by Lisa Harris
“I don’t blame you. He’s quite impressive.” Teresa turned to Aiden. “Joel told me you were in town. I expect you to come by the house. It looks like you could use a homecooked meal.”
“You know I’d love that.”
“Good. I’ll have Joel nail down a date with you. I have to do everything around his schedule.”
“What we really need,” Rachel said, “is your husband. We haven’t seen him.”
“Join the club. He’s been in meetings all afternoon and is running late as usual. I got a text from him about an hour ago. He had to go back to the lab for something, but promised he’d meet me here.” Teresa frowned. “How can someone so precise in the lab not give the same careful attention to his watch? Honestly, I’d decided if he didn’t show up in the next ten minutes, I was going home.”
“He probably lost track of time,” Aiden said.
Teresa rested her hand on Aiden’s arm. “Is everything all right?”
“Of course.” He glanced at Rachel. “We’re working on a project together, and we need to ask him a few questions. But it can wait. I know he’s busy.”
“If you’ll excuse me,” Teresa said, grabbing an avocado bruschetta off a silver tray, “I have one more person I need to talk to before I head out.”
Rachel turned back to Aiden. “What do you think?”
“Maybe Moreno went to meet my boss at your lab.”
“I’ll text Cara that I’m leaving.”
A minute later they’d collected their coats and were heading down the long driveway toward his car in the forty-something-degree January weather. He clicked his key fob and the lights of his silver compact car flashed. He opened the passenger door, waited for her to get settled, then hurried around to the driver’s side. A few seconds later, he had the car running and the struggling heater turned full blast. He eased around the expensive vehicles parked in the driveway then floored it. Maybe he was overreacting, but being wrong wasn’t a chance he was willing to take.
Aiden cut a glance at the woman sitting next to him as he sped down the expressway toward Alexandria. The entire situation was ironic. Here he was, alone with a beautiful woman who was wearing a stunning dress and heels. Instead of getting to know each other over fancy hors d’oeuvres, they were headed to a biocontainment lab. He’d meant what he said. He did need to get out more, but his work was the main reason he rarely dated. Spending months out in the field and not knowing when he would be coming home wasn’t exactly the stable kind of relationship most women wanted. In fact, right now the closest thing he could call home was his current hotel room. That didn’t exactly scream stability.
Twenty minutes later, he pulled into the underground garage next to the lab and parked. A surveillance camera light flashed in the corner.
“Dr. Moreno’s car is here.” Rachel opened the passenger door and climbed out. “He’s probably in the lab checking my work, or in his office planning to fire me for leaving after he told me not to.”
She used her security pass to get them inside the building then headed directly to the third floor. “We’ll try his office first.” A minute later she stopped at one of the doors and started to knock.
“That’s odd.” She inclined her head toward the partially open door. “He never leaves his office unlocked. Dr. Moreno?” She stepped inside the room then stopped. “Aiden?”
At the alarm in her voice, Aiden quickly pushed past her. Something caught his eye, and he walked over to the edge of the desk. There was blood smeared on the corner and a puddle of red on the floor. Nausea swept through him as his mind zoomed in on the possibilities. “Rachel. . .Where’s the virus?”
Chapter Four
Aiden tried to pull her away from the bloody edge of the desk when she didn’t respond. “Where’s the virus, Rachel?”
The voice imploring her to move sounded garbled, as if her head were held underwater, but her feet refused to give in and follow the urgent tug on her wrist.
“Rachel.” Aiden spun her around, and his grip on her shoulders tightened. “We have to make sure the virus is secure. Where is it?”
“There has to be a reasonable explanation for the blood. Like Dr. Moreno tripped or. . .or maybe the blood belongs to someone on the nightly cleaning crew.”
Her brother Josiah was constantly accusing her of making a mountain out of a mole hill. Before she jumped to the worst-case scenario, she needed information.
She tried to refocus her attention to the cell phone in her hand. They should call someone. Security? The police? Dr. Moreno’s wife? Yes. That made the most sense. Before she set off any false alarms, she should ask Teresa if her husband had called her to say he’d been hurt. But if Dr. Moreno had cut himself with a broken lab vial, he wouldn’t have called his wife to tell her he’d possibly been exposed to a high-consequence pathogen. And even if he’d been working in a Level 2 lab, which he rarely did, he wouldn’t have left a sealed environment to go bleed all over his desk. He would have followed the lab’s well-defined and well-rehearsed protocols for exposure to any type of virus, dangerous or not, and immediately alerted the facility manager.
Aiden’s eyes bored into hers. “Rachel, listen to me. I know you have a lot of questions, but you’ve got to trust me. We need to make sure the virus is safe, or this whole thing could get a whole lot worse.”
Worse? How could things possibly get worse?
“I don’t have to trust you.” She pulled free of his hold and took a step back. “I just met you. I can see that something is very wrong here. My boss is missing, there’s blood all over his desk, and there’s a viable super virus in the building that presumably can start a worldwide pandemic, according to you. But you. . .I don’t really know you.”
“Look.” He raised his palms and calmed his voice. “Joel knew the risks when he agreed to secretly look at this for me—”
“That’s the problem. Why all the secrecy? Dr. Moreno said the same thing, and even insisted I write my notes in a cheap spiral instead of logging them digitally. Yes, I saw how that virus reacted in the lab, but nothing about the way we’re handling this is how I’ve been trained to handle things at Gaumond Labs.”
“I’ll explain everything once I’ve made sure the sample is safe.”
“No.” Her hands clenched into fists. “You’ll explain everything now. From the beginning.”
He took a frustrated breath, leaned in like he didn’t want anyone to overhear, and whispered, “I brought the samples to Joel. One had cells I’d taken from the heart of a dead twenty-year-old Tibetan woman. The other was virus cells recovered from the heart of the original suspected host. I can’t lose those samples.”
“It’s not the end of the world if you have to go back to Tibet to procure other samples.”
“I can’t.” He raked his fingers through his hair. “Traditional Tibetans give their loved ones a sky burial. The dead disappear within hours.”
She’d read about the practice of allowing harsh mountain elements and predatory animals to return a dead body to the earth. “What about the virus host?”
“The virus host was a frozen baby woolly mammoth discovered deep in the permafrost.”
“Why did Dr. Moreno tell me the virus came from core samples drilled from the ice?”
“Because that’s what I asked him to say.” He took a breath. “Hear me out, please.”
“This better be good.”
“We lost solar power up on the mountain. Without the power, our extra samples decomposed rapidly.”
“Surely you took more host samples than the single vial we received.”
“My priority was to get the host and victim samples to Joel ASAP. It took five hours on horseback to come off the mountain. Then another two hours of navigating switchbacks in a jeep to get to the nearest landing strip. By the time I had phone service again, it was too late to do anything about the text I’d gotten from Iceman.”
“Iceman?”
“Colleague and old college roommate. He was in Tib
et with me.”
“What did his text say?”
“We lost the mammoth too.”
“Oh, no.” Rachel was warming to the truth of his story, but from what she’d seen of the capabilities of this virus today, she knew she couldn’t be too cautious. “So the vials in our lab are the only uncompromised sample of what you found?”
He swallowed. “Yes, and trust me, if you saw what I saw when I autopsied that mammoth, you would want to make sure this virus doesn’t spread.”
From what little she’d already seen of this giant virus’s aggressive ability to replicate, she wouldn’t be surprised if it possessed Herculean destructive capabilities. “What did you see?”
“That prehistoric little elephant had suffered from having his entire heart riddled with huge wormholes.”
“Some sort of adenovirus?”
“Maybe. But from the look on your face, I think you agree this doesn’t act like any other heart virus you’ve seen before.”
“It would take more testing before I could say definitively what this virus could or could not do to a heart.”
“We don’t have that kind of time. There’s a possibility someone came for the sample, and they weren’t willing to wait for Joel to agree to give it to them.”
“Are you proposing some sort of government conspiracy stuff?”
“Maybe.” His gaze shifted to the floor. “But I still haven’t told you everything.”
Rachel rubbed at the intense pounding between her eyes, unsure at the moment what she should believe. “I’m listening.”
“When I’m out in the field, I have to rely on digital communications to transmit my findings and data. Unfortunately, there are vulnerabilities in the systems. Hackers interested in collecting the information I’m gathering.”
“What kind of information?”
“All my stats on the virus,” he said. “I contacted a friend who’s big into high tech. Long story short, he was able to find malware apps running in the background and sending information back to an unknown server. If the specifics of this virus were to get into the wrong hands, the results could be deadly.”
“The only reason someone would want a Level 4 virus is”—her head snapped up— “to weaponize it.”
Aiden’s slight nod sent a wave of terror coursing through her. “That’s exactly what I’m trying to say. We’ve already seen a small sampling of what it can do in its raw form. Imagine if its deadliest components are maximized.”
Rachel let her gaze slide from Aiden to the corner of the desk. The world was not ready for a virus like this. “We need to look at the security tape.”
“You have access?”
She nodded, then slid into the chair in front of Dr. Moreno’s desk, typed in her password, then scrolled to the closed-circuit recording. She ran the tape back a few minutes, then stopped as a large man dressed completely in black and a ball cap pushed Dr. Moreno out of his office. Blood ran down Dr. Moreno’s head as the man forced him down the hallway and onto the elevator. Rachel could see the word security written on the back of the aggressor’s jacket and a Gaumond Labs’ patch on his left arm.
“I don’t recognize that guard,” she said.
“I don’t think that’s a Gaumond guard.”
She started clicking through more of the footage, searching for where they’d taken Moreno.
“There.” Aiden tapped on the screen as they appeared again. “Where are they going?”
“It’s a separate research wing.” She paused the footage again. “Moreno must be trying to stall him.”
Aiden’s cell phone buzzed. His frown deepened as he read the message.
“We might have another problem.” He held out his cell phone.
She took it and read the text.
there’s more going on here than just a deadly virus. i think someone is after me. inside job. not safe. don’t know who to trust. watch your back.
She handed the phone back to Aiden, panic now raging full force. “Who’s this from?”
“My boss,” Aiden said, and quickly placed a call. “Come on, Shepherd. Answer me.” He stared at the phone as the call switched to voice message. Aiden grabbed her hand. “We need to get the virus out of here.”
Rachel shook her head. “The safest place for the virus is right where it is in our Level 4 lab.”
“Not if this is an inside job.” Aiden caught her gaze. “Not if someone uses Moreno to get into the lab.”
Rachel swallowed hard, terrified at the thought. She knew Moreno. If someone was trying to force him to hand over the virus, he’d do everything in his power to stop them, but what if he didn’t succeed? What if the virus ended up in the wrong hands?
“We need to get to the lab.”
She could almost feel Aiden’s breath on the back of her neck as he followed her through the large multi-story atrium that separated the office spaces from the BSL-4 laboratories.
The elevator slipped past the floor with the deserted workout facility, and finally past the floor that housed the cook tanks where liquid waste from the lab sinks and showers was autoclaved. By the time they reached the basement level, Rachel still didn’t have a plan to stop this rulebreaker from taking what he claimed was his.
“This it?” Aiden’s calm voice cut through the storm in her head.
“Yes.”
They stepped into the wide, well-lit, and eerily quiet hallway. She’d spent many nights in this facility, but she’d never felt afraid. She was always locked inside the lab where she’d stay until her need for morning coffee drove her stumbling into the next shift of researchers. This pin-drop quiet must be what had her spooked, because her trembling hands were having trouble fishing her ID badge out of her purse.
She held her picture up to the electronic pad that opened the door. Access granted, she hurried through the corridor that led to the solid concrete box lab where she’d foolishly left a potential ancient killer unattended.
Long banks of windows faced both sides of the hall. The transparency had two purposes. If researchers could see out, it helped reduce the claustrophobic feeling that came with being sealed inside a locked room. If management could see in, the sense of being watched increased accountability and reduced mistakes.
Rachel cupped her hands to the glass outside her Level 4 lab. The room had the faint red glow cast by the exit sign above the door to her right, but it was too dark inside to see if anything had been disturbed. She checked the negative air pressure readings on the lighted panel beside the lab’s outer door. If anyone had opened the inner door after she’d left for the party, the system had restabilized.
“Everything looks normal.” Rachel leaned her face toward the tiny iris scanner. A click sounded and the automatic door lock released. “We need to hurry.” She led Aiden into the clothing room. “You can wear your glasses, but no other personal items are allowed.” She pointed at the stacks of surgical scrubs, socks, and underwear.
“Not exactly Calvin Klein,” he said.
“Safety trumps comfort.”
“Disposable underwear’s a luxury for a guy who just spent the past few weeks living in a tent.”
She felt her cheeks flame, then turned without comment and gathered what they needed. “This way.” They stepped inside the small locker room. “You can use that changing closet.” She took the other one. She kicked off her heels and slid out of her fancy cocktail dress. A few minutes later, she was clad in scratchy paper underwear and cotton scrubs. The low-grade quality had never bothered her before, but it grated against her skin as if Aiden Ballinger had awakened every nerve in her body.
Once they were both dressed, they passed into a room where different sizes of hazmat suits hung from the drying rack. She helped Aiden pick the one most likely to fit his six-foot lean and muscular frame. She inflated the suit with an air hose hanging from the ceiling then listened for leaks. He did the same for her once she was safely sealed inside her suit. Aiden held her wrist and taped her triple layer of gloves
to each sleeve of her suit with the skill of someone who’d done this a million times. She was relieved he didn’t break rules when it came to lab protocol, but his touch was a dangerous fire she could feel through all the protective layers. Her hands were still trembling as she taped his gloves.
She returned the tape to the storage bin. “Ready for a helmet?”
“You first.” He removed the helmet from the rack with the word Allen written across the back. “This one yours?”
She nodded.
He leaned in so close his breath brushed her cheek as he placed the clear bubble over her head. She sucked in a gulp of the oxygen flowing into her mask and reined in her thoughts. “Our suits are equipped with a fully functional communication system. We can talk to each other in the lab or communicate with people outside the lab.”
“Great,” he said. “I’ll order a pizza. See if they can get it delivered before we catch this virus and die.”
“I meant, if Dr. Moreno found a way to contact me.”
His grin slid from his lips. “You don’t break rules and you don’t joke, right?”
Her brother Josiah accused her of having no sense of humor. After their father died, Josiah had been the one who’d used humor to deflect his pain. Although it had frustrated her older brother that he could never get his little sister to lighten up, it hadn’t stopped him from trying. Her brother was the only man left in her life who truly loved her, and because of that, his constant teasing and joking was a trait she’d grown to appreciate and admire. But it wasn’t a trait she’d ever managed to imitate.
“You’re the one claiming someone wants to wipe out humanity.” She couldn’t let the fact that this man was alarmingly handsome, intriguing, and somewhat funny distract her. “Doesn’t that feel serious to you? Because it feels serious to me.” She slid a clear helmet over his sandy brown hair. Behind the lens of his glasses, his intelligent eyes watched every movement she made with more than a clinical interest in whether or not she’d done everything properly.
