Page 23

Deep silence enveloped the facility. Up close, more damage was apparent and they were able to duck into the main building through a hole in a wall. Some sort of bottling and labeling assembly line was trashed in front of them. It looked like the hull of a giant centipede.

“Sheesh, this place is creepy. I half-expect a zombie to pop out of the shadows,” Katie breathed.

He was too busy watching for possible threats to register such things. Something skittered in a corner, and he nearly shot a rat. He was grateful to see the rodent. It was tantamount to a canary in a mineshaft. The rat’s presence meant the air was probably safe to breathe throughout the factory.

What intrigued him most was how abandoned this place looked. Had the hurricane done all this damage? Or had the factory been decaying for a while before Giselle hit?

“This is the place with the dock, right?” he asked over his shoulder.

“That’s what our driver said. He said ships come in here regularly.”

Alex made his way to the ocean side of the building, and he and Katie shoved opened a big, sliding door facing this supposed dock.

Unlike the decrepit facility behind them, this area looked relatively well cared for.

The damage from the hurricane was serious, but there was very little rust or corrosion, and the mangled equipment looked reasonably modern.

A paved strip of concrete and a torn-up rail line must have been the main points of debarkation for cargo. The concrete and steel rails ran toward a cluster of buildings behind them. A second, smaller road seemed to pass beyond the fenced Zacara buildings. Frowning, he started to walk down it.

“Should we go ninja and be sneaky?” Katie breathed.

“Anyone in the area won’t expect us to be here. They won’t mask the noise of their presence.”

“So we’re just going to march down this road into the unknown?”

“Pretty much.” He wasn’t worried about what would come around the corner. He’d been trained to handle just about any eventuality on the fly.

The chemical sensor beeped a general warning, and he stopped to run a specific analysis. The electronic face identified the airborne chemical it sensed as “Unknown.” The parts per million displayed on the gauge were still very low, though, so he continued walking forward.

“Should we have gas masks or something?” Katie asked nervously.

“If the levels of unidentified gasses climb too much, we’ll go back.

Wind’s at our backs, though, so we should be okay to proceed.

” In fact, a stiff breeze was picking up, blowing onto shore.

Given the time of day, there must be a front of some kind moving into the area.

Rain was a pain in the ass, but it did make stealthy movement easy.

Not to mention it tended to keep bad guys indoors.

He spied a dark lump on the side of the road ahead. Intuition and many hours in emergency rooms made him murmur to Katie, “Wait here.”

He moved ahead and knelt beside the dead soldier.

The body looked like it had been here a few days.

It was bloated and flies crawled on the exposed skin.

But the signs of how this man died were still visible.

Dried blood stained the corner of his mouth and had run from his nose, and the soldier’s hands clutched at his own throat as if he’d choked.

Alex photographed the soldier dispassionately with his cell phone before pulling out a scalpel and removing tissue samples from the man’s nasal cavity, his lungs, and his stomach lining. He finished by scraping dirt stained dark with blood from under the corpse into a plastic bag.

He waved Katie forward and moved on down the road with her. He paid very close attention to the face of the gauge in his hand. The road led inland a few hundred yards uphill into thick undergrowth. It stopped in front of a low mound of weeds.

“This is it?” Katie asked, looking around in confusion.

“Bunker,” he muttered, walking around to the side of the mound. Sure enough, a heavy-duty steel door was recessed into the side of the hill.

“Is this where they store the explosive furniture polish?” she asked dryly.

He smiled slightly. His gauge beeped, urgently this time. “I think we may have found the source of our chemical leak.

“And we would be leaving now, right?” Katie said, backing up already.

“Wind’s blowing steadily. As long as we stay upwind of this place, we should be okay.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“How are you at holding your breath?” he asked, studying the steel door, which, at a closer look, appeared heavily damaged.

“Not bad. I can go around two minutes.”

“I can do three. I’ll go in,” he announced. He started stripping off his clothes in a pile beside her.

“As much as I love sex with you, now’s not exactly the time?—“

He cut her off. “I don’t want my clothes getting contaminated.”

She threw him an alarmed look.

“Count two minutes in your head and then call out,” he directed her. “If I’m not out in four minutes, hold your breath, and come drag me out.”

“Are you sure we should be doing this? It seems really dangerous.”

“That would be the point, wouldn’t it?” he commented as he moved forward naked, eyeing the door.

It looked like some sort of mudslide had come through this steep area, for the door was badly dented as if boulders had slammed into it.

If the mudslide had happened early in the hurricane, later rain could have washed the evidence of it away.

A big, horizontal bar that looked like part of the locking mechanism was twisted and broken.

It was this he focused his attention on.

He took one last deep breath and moved forward to try lifting it.

It moved a little, but was too heavy for him.

He backed up to her side. “I need your help.”

She took a deep breath and moved forward with him.

By both of them planting their shoulders under the bar and lifting with their legs, they were able to prize the bar free of a broken bracket.

It thudded onto the dirt at their feet. The door behind them gapped open a little. A black abyss yawned beyond.

They both backed up and breathed again.

Alex grabbed handfuls of plastic bags and test tubes, nodded at her to begin counting, and moved forward carefully.

Katie positioned herself outside so she could point their high-powered flashlight into the darkness. It was enough for him to see stacks of barrels mostly filling the space. Labels in Arabic script, which he couldn’t read, were visible. Next trip in here, he’d take pictures of those.

Careful to avoid any puddles at the bases of the barrels, he took air samples near the barrels with his plastic bags and sealed them.

Katie called a two-minute warning, and he filled a couple of test tubes from the puddles on the floor before he started to see spots before his eyes.

He backed out quickly, and when well clear and facing into the wind, took a bunch of deep breaths.

He passed Katie the test tubes and bags. “Cover these completely with duct tape, and label them with the time, date, and GPS location.”

She worked on that while he pulled out his cell phone and got ready to go in again. Three more times he went inside the bunker to pull samples. The last time, he actually pried barrels open and very carefully dipped samples of the liquid contents.

Modern chemical poisons were generally most lethal in an aerosolized form and inhaled. Blistering agents that relied on skin contact were harder to disseminate and less effective on a large scale, hence had gone out of fashion.

The rational part of his brain informed him in no uncertain terms that taking these samples was madness. But it was also his job. Better that he risk his life and potentially save thousands of other people from harm or death, right?

But at the cost of Katie and Dawn’s lives? It was time to get the hell out of here.

Maybe they should pretend they’d never found the bunker and get on with their lives like his father had told him to. He didn’t for a minute doubt that Roman would follow through on his veiled threat to kill Katie and Dawn if proof of the existence of this bunker’s contents got out.

But the United States really did need to know these chemicals were here.

No way would America tolerate chemical weapons in the control of a hostile foreign government so close to its own soil.

If all those barrels contained some sort of chemical weapon, there was enough in this bunker to wipe out most of the major metropolitan areas in the United States.

He was deeply undecided as to how to proceed.

For now, he would collect the damned samples.

There was still time to destroy the evidence.

If there was a way to both give the United States the evidence and also protect his family, he had yet to figure it out.

He’d threaded some tricky needles in his day, but this might be the one that was too much for him.

With an admonition to be careful with these ones, he passed the last test tubes to Katie to seal up and label.

When she finished, he said, “If you could pick up my clothes, I’m heading to the beach for a bath.”

“You do realize how silly you look prancing around out here buck naked,” she commented.

He made a face at her. “That’s me. The starkers spy.”

She laughed and followed him as he picked his way down the rocks to the ocean, which was brutally cold.

He hoped the salt water would help neutralize any chemical residue on his skin.

Katie tossed him a bar of soap, and he scrubbed his skin until he felt raw all over.

After washing his hair and rinsing it out with salt water, He climbed out of the water, shivering.

He was just making his way up the jumble of man-sized boulders when a man-made sound rose over the surf.

He swore under his breath as he leaped from rock to rock.