Taking a chance, she opened herself up a bit. “I don’t believe it was an accident, Director Crowe.”
“Painter is fine, but why do you think that?”
“I saw a helicopter leaving the base between the time the mayday was sent out and when everything went to hell. It was the same helicopter that offloaded a squad of mercenaries atop that hill. They must have spotted me fleeing from the toxic cloud.”
“And went after you to eliminate the only witness.”
She nodded. “They came darned close to accomplishing that.”
“Can you describe the helicopter? Did you note any insignia or numbers?”
She shook her head. “But I did get a photo of it.”
She took a small measure of enjoyment at his shocked expression. As she pulled out her cell phone, she related what had happened at the ghost town, going into as exacting detail as she could. She also called up the camera roll on her phone and went through the pictures. She stopped at the photo of the giant carrying a flamethrower.
“This guy seemed to be the leader of the assault team.”
Painter took her phone and zoomed in on his features. “You caught a clear shot of him. Good job.”
She felt a flush of pride. “Hopefully he’s in some database.”
“I hope so, too. We’ll definitely run him through facial recognition software, both here and abroad. We’ll also get the photo of the helicopter into law enforcement bulletins across the Southwest. They can’t have gotten too far.”
“They also have a prisoner,” she warned. “One of the scientists. Or at least the man was wearing a white lab coat. He tried to escape, but that guy with the flamethrower recaptured him, dragged him back to the helicopter and took off.”
Painter looked up from the phone. “Did you get a picture of their prisoner?”
“’Fraid not. By that time I had already hid my phone with Nikko.” She patted the husky’s side.
Painter studied her closer, then spoke as if reading her mind. “Let me guess. You hoped that once they killed you, the enemy would leave. Then later someone would find Nikko and your phone.”
She was impressed. She had mentioned none of that, but the man had figured it all out anyway.
Lisa spoke up. “If they kidnapped someone, I’d lay money on it being Dr. Hess. He would be the highest-value target at that base.”
Painter turned to Jenna.
She shrugged. “I couldn’t say if it was him. It all happened so fast, and I never got a good look at his face. But it could have been Dr. Hess. Still, there’s one other thing. Whoever it was, he was trying to run into that toxic cloud before he was recaptured, like he would rather die than be taken away.”
“Which suggests the prisoner must have secrets he didn’t want the enemy knowing.” Painter sounded darkly worried.
“Secrets about what?” she asked.
“That’s what we need to find out.”
“I’d like to help.”
Painter studied her for a long moment. “I’ll admit we could use your eyes during this initial investigation. There may have been some detail you’ve forgotten or didn’t think was important at the time. But I must warn you, it will be dangerous.”
“It’s already dangerous.”
“But I believe it’ll get much worse. Whatever was started here is likely the tip of something larger and far more deadly.”
“Then luckily I’ve got help.” Jenna placed her palm on Nikko’s head. He thumped his tail, ready for anything. “What do we do first?”
Painter glanced to Dr. Cummings. “At first light, we go into that toxic wasteland. Look for clues to what went down.”
“And perhaps to what got out,” his companion added.
Jenna felt the blood coldly settle into her lower gut as she pictured reentering the trap she had just escaped.
What have I gotten myself into?
7
April 28, 3:39 A.M. EDT
Arlington, Virginia
“Why are we always stuck in a basement?” Monk asked.
Gray glanced over to his best friend and colleague. They were presently buried in the sublevels of DARPA’s new headquarters on Founders Square in Arlington, Virginia. They had accompanied Dr. Lucius Raffee back here. The Biological Technologies Offices took up a large swath of real estate on the seventh floor. Upstairs, the director of BTO continued to make calls, trying to rouse someone in the middle of the night who had more than a cursory knowledge of the research going on at the facility in California.
In the meantime, they had their own business down here.
“In your case,” Gray answered, stretching a kink from his neck as he sat at a computer station, “you’re destined to either be holed up in a basement or swinging from some bell tower.”
“Is that a Quasimodo crack?” Monk scowled from a neighboring station.
“You are developing a bit of a hunch.”
“It’s from hauling two growing girls in my arms all day. It’d give anyone a bit of a hitch in their back.”
The third member of their team made a small sound of exasperation and huddled deeper over his keyboard, typing rapidly. Kat had sent Jason Carter to run a digital forensics analysis on the base’s files and logs, to cull through the mountains of data, inventory requests, and countless e-mails for some clue as to what was really going on in California.
The three of them were encased in DARPA’s main data center, a small room with a window that overlooked banks of black mainframes, each the size of a refrigerator. The walls of the subbasement were three feet thick and insulated against any form of electronic intrusion or attack.
“I think I found something,” Jason said, looking up bleary-eyed. An empty Starbucks cup rested by his elbow. “I ran a search crawler through the stacks, using both Dr. Hess’s name and Social Security number. I cross-referenced that with the term neogenesis.”
“What did you find?”
“The search ended up still pulling out several terabytes of information. It would take days to sift through it all. So I refined the crawl to cross-reference with VX gas.”
“One of the toxins used as a countermeasure by the base?”
He nodded. “I figured those files might address whatever organism that poison was engineered to kill. But look at the first folder that popped up.”
Gray crossed over to his station, joined by Monk. He read the file name.
D.A.R.W.I.N.
“What the hell,” Monk muttered.