by Jack Soren
“I promise I’ll keep you safe, but right now you have to be quiet or this whole thing is going to be blown.”
Lew put the panel back in place, looked out the window, and saw the men leaving the building. Time was up.
Knowing true smugglers always have more than one hiding place, Lew moved to the back of the plane and looked for an empty place to hide. With moments to go, his fingers slipped under the edge of a wall panel. He pulled and the panel came away. It would be a tight squeeze, but he’d fit.
Lew wedged himself in and pulled the panel shut behind him, the clips that held it in place clicking just as he heard voices on the other side. He leaned back, got as comfortable as he could, and then pulled one of the weapons. He checked that it was loaded and then slid the clip back into the handle. He pointed the weapon at the panel and waited.
40
Tartaruga Island
9:30 P.M. Local Time
SOPHIA SAT ON the floor in the back corner of her lab, gently stroking Lucy’s twitching head. She knew in Lucy’s current unmedicated state she probably wasn’t even aware of the caressing, but the strokes weren’t really for Lucy.
The door to the lab buzzed, telling Sophia someone had used their pass card to unlock it. She quickly got up and put Lucy back in her cage, then busied herself at one of the stations. A few moments later, Nathan and Lara came in. Nathan had a metal box in his lap.
“Sophia?” Nathan’s electronic voice called. “There you are,” he said when she walked out from behind the station.
“Hard to be anywhere else with your Gestapo outside the door,” Sophia said. Lara rolled her eyes, but that was all. No snide comment or derisive banter. And she kept flicking her gaze to Nathan. Sophia thought she seemed antsy. Almost nervous. A state Sophia had rarely seen her in.
“I want you to do a DNA profile on the eyes in this case,” Nathan said. Lara took the box from his lap and put it on the counter. “I’ll have another sample for you soon. You’ll need to profile that one as well and cross-match the two—make sure they’re from the same donor. If all goes well, you’ll need to prepare one more serum. The final serum.”
“Final serum?” Sophia repeated, knowing what that meant. “How can you be sure that—”
“I’m sure. That’s all you need to know.”
“Who’s the donor? Where are the eyes from and why don’t you have the other sample yet?” Sophia asked.
“Don’t worry about the details. You just take care of the science,” he said.
“Wait a minute,” Sophia said as Nathan wheeled away with Lara behind him. He stopped and turned back. “I want to know what’s going on.” She would have preferred to do this one-on-one with him. She could feel Lara’s eyes burning into her.
“Sophia, you’re told what you need to know, just like always. You know I’m a busy man and I don’t have time to explain everything. Now get to work. You don’t have much time.”
“That’s not good enough,” Sophia said, stepping forward, her recent revelations fueling her uncharacteristic backbone. It was such an unusual stance for her, both Nathan and Lara jerked back a little. “You have time to explain things to Lara. I’m . . . just as much your daughter as she is.” Her voice cracked a little, but she cleared her throat to cover it.
“Oh please, Sophia. Play your games on your own time. We’ve got work to do,” Lara said.
“And what I’m doing isn’t work? But that’s beside the point. Where’s Jonathan? And for God’s sake, why is his daughter here? And why wasn’t I invited to dinner? What did you talk about that I couldn’t know?” The questions riffled out of her like vomit. Once she started she couldn’t stop and they just came faster and faster. “And the guards. Since when is there a guard posted outside my lab? I gave you the neuro-blocker. Is he protecting me or keeping me in? I don’t see why—”
Lara stepped forward and slapped Sophia across the face. Hard.
“Get a hold of yourself. You’re acting like a fool. Do as you’re told,” Lara scolded.
That was the last straw for Sophia. Her anxiety, fear, and anger came rocketing up out of her chest in the form of a closed fist punch into Lara’s face. Lara’s head rocked back and she stumbled for a moment before righting herself.
“You little bitch!” Lara lunged at her, but Sophia was ready.
“Stop it. Stop this,” Nathan said, rolling to the left out of the way of the fighting women. He seemed to be more interested in protecting the sample than in stopping them from hurting each other.
Arms locked on each other’s shoulders, the girls spun around, a blur of black and white. Lara had the training and height, but Sophia had fear and anger, a powerful combination. They danced around the lab, slamming into workstations and sending glass flying where it smashed on the floor. Then the other would get the upper hand and they’d dance the other way, sending more glass smashing to the ground. They were destroying the lab, which was almost as satisfying to Sophia as the idea of strangling Lara.
“Stop this. Stop acting like children. Lara. Sophia. Stop it,” Nathan said again, spinning his chair this way and that to avoid the whirling dervish crashing through the lab.
“I hate you! You’re a weak, pathetic fool!” Lara shouted as she fought.
“At least I’m not sleeping with Thomas so I can hear Father’s secrets!” Sophia shouted back,. It was a guess—Thomas had come into her lab more than a few times reeking of Lara’s perfume—but she could tell by Lara’s reaction she’d hit pay dirt.
Lara howled at the revelation in front of Nathan, who went silent when he heard this. She said, “I’ll kill you, you ungrateful bitch!” Lara lunged, her eyes wild with rage. Sophia dodged the attack at the last second. But Lara had put so much into her lunge that she couldn’t stop. She slammed facefirst into the workstation counter, blood shooting into the air, and fell to the ground dazed.
Sophia took the opportunity and jumped on her back, hooking one arm around Lara’s throat, both women being cut by the broken glass scattered all over the floor.
“Who am I supposed to be grateful to? You?” Sophia demanded, holding her sister in place.
“I’m not the one who was sent to university. I’m the one that had to stay here. I’m the one that had to—” Lara let that last go unfinished as she pulled on Sophia’s arm, trying to free herself.
Sophia reached down and picked up a long, pointed hunk of broken glass and pressed it to Lara’s throat.
Everyone got very quiet.
“Do it,” Lara hissed. “Destroy me, then maybe you’ll see who Father really is.”
But she already knew. Didn’t she? Regardless, Sophia couldn’t do it. She realized as she held the shard to Lara’s throat, slicing her own palm until blood ran down her arm, that it wasn’t Lara she hated after all.
The hesitation was all Lara needed.
Suddenly she grabbed the shard and bucked backward, throwing Sophia off—right into Nathan’s wheelchair, knocking it over and sending him sprawling onto the ground.
The sight of the helpless Nathan squirming on the ground took the fight out of both of them. Sophia called the guard in and they got Nathan back into his wheelchair.
“Get yourself cleaned up,” Nathan said to Lara. “We don’t have much time.”
“But Father—”
“Now.”
Reluctantly, Lara turned to leave, but before she did, she leaned in to Sophia and said, “I wouldn’t have hesitated.” Then she flipped her bone-white hair back and marched out of the lab, still gripping the bloody shard that had almost ended her life.
“Get your hand cleaned up and then get the eyes profiled. We need to be ready.” Before Sophia could say anything more, Nathan spun around and left with the guard at his side.
Sophia rinsed her sliced palm in one of the lab’s sinks and wound gauze around it to stem th
e bleeding. Then she swept up as much glass as she could, getting the lab if not clean at least tidy enough so she could work. Before she could start the DNA profile, the anxiety rose in her again, but instead of anger, this time all she felt was despair and loneliness. She crumpled to the floor against the counter, crying. She didn’t cry just because she was trapped, she cried for the loss of a father she’d never really had in the first place; she cried for her sister, not Lara but the girl she used to be who had been dead and gone for so long; and she cried for a little girl she hadn’t even met, but only viewed from a distance through the eyes of a distraught father. She cried for them all, but mostly she just cried because it felt good and it was hers. Hers alone.
They were insane. She didn’t know what their little project was, or who would pay the price, but she knew what the endgame was—Nathan’s life. And she knew they’d do anything to achieve it. Even if that meant endangering an innocent little girl.
The final serum.
If that were somehow possible, Sophia wondered what would become of her if Nathan didn’t need a cure anymore. She was pretty sure the reason he’d kept Kring Laboratories and, more recently, her additional research quiet was to make money off it once the work was complete. But while he needed the research, what about her? Would she serve any purpose once the work was completed? If she wasn’t working to save him, she wasn’t even sure who she would be. Part of her thought she might just cease to exist.
Cried out, a calm came over her, but her mind kept reeling. She needed to work, needed to be busy. She got up, washed her face, and then took the eyes Nathan had brought her to the DNA profiling workstation. She had been using the DNA-testing-on-a-chip method and apparatus developed by FBI scientists for months now, and knew the DNA test would take only a few hours, but Nathan didn’t need to know that. She could use the extra time. She had plans.
Sophia injected the fluid sample from one of the eyes mixed with a chemical onto the chip that was the size of a large postage stamp. Then she put the chip into the testing system, a peripheral computing device that looked more or less like a small inkjet printer. Connected to her laptop by a USB cable, she ran the testing software and sat back to wait for the results. It took her only a few minutes to make her decision.
When her work was complete, she would leave the island with the research—not just what she’d done, but all of it. She was finished with this insanity. It was time to help others. And she would start by helping a scared little girl a few floors above her.
“IS IT TRUE?”
Lara had been so lost in her fury after leaving Sophia’s lab, she hadn’t heard Nathan wheel into her room. She turned around to face him.
“Yes,” she said. She’d thought about denying Sophia’s accusation, but one of the benefits of what he’d told her in his office was that now, aside from keeping him alive, all bets were off.
“How long?”
“Almost a year,” she said. Nathan was quiet and seemed to be struggling to look at her.
“Do you love him?”
“Would it matter? I know what has to be done,” Lara said. Even before the illness, her father had been one of the proudest and most vain men she’d ever known. It made sense that he wouldn’t want anyone around who had witnessed him at his weakest, but it had been a long illness and the list of witnesses was just as long, but she knew her little revelation had just thrust Thomas’s name to the top.
“There will be others,” Nathan said. “Men of better standing. Men worthy of a Kring woman.” She knew he was talking about himself.
“I know,” Lara said.
“When he returns from Australia, we’ll know if it’s time. Best get some rest,” he said.
Lara forced a smile, stepped forward, and kissed him on the cheek.
“I’ll be ready.”
41
Somewhere east of Zanzibar, Africa
1:30 A.M. Local Time
THREE MINUTES AFTER the voices faded away, Lew kicked the panel off and rolled out onto the plane’s floor. He hadn’t spent this long in the fetal position since he was in diapers, and now he was just as cranky. He groaned as he stretched his legs and back out straight again, hollow cracks emanating from his joints and old wounds. He rolled his neck and looked around the plane’s interior.
It was empty and moonlight shone in through the tiny windows and the open door. The air smelled salty and humid, perspiration breaking out on his upper lip. He wiped it off with the back of his hand and stood up.
Through the windows on one side of the plane, Lew could see the tarmac and a jungle beyond lighted by the runway lights. On the other side he saw a small outbuilding and a paved road that led away and down over a crest in the landscape. No one was visible outside the plane anywhere. Worrying that he was too late, he hurried to the false floor and lifted the cover. He exhaled when he saw Emily still bound and alive.
Click.
The door to the cockpit opened without warning. Lew froze. The pilot was still on the plane.
Looking at something on the instrument panel as he pulled the door open, he hadn’t seen Lew yet. Lew eased the false floor cover down and duckwalked two yards back into the plane, quietly rolling behind two of the big leather seats. He couldn’t be sure that he hadn’t been seen or that the pilot wouldn’t come back there, so he pulled one of his guns and eased the hammer back, pointing the weapon where he thought the pilot would appear at any moment.
Lew steadied and slowed his breaths until the only sound he made was the blood pounding in his ears. He listened for the pilot’s approach. He heard the sound of the cockpit door closing. Then the squish of loafers treading on the plane’s lush carpeting—coming toward him. The pilot reached his hiding spot and stepped into full view.
The pilot was facing away from Lew, looking out the windows on the other side of the plane. Lew applied more pressure to the gun’s trigger, then he heard a car’s engine approaching. If he had to shoot, it would bring everyone running. He thought about trying to jump the pilot, but from the size of his arms and the prison tattoos, he knew it wouldn’t be a quick or quiet fight. All he could do was wait.
The squeak of brakes.
The slam of a car door.
The rattle of a tailgate dropping open.
Every sound brought Lew’s finger ever closer to pulling the trigger. All through it, the pilot continued to look out the window.
“Dieter! Get your arse out here and help me!” a voice called.
“Bugger me,” the pilot said. He spun on his heel and marched back up to the front of the plane.
Lew eased off the trigger and rested the cold barrel against his forehead as he breathed again.
He got into a crouch and looked out the window, staying out of sight. The pilot was just reaching the man who had called him, a tall, blond-haired military type with a beat-up pickup truck behind them. Two uniformed guards stood beside it, a tall, thin form between them with a black hood over its head. Lew knew immediately it was Jonathan from his clothes and stature.
“Yes!” Lew said louder than he meant to. He couldn’t help it, the relief pumping through him like a shot of morphine easing his pain. Memories of the first time they’d met threatened to take his attention, but he worked to stay focused, knowing they weren’t out of the woods yet. Not by a long shot.
Lew watched them argue for a minute before the pilot reached in the back of the pickup and took out a large metal case. It was heavy from the look of it. The blond-haired man took Jonathan from the guards and they headed back toward the plane.
“Ah, crap,” Lew said, holstering his gun. His plane ride apparently wasn’t quite over yet. He turned and headed back to his hiding place, seeing the panel lying on the floor and realizing it was a miracle the pilot hadn’t noticed. Or had he? “Shit!”
If the pilot had noticed and just figured the panel came off in f
light, putting it back in place now would only attract more attention. If he hadn’t noticed and he left it where it was, that could cause them to search the plane.
In a flash, Lew decided he couldn’t risk touching the panel again. He left it on the floor and looked for another place to hide. In desperation, he opened the lavatory door. Hiding in there had obvious pitfalls, but as it turned out he didn’t have to worry about it. There was another door on the other side of the lavatory. He closed the first door behind him and opened the other one into the baggage area in the tail of the plane. Jackpot!
Lew stepped in and quietly closed the door behind him. The compartment was completely empty, save for an uninflated raft held to the wall with Velcro straps. On the other wall, secured while it wasn’t in use, was some cargo netting. There was nowhere to hide if anyone came through the door.
A few minutes later, he felt the plane’s engines rev to life. After warming up, the plane began to move, turning around in preparations for takeoff. It was just about then that Lew realized there was something else missing from the cargo hold—seat belts. The engines revved higher and higher, the uninsulated cargo hold echoing the sound until Lew thought his fillings were going to shake loose. He finally felt the plane roll forward, slow at first but then faster and faster. Lew stood with his feet apart in an effort to maintain his balance.
This isn’t so—
The pilot slammed the supersonic engines into full throttle and the plane shot forward like a bullet. Unfortunate Newtonian physics kept Lew in one place, and though he thought he slammed into the back of the cargo hold, it was actually the other way around.
Just as the sonic boom echoed from outside as they broke the sound barrier, Lew’s intestinal fortitude ran dry and he passed out.
PART SIX
Wednesday
42
Canton George Reserve
