Page 31

No good choice. Let a fellow American operative burn to death. Do his duty. Heart versus head.

The Special Forces code of ‘Leave no man behind,’ imprinted on his soul in blood, sweat, and tears, burned like acid. The McCloud creed, ‘We take care of our own,’ added its chorus to the urgency screaming in his head.

Swearing in a steady stream, he turned for the house and Piper.She had better be dead, because he was going to kill her for making him let the Palestinian get away.

He paused long enough to test the front door knob for heat—cool to the touch. Safe to go in. A small vestibule greeted him, smelling of bleach and antiseptics. A staircase disappeared upstairs to his left. He stepped into the room on his right and saw the source of the smoke. A pile of bedframes and thin mattresses were haphazardly stacked in a bonfire in the middle of the room and flames rose from the pile almost to the ceiling, which was already turning black.

Whoever had set this fire should have opened the windows to provide additional oxygen to the blaze. But far be it from him to tell an arsonist how to do his work.

He ran down the central hall to the back of the house and found an empty kitchen. Ian backtracked, checking the other rooms on the first floor quickly. Where in the hell was Piper?

He returned all the way to the front door. The fire was starting to crackle and pop as the wooden bedframes caught fire. That blaze was going to get hot fast. And then this old, dry, wood frame house was going to go up all at once.

He raced upstairs, calling Piper’s name. The carpet in the room over the bonfire was smoking and threatening to burst into flames. He went room to room but saw no sign of her. Where was she?

Had those bastards knocked her out and stowed her body somewhere? He checked the closets and behind the desultory furniture, anywhere she could be lying unconscious, about to be roasted alive.

The last door in the back of the upper floor revealed the only fully furnished bedroom. Refrigerator-esque cold skittered across his skin in the dim space. A double bed took up one wall, and a low cot covered with a lavender comforter sat in thefar corner underneath what must be an industrial strength air-conditioner. Even now, the thing was humming away, blasting the room with chilly air.

Good luck against the inferno to come. All across the top of the unit, small blue bottles stood in a neat row. He picked one up to have a look. The label was written in some Arabesque language he did not read. He snapped a quick photo of it on his cell phone before tossing it in a pocket on his utility vest.

He threw open the closet door and peered in just long enough to rule it out as Piper’s hiding place.

Unfamiliar and altogether unpleasant, panic started to claw at his gut.

He tore back downstairs. The ceiling of the living room was on fire now, along with the curtains and exterior wall. Heat roared toward him, and the fire was getting loud.

He bolted past it one more time to the back of the house. He would’ve seen her go out the back door from his vantage point, and she definitely hadn’t gone out the front door. Shehadto be in here, somewhere.

Where. Was. She?

He skidded to a frustrated stop in the kitchen. The first door he threw open was a pantry. The second door revealed a staircase, however. Basement.

Casting a worried glance over his shoulder at the fire quickly consuming the front of the house, he raced down the steps into the dark.

He narrowly avoided hitting his head and was forced to slow down. “Piper! Are you down here?”

“Ian? What the hell are you doing here?”

“Saving your?—“

He rounded the corner and skidded to a halt in the middle of a high-tech lab set-up that looked like it belonged at a pharmaceutical firm. “What’s this?” he blurted.

“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” she muttered over her shoulder as she fooled with a keyboard and monitor attached to a computer tower sitting on the floor.

“Are you aware that the house is on fire?”

That made her look up. “What?”

“Burning merrily overhead as we speak. We have to get out of here, now.”

“I can’t go, yet. I’ve got to collect samples. Bag and tag them so we can figure out what was going on in here.”

“Piper. The house is onfire.”

As if to emphasize his point, a burning ember fell from the ceiling at the far end of the long lab, right about underneath where the bonfire ought to be.

“I’m sorry, Ian but I can’t leave until I get samples. This is too important.”