Dangerous Conditions (Protectors At Heart Book 4)

by Jenna Kernan

  “They don’t see them,” said Paige.

  Logan turned on the snowmobile and flashed the light.

  The guards turned toward them.

  Both doors opened on the SUV and two people emerged. Behind the truck, the guards dropped to the snow-covered ground and lifted their rifles.

  “Look out!” Paige yelled.

  “Take cover!” shouted Logan.

  The guards opened fire. The figure on the passenger side of the vehicle dropped. The second returned fire with a handgun.

  “Outgunned,” said Logan.

  “Look,” said Paige and pointed toward the loading dock. Two more gunmen appeared and opened fire, peppering the SUV with bullet holes. The single gunman scrambled behind the vehicle and to their downed partner. Paige watched in horror as the driver managed to get the wounded passenger back in the vehicle and get the SUV moving in reverse.

  “They’re leaving us.”

  He flicked off the light and moved them along the tree line and out of the scope of fire. Paige could see the flash of the muzzles as the gunmen fired at them, but the sound did not penetrate the roar of the motor.

  She heard a whine behind them as they flashed up Elm and turned to see the bouncing light that could be only one thing—another snowmobile. Behind that came a second.

  “They’re after us,” she shouted.

  Logan glanced at the mirror fixed to the handlebars and then leaned forward.

  “Hold on!”

  Paige clung to Logan as they flashed through the park on the snowmobile. She wondered which of the two in the SUV had been shot and how badly they were injured.

  Out of the park now, they flew over the snow up Turkey Hollow Road, and their pursuers were gaining on them. Something hit the back of the sled and the rear taillight winked out.

  Gunfire. They were shooting at them. Paige imagined getting a bullet in her back. Leaving Lori and Steven and Valerie alone again. She had to survive this. They had to get away.

  “Hold on!” Logan cut to the right between the church and the firehouse. The volunteer organization was the only building that looked open. Why didn’t he go there?

  They rode dangerously close to the steep hill that lay between the Methodist church below them and the firehouse above. She felt the pull and slide as he managed to hug the top of the slope.

  “Get to a landline phone and call for help, Paige. Stay put. Don’t go back there.”

  “What are you—”

  Without explanation, he reached back and shoved her from the seat behind him.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Paige flew through space, arms out and screaming. She landed in deep snow and rolled. A moment later the snowmobiles chasing them flashed past her in hot pursuit of Logan. The vehicles darted up Railroad Avenue. Now it was Logan’s back wide-open to gunfire.

  Paige pushed herself to her feet, located her hat and struggled up the steep, slippery incline to the fire station.

  There she found her daughter’s third-grade teacher, Mr. Garrett, on duty in his volunteer firefighter shirt. He was holding a stained wooden spoon covered in red sauce when he buzzed her in.

  “Ms. Morris. What a surprise. Just in time for dinner. I’m making chicken parm.” His smile faded as he gave her a long look. “What’s wrong?”

  She told him as much as she could between the gasping and panting. She hurried to the phone and dialed 911. She got the county dispatch and explained the situation including the DHS vehicle and the shooting. By the time she put down the phone, the three men and one woman from the volunteer squad were suited up. There, in full firefighter gear, stood teachers Mr. Garrett and Mr. Warren, Mr. Booker, who was the husband of the school nurse and the head of human resources at the plant, and the school principal, Mrs. Unger.

  “You can’t go down there. They have guns.”

  Mrs. Unger, who had always inspired terror in Paige as a child, gave her a confident smile.

  “So do we, Ms. Morris.” She lifted the edge of her polar fleece jacket to reveal a shoulder holster.

  Paige blurted out the first thing that came to her mind. “Do you carry that in school?”

  “Of course not. But we aren’t in school.”

  “Why do you think these men were not just armed security guards?”

  “Automatic weapons. Body armor. They set up an ambush for the DHS agents and then they attacked us without provocation.”

  Unger nodded. “Then we had better stop that truck. You coming?”

  She was. In only a few moments she and five members of the volunteer fire department of the village of Hornbeck were underway in their single hook and ladder truck. Behind them came their EMS vehicle, driven by Mr. Garrett.

  As they headed back down Turkey Hollow Road, Mrs. Unger turned to Paige.

  “Busy week for you.”

  * * *

  LOGAN GLANCED BACK to see Paige land in deep snow and roll. A moment later his pursuers flashed past her position, following him. Logan had one advantage. He knew the territory. But his snowmobile was slower, and his pursuers had firearms. Logan was vulnerable and exposed.

  Logan reached Creamery Road. Here he turned off the headlight. He knew this trail down the cutoff. He knew where the boulders had been pushed out of the way for the rough jeep trail and where the narrow bridge broached the fast-running stream. His pursuers did not.

  He aimed for the creek and only veered toward the bridge at the last moment. As a result he slid sideways. The back part of the track left the bridge. He shifted forward, leaning out over the skis and the weight of his body and the engine was enough to keep him on the wooden trestles.

  Behind him, his pursuers, on larger machines, did not make the turn so quickly. The first sled swerved and skidded across the start of the trestle and then fell off the side of the bridge. The snowmobile tipped and rolled, landing on the driver in the icy creek. The second driver started the turn and then abandoned the attempt so that he and his snowmobile careened down the incline, also landing in the stream.

  Logan did not stop. He had to find Paige and be sure she was all right. He made it down the cutoff and over Turax Hollow Road, coming out between the school and Rathburn-Bramley. There he saw the red flashing lights of the village’s fire truck, which had collided with the box truck he’d seen parked at the loading bay. The two vehicles blocked Raquette Road and the box truck had slipped off the shoulder. Logan’s best guess, it wasn’t getting out of that ditch without a tow truck.

  He slowed at the accident and found Mr. Garrett standing at the back of the EMS vehicle.

  “Where’s Paige?” Logan asked.

  “She went with Drake, the DHS agent and the sheriff.”

  “Where?”

  “Into the plant.”

  “Is it clear?” asked Logan.

  “I don’t know, Logan. I only know that we are supposed to treat this truck as a biohazard and stay here with it until backup arrives.”

  “The driver?”

  “Ran off.” Garrett motioned in the direction of the woods.

  Logan put the snowmobile in motion toward the glowing mouth of the open loading dock door, twisting the throttle for greater speed. She was in trouble. He just knew it.

  * * *

  PAIGE FOLLOWED BEHIND Sheriff Trace, now bleeding from his left shoulder. They reached the front entrance of the pharmaceutical plant. Drake had opened the door using the key code, and the sheriff had braced it with a cylindrical waste can to allow their eventual backup easy access. Before him was the CEO, looking pale and shaken after his arrival and clutching his key card as if it had some magical powers to grant invisibility. Leading the group was DHS Agent Rylee Hockings.

  Paige had suggested waiting, but when Hockings had told her what they were facing and that this terrorist group was fully capable of releasing this pandemic in her homet
own, Paige changed her mind. Her daughter lived here, the Sullivan kids and her mother and Logan’s family. Everyone who was dear to her lived right here.

  Hockings and the sheriff had been delayed in their arrival because they had slid off the road and it had taken some work by the three of them to get them back underway. They had arrived to take fire from the loading dock and reversed course. They had been on the front side of the building, out of sight of the loading dock, when the fire truck and EMS had arrived, forcing the box truck off the road.

  Since Paige was the only one who knew the batch numbers from Dr. Sullivan’s files and what sort of packaging and shipping containers to search for, she was included in the party heading to the factory.

  Paige had joined Rathburn-Bramley’s CEO in the backseat as they made a second approach. They had already tried and failed to make contact with Hocking by phone, but they did not have a signal. When Paige explained that she’d called the state police and told them the situation, Hockings and Sheriff Trace decided to go in via a different route.

  Now knowing that their targets were on the loading dock and armed, they approached from the opposite direction, through the main entrance.

  Hornbeck’s volunteers remained back with the fire engine and EMS vehicle waiting for the DHS agents and state police.

  Where was Logan? Had he evaded pursuit or was he out there in the snow, injured or dead? She pushed down the panic at that thought. If ever in her life she needed to focus, it was now.

  They crept down the hall past the empty security station and through the silent metal detectors.

  Hockings had said this group called themselves Siming’s Army after some Chinese mythological creature that judged each person’s worth to determine the number of days they had on earth. This group had successfully created a deadly, virulent strain of influenza that would rival the pandemic of 1918. She’d studied that epidemic in school. She knew that more people died in the two-year contagion than all the victims of WWI. Like a war, that illness did not take the young, old and weak. It killed people in their twenties and thirties at a rate of twelve percent. Paige had asked the mortality rate of this strain. The CDC had told Hockings that it would approach sixty percent.

  Worse still, this contagion, once airborne, would not die on surfaces. It would spread with the speed of a gas leak, only undiluted, from host to host.

  They paused in the data center at the bank of windows overlooking the finished goods area. Beyond was their destination: shipping.

  “How do you know it’s here?” she asked Hockings.

  “Because we intercepted one shipment of both the vaccine and the pathogen. And because this is a perfect site for manufacturing this virus.”

  “And because they were shooting at us,” added the sheriff.

  “It could be in the box truck,” said Paige.

  “They wouldn’t send the truck without armed guards. The driver fled. We watched him. The guards are here, so the product is here,” said Hockings. “Our intelligence indicates that once production is complete the pathogen will be released in this state in locations where it will cause the highest mortality.”

  “But why?” asked Paige. “Why would anyone do this?”

  “Not anyone. North Korea. A country we have choked with sanctions for years. Our people believe that they aimed to blame this attack on China, and for a time there, we believed that the Chinese were behind this. A rift between us and the Chinese would certainly benefit the North Koreans.” Hockings looked down at the dark manufacturing floor. Only emergency lights glowed.

  “What am I looking at, Drake?”

  “That’s where we manufacture pharmaceuticals. The upper level is management and quality control. Down here we have packaging, through those windows.” He pointed straight ahead, at the darkness beyond. Then he pointed left, to another bank of dark observation windows. “That’s finished goods and storage. The actual creation, brewing, we call it, and the filling floors are past packaging. Shipping adjoins filling, and the loading docks flank the building beyond that wall.”

  “Quickest route?”

  Drake looked to Paige. “Through packaging, filling and shipping to the dock.”

  “Whatever they were shipping is still in here. We need to find it.”

  Hockings was confident that help would be coming, but Paige knew that there would be no air support. Helicopters would not fly in this. And the roads were now nearly impassable.

  They entered the packaging floor, their footsteps echoing in the chamber filled with still conveyers, their metal rollers silent.

  “What kind of doors between filling and shipping?” Sheriff Trace asked Drake.

  “Uh...” Their CEO looked to her and she realized she’d never seen him on the filling floor.

  “Fire doors,” she said.

  “Windows?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Safety glass. The kind with wires inside.”

  They crept along the wall and to the doors. Trace took one side and Hockings the other. Paige watched them gesture and nod in some language of which she was unfamiliar. Then the sheriff eased open his door. Light spilled across the concrete. Cold air crept along the floor, chilling her in her wet clothing.

  Trace disappeared. Hockings whispered to them.

  “Stay put.”

  Then Hockings disappeared after Trace. Drake looked at her with eyes wide and lips pressed into a grim line.

  “Maybe we should move away from the doors,” he said.

  Paige shook her head. She was looking for the sort of shipping containers they would use to ensure an active virus was safe from breakage and protected from extreme temperatures.

  The flu virus could survive up to two days outside the body on hard surfaces. But she knew how to kill it. Bleach. If this thing was a virus, bleach would kill it.

  Paige cracked the door open and watched Hockings and Trace creep through the filling area and straight to shipping. Beyond lay the loading dock. After another series of unreadable gestures, they headed through the second set of doors.

  Paige crept through the door after them to the shipping area where stacks of finished product lay in cardboard boxes awaiting transport to the loading docks.

  “Stay here, she said,” Drake whispered.

  Paige left him behind, crossing to the doors leading to the loading dock. All those terrorists would need to do was toss one vial on the floor and they’d all be infected. They could be infected if one broke accidentally from, say...a bullet.

  The shout came from the loading dock, Hocking’s voice.

  “DHS! Hands where we can see them.”

  The reply came in the form of automatic weapon fire.

  Paige crouched beside the door, pressed up close to the small stack of boxes.

  There was more shouting, and more shots fired. She knew one of the voices.

  “That’s Lou Reber, my head of security.”

  Paige jumped at the voice that came from beside her. Drake had made the move and followed her.

  Next came two female voices ordering Lou to get the packages and get clear.

  “That’s Veronica,” said Drake, his jaw now hanging open.

  Veronica Vitale, the new CFO of Rathburn-Bramley. Paige recalled the day she was suspended. She’d been trooped out past Veronica Vitale and Lou Reber. The very two she had chosen not to contact with her discovery based on the assumption that her then boss, Dr. Ed Sullivan, would have reported the uninspected batch of product to one or both.

  Another woman shouted to get the boxes.

  “That’s Carol Newman,” Paige whispered.

  “Who?” asked Drake.

  “Sullivan’s replacement.”

  “I didn’t replace Sullivan.”

  Paige was certain the shock showed on her face.

  Someone did, she thought.

 
Paige turned to Allen Drake to say as much when she noticed the boxes behind which they cowered. More important, she read the packing number on the sticker beside the mailing labels.

  She’d looked at the hard copy of Dr. Sullivan’s files often enough to recall the distinct series of numbers and letters. Now they made sense.

  S6Y6M6INGAR666

  Siming’s Army and 666 and so on to 767. Twelve boxes and they were all right here.

  “Sinclair, get to the serum,” shouted Vitale.

  “Sinclair?” asked Drake. “Park. He’s my...”

  “Head of productions,” she finished for him.

  Sinclair burst through the doors and turned toward them, coming up short at seeing them both squatting beside the boxes.

  Drake roared and charged him. Sinclair lifted his pistol and fired twice. Drake grabbed his middle and crumpled to the cold floor. It gave Paige the moments she needed to run. She charged back out through the swinging doors. A shot broke the window above her head.

  She darted between the stacked cardboard boxes as she ran a serpentine route back the way she had come.

  “Morris! Come out and I won’t kill you,” shouted Sinclair.

  Yeah, right, she thought, continuing toward the exit.

  She made it through shipping to the filling area where three rows of production lines rested. Here they could package anything from a syringe of insulin to capsules of painkillers. Her heart hammered and her hands shook. She needed to go back and get those boxes. Every nerve in her body urged her to flee, to run home and hide under her bed as if she were six. But her mind raced with what she had to do. She must get all twelve of those boxes and destroy them. Which meant she had to keep from getting captured or killed.

  Run. Then circle back.

  She almost made it, too.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Logan drove the snowmobile to the main entrance of Rathburn-Bramley, slowing at sighting the familiar black SUV. The sheriff and DHS agent were likely inside. He parked behind a row of shrubbery and headed through the main entrance past the waste can someone had used to block open the door.