Page 31 of Pressure Point (Lantern Beach Blackout: Detonation #2)
CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE
Atlas watched Quinn disappear into the woods. Every instinct screamed at him to stop her. Instead, he decided to follow at a distance.
Through the foliage, he saw something out of place.
A van.
Quinn had climbed inside. How had she known the vehicle was there? The shadows had hidden the vehicle.
He remained concealed as he kept an eye on her.
Several moments passed before Quinn burst from the vehicle. She ran toward the beach, something small and flat in her hands.
Atlas followed her back toward the shoreline. He didn’t want to stop some kind of memory from emerging. Right now, it was better to let it play out.
The other guys noticed the commotion and gathered to see what was wrong.
She stopped in front of them, breathless. “I . . . I think I remembered something.”
She explained how she believed someone was responsible for manipulating storm systems. How they’d tried to do it with a storm in the Bahamas. How they’d failed—though just barely.
She reiterated how men had come after Dr. Hartwell. How she wasn’t sure what had happened to him.
“They’re making the weather into a weapon,” Jake muttered. “Into . . . a bomb of sorts.”
“Exactly,” she murmured.
“Are you sure about all this?” Jake squinted with a healthy dose of skepticism.
“I am.” Quinn nodded emphatically. “I can’t explain how or why. But the memories . . . they feel real.”
“So you think these people are trying to alter Hurricane Delilah?” Hudson asked. “To make it a monster storm?”
“That’s my best guess.”
Their silence only lasted a moment before everyone sprang into action.
“Maverick, see what you can find out about this Dr. Hartwell,” Jake called. “Quinn, why don’t you keep looking at those notebooks and see if you can remember anything else? Atlas, stay with her.”
“What about Kyle and me?” Hudson stood with his hands on his hips, and his eyes narrowed as the sun peeked from behind a cloud for a brief moment.
“Keep sweeping this area for explosives or anything else suspicious,” Jake said. “We don’t have much time. Get moving. Now. Because if Quinn is right, then we are about to have a catastrophe on our hands.”
Quinn went back to the van with Atlas to continue looking at all the notebooks.
Her mind raced. She was so close to finding answers. She could feel it in her bones.
She couldn’t let these moments slip through her fingers like sand.
She had to seize the memories now.
With the van’s back doors open, Quinn sat down and spread Dr. Hartwell’s waterlogged notebooks across the floor. Her hands shook as she tried to piece together the fragmented data.
The numbers told a terrifying story.
These storms weren’t just natural disasters.
They were weapons of mass destruction.
As she studied Dr. Hartwell’s notes, something else began to surface. A memory that felt different from the others.
A memory that felt sharper and more immediate.
A sterile white room. Fluorescent lights that hurt her eyes. The smell of antiseptic and something else—something chemical and wrong.
“The target is protected,” a voice said, cold and clinical. “I need more time.”
But it wasn’t her voice. It was someone else’s.
“You’re going to help us, Quinn,” a man wearing a white lab coat instructed. “Just like you helped the Russians.”
“I didn’t help them. I stopped them. And I won’t help you.” Her voice sounded hoarse as if she’d been screaming.
“You will. Unless you want us to kill your friend Dr. Hartwell.”
Her heart skipped a beat. “He’s still alive?”
“He is—for now. But he’s not being cooperative. We can’t do this without one of you.”
Quinn jerked back to the present, her heart pounding so hard she could hear it over the wind.
It all made sense now.
Those men had kept her alive because they needed her expertise.
Her knowledge of storm systems, her ability to predict and analyze hurricane behavior—they couldn’t do this without help.
“Are you okay?” Atlas’s voice pulled her out of her thoughts.
“It was another flashback.” Her voice came out breathless. She glanced at Atlas, finding comfort in his presence. “Someone was trying to force me to do something. They were going to kill Dr. Hartwell if I didn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
Still sitting in the van, she grabbed Hartwell’s notebook with trembling hands, reading his final entry.
More memories flooded back.
Standing in a laboratory, analyzing satellite data that showed impossible storm behavior.
Phone calls with colleagues who’d noticed similar anomalies in other storm systems.
The growing realization that someone with military-grade resources was conducting illegal weather modification experiments.
Their plan had failed in the Bahamas. She had to make sure it failed here as well.
Quinn pressed her palms against her temples as the full scope of the conspiracy became clear.
Someone hadn’t just been experimenting with weather modification—they’d been perfecting it. Using actual hurricanes as test cases, regardless of the civilian casualties.
These people had tried to make her and Hartwell help with their deadly project. When they’d come after her here on Lantern Beach, it wasn’t to kill her.
They wanted her alive. They were only trying to eliminate Atlas or anyone else who stood between them and her.
If not for Atlas finding her when he did, she might have completed whatever mission they’d manipulated her into working on.
If her theory was correct, Hurricane Delilah would soon be bearing down on this island with artificially enhanced fury, following the exact pattern Hartwell had died trying to expose.
Quinn glanced through the trees at the lighthouse as it towered in the distance. Beyond it, storm clouds gathered.
This time, she stared at the sky with the trained eye of a meteorologist who finally remembered what she was looking at.
And she knew with certainty they were running out of time. They had to either stop this storm or get people off the island. Whatever these criminals had done, they’d figured out how to strengthen storms. To speed them up. To direct their paths.
“You guys, I found something!” Hudson yelled.
Quinn and Atlas glanced at each other before dashing from the van.