Hugh had been leaning against the car window but jolted upright. “The UMMC is a lab hospital, right?” His eyes widened. “Couldn’t he be using one of the labs in a research building or something?”
“Maybe.” Not convinced, Robin considered the suggestion. “Most of the labs are packed with research assistants and scientists. It’s an academic institution, so there are a lot of people in a small place, you know? There’s not exactly money raining on the place for everyone to have their own huge lab.”
“Hugh might have a point.” Chris watched out the window as the car drew nearer to the glowing red and white signs announcing the University of Maryland Medical Center. “There have to be labs or storage rooms or something off the beaten path. A place where people wouldn’t normally frequent. We didn’t find anything at Reed’s house, so he’s got to be manufacturing these camouflaged prions somewhere, and the hospital would have all the equipment he’d need to do it.”
Jordan thought back to his own days of laboratory research at Northwestern University’s labs in downtown Chicago. “I think I might have an idea.” He and Chris had met while performing genetic engineering research. As graduate students, they’d often set up experiments requiring them to wait a couple hours between steps. That gave them plenty of time to goof off. Since they worked late hours, they’d had the run of the hospital and all its dark corridors to wander and explore. “There was a lab at Northwestern. A high-powered imaging lab. Or at least, a few decades ago, it was considered high-powered. It held a pretty massive transmission electron microscope.”
“Right.” Chris leaned out of his seat. “The whole lab was buried in the basement. Sound and vibration dampeners all around it to prevent the vibrations from cars on the street from interfering with the imaging.”
“The microscope was that sensitive?” Robin asked.
Jordan nodded. “It was built in the 2020s. The tiniest vibration would disrupt the images it could obtain on a molecular level.”
“And I take it the dampeners and padding used around the lab would prevent sound from not only entering but also escaping the lab?”
“That would be my guess.” Chris gripped the door handle as the car slowed to a stop. “So do you have any old imaging labs?”
Robin exhaled and glanced at the stark LED lights above the glass doors labeled Employees Only. “I’ve never spent much time looking around for old imaging labs, but there’s one way to find out.”
“We don’t have the luxury of spending all night looking around,” Jordan said.
“Then let’s get moving,” Chris said. “Put a little hustle into it.”
Chris exited, and Robin followed. Jordan laid his hand on Hugh’s shoulder. “My man, thanks for your help tonight. Could you circle around the area but try not to appear too suspicious?”
Hugh nodded.
Jordan and the others might need the Audi for a speedy getaway, and they also needed someone to keep an eye on Gordon Huff, still secured in the trunk. “Hopefully this will be a quick in-and-out trip and we’ll be back with Ana, ready to go.”
He got out and ensured his pistol was still stowed in his waistband. An ambulance’s sirens went off, flying up to the glaring red letters glowing atop the emergency room entrance nearby. Taking another glance at the ambulance disappearing down a side street, Jordan prayed none of them would be visiting that part of the hospital tonight.
Chapter 36
Ana woke. Her head pounded. Back at Equest, when she’d told Robin to hide, she’d felt a momentary spring of courage. She’d put up a fight before running out of rounds. Her last memory comprised several of the gunmen charging her, subduing her, and then her world went black.
Now an intense agony coursed from the back of her skull to her neck. She’d never been one to suffer from headaches or migraines; she usually mitigated hangovers by keeping track of her drinking. Other officers and detectives chose to numb the memories of their working days with alcohol. More often than not, she drowned her anxieties of unsolved cases or mistakes with more work.
She’d never known what it felt like when her colleagues described light from seemingly weak bulbs piercing their eyes and sending intense pangs of pain undulating through their brain. She’d never been able to empathize when Detective Lee Harris went home, claiming his migraine hurt enough to blur his vision and muddle his thoughts.
She understood now.
The sterile, chemical-laden air stung her nostrils, and even that seemed to accentuate the pain. She blinked then squinted to survey her surroundings. The light sneaking between her lashes and eyelids lit a fire in her skull, but she needed to know where she was, what was going on before her captors finished her off.
Dying now would end her pain, but it wouldn’t solve the case she’d started. A case she felt she’d opened ages ago. It had taken only a few short days since the senator’s assassination and the death of the journalist, once seemingly unconnected events, and she’d ended up here.
Wherever here was.
Everything she’d worked for, her struggle for survival and evading her own police department, couldn’t be in vain. She’d fought to find the truth behind the dark events plaguing her life, and now she might be closer than ever to doing just that. She needed to escape, to figure out where she’d been taken.
She leaned forward, but a heavy strap pulled on her chest. She was lying on her back with both wrists, both ankles secured to something.
Vague sounds of mechanical clinking and the whirring of electric motors whispered from across the space. She forced her eyes open wider, strained against the straps holding her, and bent her chin to her chest. Against the white-painted cinder-block wall stood an assembly of glass tubes and plastic boxes. It appeared no different than many of the scenes she’d seen in academic laboratories in her constant efforts to tour various labs and speak with researchers to stay at the top of her field.
But if recent events were any indication, she doubted the assembly’s purpose was anything as innocuous as a university research experiment run by a graduate student eagerly awaiting happy hour and pepperoni pizza.
She twisted her neck to the right. The straps fought against her, but she could make out the blurred silhouette of another mechanical assembly. This one sat like a waiting, golden giant. Cords and plastic tubes sprang from its coppery skin in a bevy of swirls and loops. The machine was silent.
She strained her ears but heard no sound of footsteps or breathing or any other indication someone else inhabited the room. Closing her eyes, willing the pain to subside, she focused on the smell. Underneath the sterility and harsh chemical scent, she detected a hint of mustiness.
The crashing of a door interrupted her thoughts. Heavy footsteps echoed across the tiled floor. They drew near.
The footsteps quieted. Warm breath washed over her. Hands crept over her shoulders, her arms. A hot fury built inside her until she could stand it no more.
She opened her eyes, pain knocking back and forth within her head. “Who the hell are you?”
“A doctor.” He spoke with a calm voice. The word alone contributed to momentary relief. Maybe she’d been saved, helped after all.
But the straps across her chest provided no such solace. “What the hell are you doing with me?”
His silhouette became clearer to her as she kept her eyes open against the pain. He reached out with a long, thin arm and grabbed her wrist.
She recoiled as much as she could, his touch disgusting her. Tied down and stuck away in some strange laboratory, she didn’t expect this man’s intentions to be at all benevolent.
“Don’t worry. I just want to take your pulse.” Light-brown hair whisked across his head. His brow furrowed as he pressed a cool plastic device against her wrist. His thin, tall nose twitched as he appeared to concentrate on the device’s readout. “Looks like you’re okay. I’ve been at this for decades, but it’s always a bit risky anesthetizing a patient who’s suffered massive blood loss and significant cranial traum
a.”
“All this to keep me alive?” She tried to spit, but even that small effort sent waves of pain through her skull. “Why don’t you kill me?”
“I won’t personally kill you.” The man’s cracked lips spread in a menacing smirk. “That would go against the Hippocratic Oath, wouldn’t it? Someone else gets to decide.”
“Who?”
“Hardly important to you.” He tilted his head, scratching at his temple. “Although I guess you are a detective in Bio, so this might actually be hugely important, huh?” He reached behind him. The squeak of unoiled wheels assaulted her eardrums. He dragged a stool up beside her and sat.
A doctor examining his patient. That was all this was. Ana wanted to laugh, wanted to diffuse the fright and pain and confusion dancing in her mind and running through her nerves. She’d been lucky to escape death before, but she feared luck was no longer on her side. She saw no way out of her predicament, no way to flee or fight back.
“But to answer your question, I need a little information from you.” The doctor poked her shoulder. “And if you help me out, there’s a chance I can persuade the boss when she arrives.”
“The boss?”
The doctor laughed. “Yes, in more ways than one. She’s responsible for recruiting a few people you might know in the feds and in your own department, your colleagues. So if you’re cooperative, if you prove yourself valuable, you might come out of this alive and keep your job as a detective. Plus, we pay our detectives a little bonus for their continued loyalty. Understand?”
Disgust filled her, and she wondered how many of her colleagues had been paid off by this man. “You’re bribing me, bribing others.”
Another chortle escaped the doctor’s lips. “I’m not trying to be subtle, but yes, that’s what you’d call it. You wouldn’t be alone, either. It’s not just your department or the FBI. We’ve got good men and women across the nation on our side.” He wrapped his fingers around her wrist. “And you wouldn’t have to give up pursuing criminals or taking down murderers. The caveat is we’d tell you which cases you won’t be able to solve. Not too bad, right?”
It was entirely bad. Her nose scrunched into a snarl. “Screw you.”
Instead of laughing, the man’s face turned red. His bottom lip stuck out, and he slammed a fist on her shoulder.
She yelled in pain. The flames in her head exploded.
“Your stubbornness isn’t cute.” He pressed a finger into her breastbone. “Plenty of your friends work for us.”
Ana screwed her face into a scowl, panting and fighting to catch her breath. The agony still burned, but what this man asked her to do grated on her more fiercely. Knowing her fellow officers and detectives like Gordon Huff had infiltrated her department, that their federal counterparts had been coerced and corrupted, evoked loneliness and betrayal. She imagined herself a sailor adrift on flotsam in the ocean, and the shadows encircling her might be sharks. “You’re going to have to kill me.”
One of the machines buzzed. A display blinked red, and the doctor hurried over without answering Ana’s demand. His white coat fluttered behind him as he moved between the glass tubes and clear plastic hoses. He adjusted a valve connecting a compressed nitrogen tank to the contained production environment, and the buzzing ceased along with the blinking red light. Eyes closed, the doctor turned back to Ana, shaking his head.
It was as if her words finally had reached him. “I do want to kill you. Trust me, I think it would be best.” He sighed after emphasizing his opinion—as if someone or something prevented him from carrying out his plans. “But I would like to know where Dr. Haynes is. I need her here, do you understand?”
Ana understood. Quite clearly. Robin had been the first to catch a whiff of the conspiracy afoot; she’d witnessed the first case of prion disease. Robin had the nose to sniff out the trail leading to this doctor, this man imprisoning her.
But Ana would never tell this asshole where Robin had gone, where her friend hid—the doctor had put her life on the line letting Ana stay at her house and had subsequently saved Ana when those thugs had broken in. In any case, for all she knew, Robin had since vanished from the secret corridor under Jordan’s old laboratory facility. She hoped Robin had found somewhere far away from here. “I have no idea where Haynes is.” And that was the truth.
“That won’t do.” The man picked up a metal tray and set it on a stand near Ana. He selected a heat scalpel. With a subtle click, the device turned on. A blue heat-arc blade glowed menacingly from the tip.
The doctor toyed with the blade and held it close to Ana’s arm. Heat radiated from it. Her skin tingled. Made for surgery, the device could cut with micrometer precision and cauterize all in one careful motion. The bleeding would be minimized, any cuts or slashes immediately cinched up by the intense heat.
But the pain wouldn’t be so diminished.
“Find her yourself.” Ana willed more confidence into her voice than what she felt staring at the plasma blade. “No matter what you do to me, I have no idea where she is. Cutting me up like a steak isn’t going to magically imbue me with that knowledge.”
The doctor grinned and lifted his shoulders slightly. He dragged the blade across her exposed forearm. Her nerves kicked.
It hurt, but she could handle the pain. She gritted her teeth and tried to ignore the scent of burned flesh. “That’s your plan to get me talking?”
Shaking his head, the doctor laughed. “No, no. That’s nothing.” He shook a plastic vial in front of her face. “This is what goes in the nice little incision.” Flicking open the small container with his thumb, he used his free hand to grab a syringe with a needle already in place. He inserted the needle and pulled up on the syringe plunger to withdraw the liquid. He held the needle above the incision and licked his lips as a tiny drop fell into the cut.
Almost at once, an agony more horrific than that of her pounding head tore through her arm. She howled and pressed against the straps holding her down.
The doctor dripped a different solution into the cut, and at once a soothing coolness replaced the pain.
He set the glass bottle of the cooling solution next to the plastic vial with whatever had caused the bowels of hell to erupt in her arm. “This is new. Nanobots. One group developed these little guys to deliver fresh oxygen to muscle cells—kind of like an artificial red blood cell. I decided it wouldn’t be hard to coopt them for delivering other chemicals like anesthetics or, for instance, hydrochloric acid. Painful, huh?”
He peered into the vial. “The problem is that once I modified them, it’s been difficult to get them to circulate in the bloodstream. When they’re carrying oxygen, it’s no problem. But when I synthesized them so they’d carried tiny liquid droplets or aerosolized liquids, they stumble their way through the bloodstream like a drunk searching for home at four in the morning.” He shook his head and set the vial down. “The only way they’ve delivered any of the modified loads I’ve given them is through direct insertion into the target site. While I’ve tried to fix this problem, I’ve ended up with a lot of extra nanobots with no real purpose.” He sneered. “So thanks for allowing me to use them for something.”
Ana panted as she caught her breath. Sweat trickled down her forehead and along her jaw. She gazed around at the room again, studying the large hobbled-together looking microscope contraption, the painted cinder-block walls, the miniature manufacturing setup that looked like a production unit for genetic enhancements. She needed to escape, and once she did, she wanted to have the entire place memorized. She wanted to identify the place. Maybe she could squeeze out useful information from this man so determined to see her die. “You sit in this little cave and run creepy experiments by yourself?”
The doctor readied the syringe with another dose of the nanobots. “Hardly.”
“Seems like you’re lying.” She meant to take advantage of the man’s evident hubris, try to shame him into divulging more. “Doesn’t make sense for a guy, working like a Dr. Fran
kenstein, to claim he has all these connections in PD or the FBI or whatever other story you want to make up. Last time I saw an organization with real power, it was Tallicor.”
With the syringe poised above the cut in her arm, the doctor’s eyes narrowed. “The same Tallicor led by Vincent Kar? He was stupid beyond arrogance. Tallicor was run to ground by your people. Do you know why?”
“Enlighten me.”
“His organization was more like a beehive. Sure, they could sting, but everyone knew where they were hiding. At the end of the day, it’s far too easy to swat down the hive with a broomstick and send all the drones buzzing for safety.” He held up the syringe and needle. “But any organization worth its salt in this business doesn’t try to flaunt what we have. Our people are everywhere, able to rise at a moment’s notice and fade back into the shadows just as quickly. That’s our secret to success. You won’t find a glaring neon sign pointing to a home base or anything quite so trite and foolish.”
“So you’re more like a bunch of cockroaches, huh?”
The doctor inserted another dose of the nanobots. Volcanoes erupted, lava coursed through her vessels. She screamed, her throat going raw. The pain pushed her to the edge of consciousness, her vision swimming. Agony ebbed and flowed like so many tidal waves relentlessly pounding.
Her world turned dark again.
Chapter 37
Chris hated entering the gloomy hospital basement corridors with an almost empty handgun. He patted the spot where he’d stowed the gun in his waistband. Jordan had emptied his own magazine and separated the remaining rounds, so they each carried a few. Robin had partially recharged the stunner in Jordan’s Audi, but its charge meter still flashed less than a quarter full. Between them, their weapons might tide them over in any one-on-one personal defense situations, but they wouldn’t last in a gunfight. He hoped if they were right, if Reed and his cronies had tucked themselves away in the abandoned academic laboratories attached to the hospital, maybe they too would be leery of causing a storm of gunfire.
The Black Market DNA Series: Books 1-3 Page 73
