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And would very soon be inside her.

But this was not the time to lose her ability to compartmentalize. She shoved the inevitability of her own coming doom away and concentrated on the man before her. Or tried to.

“Tell me what I don’t understand,” she encouraged him. “I’ll try my best.”

“No,” she heard Jonas say from behind her. “No sign of the sister or Carter. Or anything else.”

“He has Iyara,” Sowande said. “He will kill her, of course. But first, he wants to test the weapon.” His face crumpled as he fought whatever was working inside of him. Grief. Loss. Fear. Guilt. “I dedicated my life to this research tofightthese weapons, and this is how I will go. The destroyer of worlds, despite everything.”

“Listen to me,” Bethan said then, in a voice of command that made the man before her blink. “If we survive, I would be more than happy to sit down with you and have a long conversation about your research and its noncombat applications. But right now we have to know what Dominic Carter has planned.”

“Destruction,” Sowande croaked out, his gaze dull. “Complete destruction.”

“How?” Jonas demanded from behind her. “There are a lot of ways to cause destruction in New York City. Which one did he pick?”

Sowande’s head canted to the side, his eyes fluttering closed. Bethan threw a panicked sort of look Jonas’s way, even as she felt for a pulse and found it. Faint, but there.

“We have a medical team arriving any minute,” Jonas said. “If necessary, we can use adrenaline.”

“What effect will that have on a system that’s already overloaded with SuperThrax?”

Jonas’s fierce gaze settled on her. “What choice do we have?”

Bethan didn’t like that. But then it didn’t matter, because Sowande came around again.

He focused on her with obvious difficulty. “It’s too late,” he said again.

“Tell me where they went,” Bethan urged him. Trying her best not to sound as panicked as she felt.

Sowande shook his head, despairing. “He’s waiting for rush hour in Grand Central. He wants to make a big splash, kill as many as possible.”

And though it cost her, Bethan stayed where she was while Jonas relayed the target to the team. Crouched down, murmuring encouragement to the man until the medical unit arrived. They came in wearing hazmat suits, clearly prepared for what they were about to find.

Jonas caught her gaze and jerked his head. And like that,they backed away from the medical team, let themselves out, and found themselves back out on the street.

“I feel like I’ve seen this movie a thousand times,” Bethan said as they walked away from the building that was now a crime scene. “Madman goes to some New York landmark, causes mayhem. Repeat as necessary.”

Jonas didn’t give her even that half smile, which made the panic in her build. He activated his new comm unit as they walked down the block. “The real question is, Do we call in the threat to the NYPD? Or do we hold off, because once we do that, they’ll lock it down and our guy might walk away?”

“We’re forty-five minutes out,” Isaac replied, back to sounding fully in control and in command. “But I’m going to call some of my contacts and give them a heads-up. I’ll let you know if I think it’s going to turn into a lockdown.”

“Give us twenty minutes to get into position,” Jonas said, and Isaac agreed.

“I’m patching in to the cameras in and around Grand Central,” Oz cut in from Alaska. “I’ll start running facial recognition and see if we get any hits. But it’s only coming up on four o’clock now. If I was going to target a rush hour, I would wait.”

“That’s what we’re banking on,” Jonas said darkly.

He nodded at Bethan, and they started walking north and east toward Grand Central, a mile away. Bethan had the urge to break into a run, to get there as quickly as possible, but she restrained herself. The last thing anyone in New York needed to see was the two of them running with deadly intent, like the assassins they very well could be, out in the open on an otherwise pleasant spring day.

So they walked, covering the distance in a swift fifteen minutes. They’d just reached the entrance to Grand Central on 42nd Street when Isaac was in their ear again.

“Calling in now,” he said. “Are you in position?”

“Heading into Grand Central,” Bethan replied, dodging a food cart to follow Jonas’s long stride toward the entrance. Then pausing when he did.

“Copy that,” Isaac replied.

And there were too many clocks competing inside of her. There was her prematurely shortened life span, coming at her much too quickly, and now with visuals. There was the countdown to rush hour and whatever horror Dominic Carter intended to dump on all these unsuspecting civilians. And there was whatever response Isaac would get from his call, which could complicate the situation even further.