happen?”
“That’s why we called you,” Dr. Hill answered. “They’ve been decontaminated, so it’s safe for you to go in.” Her stern brows and the set of her mouth made me feel like I was in the principal’s office. “Speak quietly and don’t turn up the lights. Mrs. Lemon will speak with you. Mr. Lemon… he may sleep through it.”
I shook Dr. Hill’s hand. Her vice-like grip served as a warning.
“I expect your agency to protect my patients better than the last time I met you.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I answered with as much sincerity as I could summon. Although we did our best to prevent a tragedy a few weeks earlier at Miami-Dade, tragedy came calling anyway when a witness-survivor was kidnapped and staff shot. “We’re doing everything we can.” Like before.
Dr. Hill gave a sharp nod and then led us into the room.
“Mrs. Lemon, Special Agents Marston and Holm are here to speak with you. They’re with MBLIS.”
The woman in the bed closest to us was sitting up with a book. She laid the book on her lap and offered a slight smile. She looked over to the other bed and took a deep breath.