“That security guard.” Alex raised his voice to be heard over the din. “Must have seen the flames through the windows and set off the alarms manually.”
She searched for something, anything else that might be a clue. But all she saw was a growing wall of fire.
“We need to leave,” Alex said.
She wanted to wring the neck of whoever had done this. Throw them in this damn fire and let them roast until they begged to answer questions.
This was just another dead end.
With anger simmering in her skull, she led the way out into the hall. Smoke billowed out after them, casting the whole floor in an ashy gray haze. Flashing emergency lights cut through the growing darkness, beckoning them to another set of stairs.
There was a damn good chance that whoever was responsible for this had already gotten away. But Skylar wouldn’t give up until she confirmed it herself. She raced down the steps, momentum and fury carrying her down them two, three at a time.
If they had only been there a few minutes earlier, they could’ve stopped this. Gotten whatever samples were in that lab before they were destroyed or stolen. And if Alex hadn’t insisted they stick together, she could have taken down the bastard responsible for the fire. Maybe gotten some answers a different way.
When they reached the bottom floor, she skidded out onto the tiles. Her gaze flicked between both directions of the hall. A dark silhouette ran toward the exit under the violent flash of the emergency lights.
Then it hit her. Like a hundred-pound Hellfire missile slamming into her skull.
A sudden anger erupted in her brain, overriding her annoyance with Alex. Her vision flashed red.
“Stop!” she yelled at the retreating figure.
The man didn’t listen. She sprinted at him, glad for the chance. She had her pistol aimed at him. No way was he getting away.
She wanted nothing more than to take this bastard down. Rip him limb from limb.
He’d ruined this mission for them. Messed up their plans.
She wouldn’t let him take another step.
The anger crashed against her mind like the inferno in Smadi’s lab. Growing stronger and stronger until rage was all she felt.
Somewhere, a voice in her mind warned her that this was just like Amman. It was happening again. She needed to stop, to calm down.
But she didn’t care. Was not capable of caring.
The rage was so strong her head physically hurt.
The man spun on his heels. His features appeared sinister from the mix of shadows and emergency lights dancing over him. The man reached for his side as he rushed toward her. The flashing lights glinted off the metal of a handgun.
Aimed straight at her.
He let out a vicious yell. Sounded more animal than man.
Time slowed. The cold swell of adrenaline curled through her vessels and into her mind. All the world faded away to the iron sights of her pistol and the man at the end of the hall.
The voice in her head told her to shoot to kill. It was like someone was yelling at her to do it, a sadistic drill sergeant in her mind.
And she almost followed its orders.
But somehow, she knew she couldn’t. Had to keep this guy alive.
Answers, he might have answers. The lab. Smadi. Solomon.
Get it together, Cruz…
The man yelled again. Fired a single shot that lanced above her head.
She aimed for his leg, still running.
She squeezed the trigger.
So did he. Again and again and again.
Rounds smashed into the doors and ceiling and floor tiles around her. His shots were wild. Panicked.
But not hers. She had stared down the barrel of a gun before. She knew what it was like to have a rocket launched at her helicopter. To hear the ping and rattle of small-arms fire riddling the hull of her bird.
She still felt the fear tickling at the back of her mind. But instead of paralyzing her, it was exhilarating. She had looked death in the face, and death had always flinched first.
Skylar aimed carefully. The mission depended on what she did next. One miss, and the guy might escape. A hit to his chest or his head, and he’d die.
Her aim was true. The shot punched through the man’s leg. He fell, slamming sideways onto the floor.
The guy was down.
Good, Skylar thought. But the monstrous rage inside her wasn’t satiated. It still demanded to be fed. Demanded a sacrifice.
Skylar was still running when the gunman twisted toward her, blood pumping onto the floor around him. In his right hand, he still held his pistol.
And he fired. One more time.
This time, she felt the heat of the round sear past her face.
She wasn’t hit, but the spike of adrenaline broke her tenuous hold over the rage bubbling in her skull.
Skylar fired just once more.
The bullet slammed home straight through the guy’s arm. She imagined the tearing muscle. The crunch and fracture of bone. All flavored by the man’s pained screams.
It was finally enough for him to drop his weapon. But not enough to keep him down.
He pushed himself up, screaming and cursing. Instead of trying to scramble away, he crawled toward his pistol, fighting against his injuries. Using his wounded limbs as if they hadn’t just been punched straight through with lead.
Skylar ran toward the man’s dropped weapon, determined to get to it first.
Like a lioness, she lunged at the weapon and kicked it back at Alex. Then she grabbed the guy by the collar, ready to dismantle her prey until he gave her exactly what she came for.
Answers. She wanted them. Now.
Those alarms and flashing emergency lights never stopped. But when she looked at the man’s face, saw who she had brought down, the world seemed to grow silent.
A disconcerting sense of shame burst through the anger.
Skylar knew who this man was.
The security guard hadn’t looked like much of a threat when his face had been buried in his cell phone. Not the type that Alex would peg to defend this university with lethal force. But now, even with the wounds in his shoulder and leg, he thrashed against Skylar.
“Help me,” Skylar said, struggling to keep the man down.
Alex scooped up the guard’s weapon and then pressed down on the man’s shoulders.
The security guard bucked. His screams tore into Alex’s eardrums. Then moonlight washed in through the windows as a cloud passed, and Alex could see the wild look in the man’s eyes. The same look that Jaber and Skylar had had when they’d lost it in the Amman apartment.
“My head is killing me,” his partner said.
She stumbled backward, leaning heavily against the wall.
“Skylar?” he asked through gritted teeth as the security guard thrashed.
She dropped to her knees, holding her head in her hands. Had she been hit and not realized it until now? Alex needed to check on her. But he couldn’t let the security guard go. The man was a tornado of violence waiting to be unleashed.
Then suddenly, the man grew still. He stopped fighting, going limp on the floor.
At nearly the same moment, Skylar pushed herself back upright. She looked dazed.
“Skylar, are you okay?” he asked, still holding down the security guard in case the man lost it again.
“I’m… okay,” Skylar managed. She seemed out of it. Like she was just recovering from a blow to the head.
She managed to stumble toward him then looked over at the security guard. “I… nearly… killed him.”
Her words came out slightly slurred, barely audible over the alarms.
Alex could see she was struggling, but they didn’t have time to dive into her feelings. This man was injured and needed medical attention. And the building was still on fire. The university was set in the mountains about twenty kilometers outside Aqaba. He wasn’t sure how prompt Jordan’s fire departments would be, but he also didn’t want to be there w
hen they arrived.
To top it off, it was clear this guard had been infected with the same Ring of Solomon agent that had devastated Skylar and Jaber. Alex could only guess that whoever had set that fire off had also come into contact with the security guard.
“Let’s get him outside,” Alex said.
Skylar nodded and grabbed the guy’s ankles. Alex did the best he could to cradle the man under his shoulders, gingerly lifting him. The security guard moaned, face scrunching in pain. The warmth of his blood seeped over Alex’s hands as they carried him outside.
He searched their surroundings, scanning to see if anyone was watching them, before ducking into the alcove of another building. As the fire crawled through the fourth floor of the chemistry building, the flickering light made the place look like a gateway to hell. Black smoke billowed up, choking the starlight.
“Watch our backs, okay?” Alex asked Skylar.
“I can handle that.” She posted up at the doorway, pistol in hand.
“Can you hear me?” Alex asked the security guard in Arabic. He used a knife to slice ribbons out of the man’s long sleeves and began using them to dress his bullet wounds.
“What…” the man said, his voice gravelly. “What happened?”
“You got injured in an attack, and I’m helping you.”
“Baraka Allahu fika,” he said.
May Allah bestow his blessings on you.
He seemed in shock, but at least he was no longer in a blind rage. And better yet, he didn’t seem to have any idea that he and Skylar had nearly killed each other moments ago.
Alex tied the last of the makeshift bandages. “Do you have any idea what happened?”
“I saw a fire from outside,” he said. “I ran… I ran into the chemistry building. Set the alarms off then saw someone running through the hall.”
“What did they look like?”
“I can’t remember.”
“A man? A woman?”
“A man,” he said. “He had a deep voice. He was looking over his shoulder. Like he was worried about being followed. When he saw me, he… I don’t really remember what happened then, but I remember the smell. Like metal.”
The guard’s eyes started to drift closed.
“Contacts?” Alex asked, looking up at Skylar.
“Nothing. It’s all quiet.” She seemed more alert now. Back to her normal self.
Alex turned back to the guard. “Can you tell me anything else about the man you saw in the hall?”
The guard’s lips barely moved. “Nothing else.”
Sirens sounded in the distance, growing louder.
“Better get out of here,” Skylar said.
Alex looked down at the guard. He wanted to squeeze the guy for more info, but he wasn’t sure they could risk trying to take him with them.
“Let’s go,” Alex said.
He positioned the guard under one of the lamp sconces near the front of the building, ensuring that the emergency-response personnel couldn’t miss him.
The first red-and-blue lights of a firetruck speeding up the road toward them reflected against the sides of the mountains surrounding the small campus as Alex and Skylar sprinted back toward their car. They raced in the opposite direction, heading south away from the university before hooking around back toward Aqaba.
“Where do we go next?” Skylar asked, wiping the sweat and ash from her face.
Alex tightened his fingers around the steering wheel, taking a hard turn onto the highway. “Someone’s cleaning up after Smadi. Erasing all evidence of whatever he was doing here. And if that’s the case, we need to reach his house before that burns down too.”
-17-
Frederick, MD
Kasim paced at the head of the conference table in Vector’s operations center. Morris leaned over his computer like a perching buzzard, eyes squinted. Couldn’t be good for the guy’s spine. Kasim had suggested that he’d end up hunched over in his sixties, but the man did what he wanted.
Kasim wouldn’t complain so long as what Morris wanted was to find Smadi.
He settled into the chair next to the analyst.
“I’m doing everything I can, but this guy might as well be a ghost too,” Morris said. “It’s like one day he just up and disappeared from the Earth. No more phone calls, no texts, not a single message.”
“Either this guy doesn’t want to be found or someone doesn’t want us to find him,” Kasim said. “Just like Ballard.”
“Too bad Vector is on the case,” Morris said, cracking a smug grin. “Ghosts are no match for me.”
“Oh?” Kasim asked.
“Yeah, the guys back in the NSA even gave me a nickname from that old ’80s movie. The original, not the new one. Never seen either one, but whatever. More of a podcast guy.”
Kasim didn’t like that Ghostbusters was considered old. “What did they call you?”
“Slimer,” Morris said proudly.
“Slimer?”
“Yeah, one of the Ghostbusters. You should know, old man.”
Kasim didn’t have the heart to tell him who—or more accurately, what—Slimer was in that movie. He had a feeling that name had very little to do with Morris’s ability to find people, though, and more to do with personal habits that he shared with the green, gooey ghost.
“Whatever your name is, I want you to find Smadi.”
He winked at Kasim. “Consider it done.”
Kasim wanted to share in his confidence, but they’d been running down a lot of cold trails lately. He felt like this one was turning to ice faster than his mother-in-law’s heart when she’d first met him. If Skylar and Alex didn’t find something in Aqaba, it was going to take a bigger miracle than Moses parting the Red Sea for them to keep going.
The door to the operations center opened. Weber marched in with a determined look on her face, frizzy blond hair bouncing. Park came in behind her, looking tired.
Kasim motioned for them all to sit at the table. “Where are we at, people?”
“We went through every published science report and paper from Smadi’s lab we could find,” Park said.
Weber tapped on the conference table, and the touch screen built into the surface morphed. It showed a scanning electron microscope image of small, round objects. “These are the nanoparticles he was using to attack brain tumors.”
Another tap on the table’s surface, and this time, an illustrated drawing appeared. It showed a pocked white sphere that looked vaguely like the moon—a single nanoparticle. On its surface were scattered Y-shaped drawings that Kasim recognized as symbols to represent antibodies.
“Smadi coated the surface of his nanoparticles with these antibodies,” Park explained.
“Antibodies are usually part of the body’s immune system to recognize pathogens,” Kasim said. “Why would he use them on his nanoparticles?”
“Good question,” Weber said. Her German accent was particularly pronounced today. Kasim knew that happened when she was either excited or exhausted. He was guessing after all the time they had been spending at Vector, it was more of the latter. “These antibodies were designed to recognize specific proteins on brain tumors. That way the nanoparticles attach directly to the tumors.”
“Ah, and once they attach, that’s when you would use a magnetic source to heat the particles, cooking the brain cells,” Kasim said.
Weber nodded.
“And you think this mechanism is somehow used in the Ring of Solomon weapon?” he asked.
Kasim started to piece things together. His education might have been firmly in intelligence and national security, but he had absorbed enough scientific knowledge while learning how bioweapons experts turned innocent or even life-saving technologies into devastating weapons to see where this was going.
“Let me guess,” he continued. “Those same attachment sites on the nanoparticles can be used to fix other molecules or drugs to the particles. Say, something that might influence a person’s mood.”
“That’s one possibility,” Park said. “In fact, we found out his nanoparticle designs not only incorporated antibodies to target brain tumors but also anticancer drugs to augment any heat therapies used to zap the tumors.”
“You can theoretically attach all kinds of bioactive molecules and send them straight to the brain with these particles,” Weber said. “Could be anything from methamphetamines to psychotropics making them intensively aggressive or catatonic.”
“That all makes sense in theory,” Kasim said. “But that still doesn’t answer two major questions. First, what kind of drugs? We haven’t found anything suspicious in any medical records or tox reports on the victims of the Ring.”
“I’m thinking that’s because we’re not looking in the right place,” Park said. “This drug might not ever reach the bloodstream. Any evidence could be relegated to brain tissue, which you’re not going to find in a standard tox report.”
“What we really need is tissue from the brain of a victim,” Weber said.
Morris adjusted his glasses. “You guys, I’m good with computers, but that’s not something I can just pull out of thin air for you.”
“Try it anyway,” Kasim said. “Maybe you can reroute some pathology samples or biopsies from an autopsy in the mail. You were just telling me how good you are. Prove it, Slimer.”
Weber raised an eyebrow, and Kasim subtly shook his head.
“Who you gonna call?” Morris said with his grin back in place.
“You said you had two questions,” Weber said. “I’m assuming that isn’t one of them.”
“Right,” Kasim continued. “This still doesn't answer how they control the timing of these drugs or signals delivered by the nanoparticles.”
“No, but we have some ideas,” Park said. “Mainly, two theories. Magnetic field generation or optogenetics.”
“Opto-what?” Morris asked, saving Kasim the trouble.
“Basically, it’s a field of neuroscience where brain cells are genetically engineered to produce light-sensitive proteins,” Park explained. “Scientists can use light stimuli to effectively turn those cells on or off at will.”
He queued up a video on the touch-screen table’s surface. Once again, it showed an illustration of the nanoparticle with the Y-shaped antibodies covering it. The nanoparticles attached to the surface of what looked like a long, stretched-out fried egg.
Demon Mind (Vector Book 2) Page 15
