Skewered by the headlights of the cars that now slammed to a halt in front of them, her ears ringing with screeching brakes and slamming doors, her terrified gaze full of dark shapes running toward her, she heard him saying something else—a quote from the Bible; she recognized it, but it made no sense.
She let it go.
Then she passed out.
* * *
The hiss sounded mechanical. The smell was some kind of strong chemical. The steady burbling sound had to be a liquid. Cold air blew over her skin.
It was the cold that woke Bianca.
Her eyelids felt heavy, like they had weights attached. Bianca forced them open.
Immediately she wished she’d kept them shut.
Through thick glass walls, she looked out into what appeared to be a laboratory. The light was whitish fluorescent, from ceiling fixtures. The walls were white, the floor black tile. Immediately in front of her were what appeared to be tall glass sculptures. Beyond them, black-topped tables held microscopes, Bunsen burners, racks of test tubes and other lab equipment, plus a microwave and small refrigerator. A CAT scan machine, a couple of long tables, two full-size upright freezers and a large centrifuge took up the far wall. A window at one end of it had the blinds drawn, but the blinds were crooked. Around the edges she could see that it was night.
Where am I?
She remembered her father, no, Mason, and her heart began to pound.
The glass wall she was looking through wasn’t the only one. A second glass wall stood between her and the laboratory she was looking into. That glass wall separated the section of the room she was in from the laboratory.
Her head ached like someone had taken a hammer to it. It hurt to move it, but she did. The glass wall around her was curved, she saw as her head turned. She blinked stupidly through it for a moment before the true horror of her situation hit her.
I’m in a tube.
A human-size test tube, to be exact. She was being kept upright by sturdy cloth straps looped around her shoulders that held her suspended from the ceiling. Or, rather, from the lid of the tube, she discovered as she looked up. It was clear, too, and above it was a glass tank slowly filling with a cloudy liquid that bubbled and gave off vapor.
Not good.
Alarm washed over her in a wave.
Her mind was clearing. She tried to make sense of what was happening. She was in a tube, suspended upright by cloth straps beneath a tank filling with an ominous-looking liquid. Her feet—they were bare; a downward flick of her eyes told her that she was wearing only her bra and underpants—touched the ground, which was a black raised platform completely enclosed by the tube.
Bianca sucked in air, glanced quickly around.
There was no one present that she could see. She was alone in a room about the size of a basketball court. The only sounds were mechanical and liquid—and the now harsh rasp of her own breathing.
The sculptures she had looked past before weren’t sculptures at all, she discovered as she examined them more closely. They were tubes just like the one she was in.
Two neat rows of human-size tubes that took up half of the room.
The other tubes were not empty.
They were full of a bubbling liquid that reminded her of clear lava lamps.
Except floating in the midst of the liquid were small shapes.
Babies.
Bianca’s heart clutched.
Dead, preserved babies with numbers affixed to the tops of the tubes they were in. The one across from her was marked with number 22. Sick with dread, Bianca looked up and down the row. There were twenty-four tubes, according to the number 24 on the last one. Twenty-four on the side she was on, too, because they were evenly matched.
Forty-eight in all.
From the position of her tube, she knew she had to be in number 44.
Bianca felt as if all the blood was draining from her head.
The Nomad Project. She was Nomad 44.
Mason had given her over to them.
Sheer terror kicked the last, enervating effects of whatever drug Mason had used on her from her system. The tank of liquid over her head suddenly took on galvanizing significance.
Her best guess was that when it was full it was going to be emptied into the tank she was in. She was going to be drowned in it, preserved.
She began to fight against the straps holding her in place.
“You shouldn’t be awake.” The mildly annoyed voice made her jump. It was male, it was coming to her over an intercom and the speaker was nowhere in sight. The language was American-accented English. She broke out in a cold sweat. “You weren’t supposed to wake up.”
“Well, I am awake. Let me out of here.” Inside she might be a shaking glob of gelatin, but her voice was strong and firm. Maybe she could convince whoever this was to release her. More likely, she was going to have to break herself out. She got her arms out of the straps, which, since they had clearly been designed to hold her unconscious body in place while the liquid poured in over her rather than to restrain her conscious, fighting self as she was murdered, required no more than her grabbing on to each one in turn, pulling herself up so that she was no longer suspended from them by her body weight, and yanking her arms through. From the way the straps were affixed to the top of the tube, she thought that they were designed to be removed from the tube once she was dead, preserved and floating like the others in bubbling liquid.
The horror of it made her blood congeal. She pushed on the walls of the tube.
There was no give.
“I can’t do that.” He sounded genuinely apologetic. “I have my orders.”
“To hell with your orders. I’m a living, breathing human being. Let me out.” There was a barely visible crack in the glass of her tube: a straight line, a door, she saw as she followed it down. Of course, they’d had to have some way to get her in. She would use it to get out.
She threw herself against the crack, then when nothing happened did it again and again.
“Stop that!” He sounded alarmed. “You’ll bruise yourself. There’s no way out. It won’t hurt. I promise, it won’t hurt.”
“Fuck that! Open this door! You know you can.” She pounded at the crack with her fists, honed into weapons by years of martial arts training. She kicked at it, threw her shoulder against it. The glass barely shook, showed no sign of breaking. Panic was starting to set in. A glance up told her that the tank was over halfway full and filling fast. When it was deep enough to drown her, she had no doubt that he would release it into the tube she was in. Then she was dead, she knew.
“There’s no way out, I tell you. It’s a voice-activated lock, and once it’s activated the whole sequence is automatic. You have to know the code to open the door, and to stop the sequence, and you have to say it into the microphone in here.”
She saw him then, in an elevated office at the far side of the room opposite the window. A scientist in a white lab coat, peering out at her through the long window that overlooked the lab. He had both hands pressed against the window, and his expression was one of dismay. Behind him were banks of what looked like computers and other equipment.
“So say it! Say the code into the microphone!” She attacked the tube with fresh vigor even as she screamed it at him. “Otherwise, what you’re doing is murder. You’re not a murderer. You don’t want to be a murderer! Say the damned code!”
“I don’t know it,” he said. “I’m so sorry—it’ll be over soon.”
Glancing up, Bianca saw that the tank overhead was almost full. Fresh terror sent adrenaline torpedoing through her veins, and she threw herself against the walls of the tube, using every trick she knew to break through.
I can’t believe you did this to me: she sent the pain-and rage-filled thought winging toward Mason as the knowledge that he had traded her life for his family
burned like acid through her soul.
Then she remembered the quote from the Bible he’d whispered to her right before she’d lost consciousness.
And she knew: he’d set her up, but he’d also given her the key.
“The truth shall set you free,” she screamed, as loud as she could so that it would go over the intercom and be picked up by the microphone in the office. “The truth shall set you free.”
The tube door opened, and she leaped out.
Immediately alarms started to sound.
“Oh, no, oh, no!” the scientist cried. Then he was summoning help. “Emergency, emergency, fourth-floor lab. Hurry.”
Bianca didn’t know what was coming, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t good. From the fact that the Nomad Project was being kept inside it, she had to assume that the facility was controlled by the CIA. She had to expect a military-quality response.
Escaping by the door was out. Whatever security force they had would be coming through that.
She was unarmed. Totally weaponless.
Luckily, she was good at making do.
With alarms wailing and the scientist still yelling for help over whatever communication system he had and what she had to assume was some kind of armed response team on the way, she darted to the window, shoved the blind aside, looked out.
Four stories up. Hard ground down. A chain-link fence. A road. What looked like a river on the other side of the road.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t fly. If she leaped from that window, she wasn’t going to make it to the river. She was going to go splat on the ground.
Unless she slid along the power line that ran from just above the window to the pole on the other side of the fence.
The window cranked open. She tried the crank. It worked.
“Hurry, hurry, hurry,” the scientist screamed. “She’s trying to get away!”
Running back into the lab, Bianca yanked loose both the rubber hoses that fed gas into the Bunsen burners. They were a good length, about three feet each. Rubber was strong—and insulating. She would throw them over the power line, grab the ends, slide to the pole, climb down.
The smell of natural gas was strong as it spewed out into the room.
She could have blown the lab up easily. Spewing gas plus a piece of metal in a microwave equals big bad boom.
But she didn’t. She just wanted to get away.
Plus there was the thought, fleeting but inexorable, that everything she wanted to know about herself might be contained in this lab. How the Nomad Project came into being, who was responsible, the identity of her biological parents—
No time to speculate. The best she could do was not destroy what was present, and make a silent promise to herself and her fellow Nomads, the babies in the tubes: I’ll be back.
She ran for the window, cranked it open enough to get out.
She was up on the sill, balancing precariously on her toes as she hooked the doubled sections of hose over the wire, when a squad of soldiers burst into the room.
“She’s there at the window! Get her, get her!” the scientist screamed.
“Stop or we’ll shoot!” a soldier yelled.
Bianca’s one thought was, they won’t take me again.
Grabbing the ends of the hose, she flung herself out into the night.
The soldiers opened fire en masse.
Bullets smacked into the wall, whizzed into the darkness, passed through the spewing cloud of natural gas.
And the lab blew up with an earthshaking roar.
32
It was almost Christmas. Bianca and Doc had been back in Savannah for nearly a month. Reaching safety had involved hiding in the back of a vehicle being evacuated from the explosion and resulting raging fire at the black site in Stare Kiejkuty, Poland, where as it turned out the lab was located, then running for her life along a highway while barefoot and in her underwear until she was able (probably with the underwear’s help) to flag down a man in a car. When, acting under a wrong assumption about her attitude toward casual sex that she might have helped put in his head, he stopped at a roadside hotel, she accompanied him inside, knocked him out and stole his clothes and car. After that, it was merely a matter of plugging into her contacts to acquire money and a passport and, voila, she was on her way home. If the Russians had discovered that King Priam’s Treasure was missing, they were keeping it quiet. So far, Germany—assuming the treasure had ended up in Germany; her trust in Mason had taken a major dip—was keeping quiet, too. The Darjeeling Brothers’ contract was no longer posted. Bianca wanted to think that it had been withdrawn, possibly as a result of the deal Mason had struck. Or maybe whoever had posted it thought she was dead, killed in the lab explosion.
Yeah, she doubted it, too.
Truly, her luck was never that good.
As far as she knew, the CIA kill team had been called off, as well. Of course, that was one of those things that she might very well only learn she was wrong about when she suddenly got shot. She was wary, afraid that she was still a huge target, that the hunt for her hadn’t been called off but, rather, had gone underground.
Which would make it all the more dangerous.
But until she knew more, there wasn’t a whole lot she could do. Except keep an eye out, and her fingers and toes crossed.
And live her life unless and until she couldn’t anymore.
Today was a happy one. Guardian Consulting had signed a new client that morning. And she’d done some Christmas shopping over lunch.
Laden with packages, she was on her way back up to the office. Tonight they were taking some of their biggest clients to dinner at The Olde Pink House, one of Savannah’s nicest restaurants, for an early Christmas celebration. In honor of that, she was wearing a red knit long-sleeved dress with a narrow black belt around the waist, black stockings and black heels. Her blond hair was brushed back from her face and tucked behind one ear.
Bottom line, she was looking and feeling good.
Her phone dinged to announce the arrival of a text as she stepped off the elevator. As she approached the office, it dinged again, then again, in quick succession. Bianca frowned, but her hands were too full to allow her to check her phone for messages.
She would do that as soon as her hands were free.
Shouldering through Guardian Consulting’s door, she was greeted by Evie.
“You have a walk-in,” Evie said, low-voiced.
Bianca looked around the reception room: no walk-in in sight.
“In your office,” Evie said, and Bianca’s eyebrows went up. Evie never let people inside her office when she wasn’t there.
“I told him to go on in,” Doc popped out of his office to say. He waggled his eyebrows and grimaced speakingly at her behind Evie’s back, but stopped as Evie turned around. “I just sent you a text. Or three.”
That explained the dings from her phone.
Bianca felt the first niggle of concern.
“So who is it?” she asked Evie as she headed for her office.
Doc was making faces again behind Evie’s back. He drew his hand across his throat in a universal kill gesture. Bianca frowned at him.
“Tower Consulting,” Evie answered, opening the door to Bianca’s office for her.
Smiling her thanks, Bianca walked in.
A tall man in a dark suit stood in front of the window. He turned to face her as she entered.
Bianca stopped dead. She nearly dropped every package she held.
The man smiled at her.
“Hello, Bianca,” Colin said.
* * * * *
Acknowledgments
It takes a team to publish a book, and I’m fortunate enough to have a fabulous one.
Thank you to my wonderful editor, Emily Ohanjanians, for her discerning eye and unfailing support.
&
nbsp; Thank you to Meredith Barnes, who does such a great job with publicity.
Thank you to Margaret Marbury, who oversees an enormous operation and does it with style and grace.
Thank you to MIRA Books for all their efforts to get my stories in front of as many readers as possible.
Thank you to my agent, Robert Gottlieb, and everyone at Trident Media Group for working tirelessly on my behalf.
And finally, thank you to my readers. Where would I be without you?
ISBN-13: 9781488023538
The Moscow Deception
Copyright © 2018 by Karen Robards
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
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The Moscow Deception--An International Spy Thriller Page 32
