by Hinze, Vicki
Mason intercepted her. “Tell me you aren’t here waiting for me.”
He smelled as good as he looked and sounded obnoxiously hopeful. “Hello, Mason.”
“It’s Gregory, as you well know, Emma.” He didn’t look flustered, just irritated. “Are you waiting for me?”
She smiled just to annoy him. “I am.”
“Great.” He shoved a hand into his slacks’ pocket. “I need a security specialist and headquarters sends me a reporter. Batting a thousand today.”
So was she; not that she’d mention it. She needed a battle with him about as much as she needed another close call on her life. “I’m glad to see you again, too.” She sniffed and jutted her chin so he wouldn’t miss it. Everyone else had called him Gregory or Greg. She’d only ever called him Mason, trying to get his attention. It had failed. But she kept up the practice to needle him. Compensation for his rejecting her.
“They honestly did send you?”
They, being his headquarters, of course. “I’m here. No one else is, or can get here,” she said, lifting a hand. “So, do you want me to go or to stay?”
He didn’t answer, but from his darting eyes, she saw the mental debate raging inside him. It annoyed her. “That was a rhetorical question, Mason.” She folded her arms. “I’m staying.”
His mouth twisted and a muscle in his cheek twitched. “Airport’s closed. You’re stuck. They’re stuck. Now I’m stuck with a reporter when I need a security specialist.” He sighed and engaged in a stare down.
Emma didn’t flinch or flay him with a sharp comeback. She couldn’t afford the luxury, being on probation. “For what it’s worth, I’d prefer to be going home.” That was the understatement of the year. It’d been six weeks since she’d left home on her last mission. “Blame your storm, not me.”
His phone chirped, and he checked an incoming message. While reading it, the expression on his face went from irritation to surprise, then back to irritation.
Likely his headquarters was informing him of her arrival and position, as well as her security clearance. While she wasn’t free to disclose her status outside of her cover, it was his headquarters’ responsibility to assure that nothing impeded her work. How they’d pass off that work being done by a reporter was their problem, not hers.
Mason stowed the phone at his waist, then clamped his jaw. “You’ve been cleared. I don’t get how, but my orders are explicit. Okay, fine. You’re the boss. God, help us.” He clamped his jaw. “Where’s your luggage?”
“It didn’t arrive.” True, but not the truth. Still, he would believe it over the truth any day of the week. The ashes of her luggage were spread on a runway in Libya. Burned in a Humvee that came under fire seconds after she’d departed from it. She’d been lucky to escape with her life and the hostage she had been sent in to rescue.
A flash of movement over Mason’s right shoulder caught her eye. A little girl about nine, wearing purple-framed glasses, a hot pink coat, teal neck scarf and a gray and white hat that was tugged down over her ears barreled toward him. “Incoming.” Emma dipped her chin to signal him.
He turned and smiled, spread his arms wide. “Olivia.” He swept the girl into a bear hug and straightened, lifting her. “I’m so glad you made it. We were getting worried about you guys.”
Emma watched with interest. Obviously, he was fond of the girl and she of him. Was Olivia Mason’s daughter?
She sneaked a look at Emma, then buried her face in Mason’s neck. “Who is she?”
“She is my friend, Emma Miller,” Mason told Olivia. “We grew up together. Emma is stuck here because of the storm.”
The girl nodded. “Hi, Miss Emma.”
“Hello, Olivia.” Emma smiled. The girl was inquisitive, but Mason’s explanation apparently satisfied her.
He didn’t give her time to dwell on it. “Where’s your mother and Jacob?”
Olivia pointed to an exotic looking woman with dark hair and huge eyes standing in a food court line with a little boy five or six. He held a stuffed beagle to his chest. “They’re getting a cookie,” Olivia said. “She promised Bandit one in the car, if he stopped barking.”
“Bandit is Jacob’s sidekick,” Mason explained to Emma, while waving to the woman and the boy. “They go everywhere together and he’s fond of chocolate chip cookies.”
The woman and the boy waved back. Mason’s wife and son? Emma had a hard time wrapping her mind around that. Her heart refused to accept it. Mason, married with two children, and he had been, apparently, for a decade. Something inside Emma twisted. Envy. Jealousy. Either or maybe both. And neither were welcome.
“Actually, Jacob is fond of all cookies.” Olivia wrinkled her nose. “Bandit doesn’t really eat them because he’s stuffed. He doesn’t really bark, either. Jacob does it.” She dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “He thinks Mom doesn’t know.”
“I see.” Adorably talkative and honest. Emma withheld a smile, but she had to work at it. “They’re lucky to have each other, then.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re here.” Mason set Olivia onto her feet on the floor. “You’d better get back over to them or you won’t get a cookie.” He smiled. “I’ll see you guys downstairs in a few minutes.”
Olivia nodded, quickly said, “Bye, Miss Emma,” and then ran toward her mother.
Mason watched until she arrived at her mother’s side and the woman smiled at him, acknowledging her awareness her daughter was back with her. He turned to Emma and all signs of warmth in him vanished. “Let’s go.”
Presuming they were heading to his lab, Emma stepped to his side and they walked. “You have a lovely family, Mason,” she said.
“Sophia is married to my lab assistant, David Johnson. Olivia and Jacob are their children.”
“Oh,” Emma said, suddenly feeling light and not at all happy about it. Whether or not he had a family shouldn’t matter to her. It shouldn’t, and yet it did. “I assumed they were your family.”
“Why would you assume that?”
Why had she? “Your face lit up on seeing them.” He was well acquainted with the family or he wouldn’t have known Jacob’s stuffed dog Bandit’s name.
“We’re close,” he conceded. “The kids think of me as their uncle.”
He was fond of them, and clearly, they were of him. Stepping around a group of college-aged students traveling together, she asked, “So why are they here?” Of all days to visit the airport, this had to be the worst. The news report warning people to hunker down replayed in Emma’s mind.
“To ride out the storm in the lab.” Mason sidestepped a teen couple dressed in black with matching tattoos on their forearms. Keri and Matt. Permanent tats they’d no doubt regret when they went their separate ways in life.
“To ride out the storm?” Emma grimaced. He was letting kids into a high-containment lab to ride out a storm? What was he thinking?
“Their dad is here,” Mason said. “Holly’s not playing around. We could all be stuck here for an extended period of time. It seemed prudent to keep the family together.”
“In a high-containment lab?” He couldn’t be serious.
“In this one, yes.” He pointed across the Main to the far wall. “Elevator’s over there.”
“In that hallway?”
Mason nodded and kept walking.
Emma followed, hoping she didn’t have to report him.
Chapter Three
Tuesday, December 17th
1500 (3:10 PM)
The Private Access Only hallway dead-ended in a square room. An industrial elevator took up the entire far wall. Mason and Emma walked over then stepped inside. Its wide horizontal door made of thick steel slats slid closed. He pushed a raised red square button on the control panel, and Emma grabbed hold of a metal handrail and held on. The elevator lurched, then began a surprisingly smooth descent that seemed to go on for a long time before it finally stopped.
“How many levels are below the ground floor?” she ask
ed, waiting for the door to open.
“Four,” Mason said. “Plus, what we call the subterranean level. That’s where the lab is located.” From inside his shirt, he pulled out an ID card attached to a lanyard then held it up to a circular scanner embedded in the control panel.
The door groaned and then slid open.
Emma’s stomach did a little flip. Rather than the light and bright colors used upstairs, everything down here was a muddy brown except the concrete floors. They stepped out and she scanned the immediate area. Abandoned luggage conveyers created a maze, motorized carts and trucks lined up, some occupied and running and others empty and parked. Heavy equipment was strewn all over the place, tall metal stairs, trucks with canvas sides and forklifts, and large sections of floor were roped off with black tarps that concealed the contents of whatever stood stashed behind them. Fumes from the running motors left a noxious scent lingering in the air that burned her nose and stung her eyes.
“Shouldn’t the luggage carriers be full?” she asked. “There are five-thousand stranded passengers upstairs.”
“These are off-limits for facility use because of the lab.”
“Ah, I see.” Logical to minimize traffic in the vicinity.
“This way,” Mason said, leading her to a long row of what looked like numbered golf carts. At 47, he stopped. “Our ride.”
Emma got in and Mason took off with authority. She grabbed the side of a roll-bar. “It looks like a cart, but it moves like a Humvee. How fast does this thing go?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, pulling to a stop in a line of vehicles waiting to enter a tunnel.
Shortly, they were inside the tunnel, and traffic moved at a slow but steady clip. At a fork, where the one tunnel split into two, most of the vehicles turned off. Mason sped up and pressed on, zipping through countless twists and turns.
“That question about speed wasn’t a challenge.” Odd murals on the walls snagged her attention. They were dark, of groups of people in pain and suffering. Fire and sparks, smoke and horrific images that burned a sense of desolation and despair into her mind. “This place is creepy.” She glanced over at him. That he didn’t seem troubled by them surprised her.
“They are supposed to be, to discourage people from coming down here,” he said. “Put your blinders on. That’s what I do every time I come in or go out.”
“It’s like a whole city down here.” One with so many tunnels splitting off into others, she was losing her sense of direction. “How many tunnels are there?”
“I don’t know how many. About 17,000 feet of them all together.” He gripped the wheel and shifted on his seat. “People get lost down below all the time.”
“Down below. Street level?” she asked.
Mason nodded.
“I’m confused. How do unauthorized people get down here to get lost? It’s a restricted area.” She frowned. “You had to scan your ID to get off the elevator.”
“Observant.”
She shrugged. “Part of my job.”
“Some of the tunnels on the uppermost lower-level are open to the public. There are offices and coffee shops, fast food places and that kind of thing. It saves the people who work down here from having to go above ground for everything.”
“So, passengers wander from the unrestricted areas into the restricted ones?” That was not good news.
“It’s a little more complicated than that. Only a couple hundred feet of all the tunnels are unrestricted. Just on the first of the four levels below street level.” He shrugged. “Occasionally, there’s a curious gawker. Not often. But some do get lost and wind up in restricted areas. Not so much on the subterranean level near the lab. It’s much more isolated.”
The floors of their current tunnel were painted with bizarre creatures. Ones long since extinct, and others that were pure fantasy and conjured right out of some troubled mind’s nightmares. “Seventeen thousand feet of tunnels,” she said. Impossible for one person to guard, and a challenge for one security team to fully monitor. “Does all this mean the secret military facility conspiracy theory is true? Is there one on the premises?”
“Not here,” he said. “At least, not that I’ve seen. No aliens, either.” He glanced her way. “That disappoints often.”
“With a name like Portal, I can see that it would.”
“Of course, I haven’t explored all the tunnels, so who really knows what’s down here?” He looked in her general direction. “My job is the lab. I focus everything on it. The rest I leave to the facility security chief and his team.”
Ahead, the overhead lights were off, or they didn’t exist. From her position, it appeared to be a dead-end. Mason drove on, never reducing his speed or tapping the brake, so apparently that dead-end wasn’t one. It didn’t raise any alarm in him. The cart plunged through the mirage of wall and into pitch-black darkness. “Slow down, Mason.”
He didn’t, but he did turn on the cart’s lights. Only the right one worked, and it barely penetrated the inky-black darkness. A still silence fell in the tunnel and the absence of light made it feel close and cloying. Instinctively, she drew in a deep breath.
“Hold on,” Mason said. “We’re almost there.”
Couldn’t be soon enough. She’d never before been claustrophobic. No light. Sudden temperature change. Still air. The combination had triggered the sensation. Knowing it, she put it out of her mind and breathed normally.
About a hundred yards into the darkness, he suddenly stopped.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
“No. Why?”
“There’s nothing here, Mason.”
He pointed to the left wall. Though dim, the light from the cart revealed a sign painted on it, like the murals. It read: Authorized Personnel Only. All Violators will be Prosecuted.
He got out of the cart. So did she, and she then walked around the rear of the cart to his side. Only then did she see the outline of a door painted the same muddy brown as the walls. Even the doorknob was the same dull and drab color. If he hadn’t stopped right in front of it, Emma never would have seen it.
“This is the entrance to the lab.” Mason pressed his ID to the wall on the left side of the door. “Not much to look at, but we don’t get visitors.”
“I’m going to need an ID so I can come and go,” she said. “I hope you never need an ambulance. I doubt EMT could find you.”
“I couldn’t call them anyway,” he said, reaching for the door knob.
“I see why you don’t get much of the lost traffic. If anyone makes it through the murals and creatures painted on the floor, they’re fooled by the fake dead-end or far too tense to risk the darkness.”
“Accurate assumption, I’d say. It’s been effective. That much, I know.” He almost smiled. “See? There is a method to the madness.”
“It appears there is.” She’d give him that one. “Most of the ride was downhill, correct?” When he nodded, she added, “It’s hard to be sure, with the downhill slope and all the curves and turns, but I’m guessing we’re three levels below ground here.”
“That’s correct, yes.”
“I thought you said it was four.”
“I said there are four levels below ground, plus the subterranean level.”
“The subterranean level is where the lab is, right? That’s where we are now.”
“I didn’t say where we are now.”
“Sly.” Okay. They were three levels down. That made her a little nervous. For deadly pathogen storage, three levels didn’t seem nearly enough, especially not with a busy airport above.
“We’re inside a mountain, Emma. They’re not symmetrical. Some areas are four plus, some are three and some are one.”
“I get it.” In this area, the third level below ground was the subterranean level.
He opened the door. Light flooded out into the tunnel. The sudden sense of someone watching them hit her hard. Emma spun and scanned the tunnel behind her, then checked it again one more time. No
thing in sight beyond a maze of more and more tunnels. Yet something had triggered her senses.
Probably the creepy murals and floor art…and being this close to Mason again.
The sense of rejection she’d felt back during their college days hit her hard. Emma stiffened, shunning the awful feelings of being measured and found lacking. That horrible feeling of caring so much about someone who cared absolutely nothing about you.
She gave herself a serious mental shake and a warning. Forget the past. Just forget it.
Even as she warned herself, she knew it wasn’t the last time memories from the past would rise up and bite her. Next time, she would be ready and nix them the moment they started surfacing.
One thing was certain. Darcy Keller had been right. Between Holly and Mason, it was going to be a long couple of days…
Chapter Four
Tuesday, December 17th
1520 (3:20 PM)
Beyond the outer door, Emma recognized the lab’s layout. A contained area within a contained area. In the spacious outer ring were two offices and multiple doors. At a break in the solid wall, a hallway revealed four more doors and a wide opening into a common room. Glimpses of furnishings identified that room as a kitchen and living room combo. Sofa, bar-stools, a television.
With one exception, all the doors appeared to be constructed from regular steel. The odd door was a biometric vault door. That one, Emma felt certain, led to the inner ring, the high-containment lab.
She removed her coat, hooked it next to two others already hanging on a rack near the outer door. “It’s warm down here.”
Mason seemed surprised by the comment. “Do I really need to explain geo-thermal—never mind. The outer ring in the lab is a constant 62 degrees.”
