Bear Claw Bodyguard

by Jessica Andersen

  Moreover, one of the enclosed trailers had a second, open trailer sitting beside it. The smaller trailer had several huge barrels strapped to it, each in a different color and bearing bright stickers warning that the contents were flammable, acid, volatile and whatnot. Hoses snaked from the containers to the larger trailer, while three big generators were chugging away on the back of a nearby flatbed, feeding thick power cables. Unless he missed his guess, that was the center of whatever they were doing there. And it was something the authorities would very much like to get their hands on.

  Tori must have been thinking the same thing because she paused in her picture-taking to grin fiercely up at him, triumph flashing in her expression.

  His mind raced. If the militia stayed put for twenty-four hours or so, he’d have time to bring in a team. If not, they could use the eagles to find the next encampment.

  Adrenaline zinged through his veins at the dawning knowledge that he and Tori had cracked the case, not only of the fungal infection, but also the Shadow Militia itself. Now all they had to do was reconnect with Tucker and the others and make their report, and the task force would reconvene and take it from there. First, though, they had to get out of there, and keep their heads down until morning.

  He touched Tori’s arm and tipped his head back the way they had come, mouthing, Let’s go. She nodded and stowed her cell, and they backed out of their vantage point and started retracing their steps.

  Halfway down the ridge, though, he was brought up short by an ominous twig crack. His instinct fired and his heartbeat kicked up a notch, but he stayed still and gestured for Tori to do the same, hoping to hell it was an animal, a random forest noise, something other than—

  Crunch-crunch…crunch-crunch.

  Damn it. Footsteps. He inhaled and reached for his weapon as the noises came closer.

  Breathing softly through his mouth, he urged Tori back away from the noises and their trail, stepping from boulder to boulder in case whoever it was stumbled on their tracks leading in. When they were several hundred yards off their original path, he guided her to a cluster of rocks and gestured her into a somewhat protected niche. Then he put his back to her and unslung his rifle.

  “Hey, Ritchie,” a man’s voice—basso profundo and faintly twangy—called. “You out here?”

  Tori flinched and bumped into him, and he tightened his grip on her arm, ready to get a hand across her mouth if she started to panic. But she quickly shook her head, mouthing, Sorry.

  He let go of her but stayed very close.

  “Ritchie? Come on, man, I said I’d cover you for a little while you sparked up, but this is ridiculous. Get your stoned butt back to camp, will you?”

  When there was still no answer, the crack-crunch resumed, not drawing closer now, but angling away from their position. Jack didn’t dare relax, though, because they had to assume that this Ritchie could be somewhere nearby as well.

  “Damn it, Ritchie, where are you?” After a pause, there was the hiss of dead air and then the click and silence of someone pushing a radio over to the transmit position. Moments later came a twangy bass complaint of “Denkins, this is Boomer. I can’t find Ritchie anywhere. I bet he’s been at the product again. Did you check all the sheds?”

  Jack couldn’t make out the squawk of return radio traffic, but Boomer cursed under his breath and the crunching footfalls resumed, headed back toward the encampment.

  When they had faded to silence, Jack safetied his weapons, tucked his nine and reslung his rifle, and took what felt like his first real breath in too long. Then he turned back to Tori, found her pale but resolute, and got a firm nod that said she was good to go. They struck out with him leading the way, sticking to the rocks and heading downhill.

  They hadn’t gone more than fifty yards when he found the body.

  He stopped dead, causing Tori to put a hand on his shoulder to brace herself. “What— Oh!” Her soft gasp of horror sounded very loud, as did the low, vicious curse that hissed through his lips at the sight of the corpse’s bulging, terrified eyes.

  “Is that…” She trailed off, fingers digging into his shoulder.

  “Yeah,” he said, forcing the word from a chest gone fiercely hollow all of a sudden. “That’s the Death Stare.” And he got it. He got it. Damn, he thought as Boomer’s comment about the missing man having sampled the product took on a very grim new meaning. “It looks like we’ve been working on the drug case all along.”

  The guy—presumably Ritchie—was wearing jeans and a camo jacket with the matching slouchy hat, and had a .38 on his belt. His face was horribly contorted, his skin the sickly greenish gray of death…and his eyes were open and staring, as if he’d spent his last minutes of life in a state of horrible terror.

  Death Stare.

  The Shadow Militia wasn’t using the strange fungus to refine copper ore or searching for gold. They were making drugs from it…and those drugs were killing the inhabitants of his city.

  Jack tried not to see Ray’s face, tried not to feel the cold burn of rage when he had other things to worry about right then. But it was coming together now, and he didn’t like the pattern it was making. Grimly jettisoning crime scene protocol for necessity, he searched the dead man, aware of Tori’s wide-eyed stare following him.

  “No ID,” he reported, “but we’ve got this.” He held up a short-range radio. “He must have turned it off so nobody would bother him while he was getting high.” And he had wound up getting dead instead. It was ridiculous to feel bad about that; no doubt when the body made it down to the city, it’d turn out that Ritchie here had a rap sheet and some outstanding warrants. Boy Scouts didn’t usually join up with groups like this one.

  Banishing the twinge that had hit him anyway, brought on by the sight of that fixed, horrified stare, Jack clicked on the radio and turned the volume up just loud enough for them to hear a clipped, faintly accented voice saying, “My associate failed to take care of the problem, though, which means we need to vacate this site immediately. Pack everything up and lock it all down, gentlemen. We’re moving to the alternate site. Make sure the DB-Auto is locked, loaded and ready to go because we’re going to have to start over in the new place.”

  Tori caught his arm so hard that her fingers dug in. “They’re going to infect another forest! We have to stop them!”

  “No,” he said flatly, even though every fiber of his being was screaming Yes! He covered her hand with his and pressed down, trapping her touch and bringing her eyes up to his in surprise. He wanted, needed her to look at him and see that he was deadly serious when he said, “We can’t risk it, Tori. If they find us, we’re dead. And sneaking down there to sabotage their vehicles, send out a distress call using their comm devices or whatever else you’re thinking of doing? That would guarantee they would find us.” He squeezed her hand. “The world is a better place with you in it. Okay?”

  His insides were screaming Not okay! but he stuck to his decision. It would cost him, no doubt—in guilt, lost sleep and the faces of the next few to die of the Death Stare—but he refused to endanger Tori in the process of bringing down the Shadow Militia, and he didn’t see any other way to do it without revealing their presence.

  “What if we could cripple the operation without their realizing we were there?” she asked, uncannily paralleling his thoughts.

  “How are you going to manage that?”

  She hesitated, blew out a shaky breath and said, “That DB-Auto he mentioned? That’s the DNA synthesizer—among other things—they’re using to create the fungus. It must need to be built from scratch each time it’s released into the wild, and then it can procreate from there. Anyway, the point is that I know how to program DBs…and, better yet, I know how to lock them down.”

  Chapter Eleven

  The sneak attack had been Tori’s idea, and she had been the one to convince a reluctant Jack that not only was it worth it—a necessity, in fact—but that it would work. But as she hunkered down behind a couple of fuel
canisters in a relatively deserted part of the camp and watched him stroll through the center of the bowl, which was now abuzz with activity where it had been dead before, she was seriously questioning both their judgment and their sanity.

  He was nuts to be walking through the Shadow Militia, disguised with little more than the dead man’s jacket, a swagger and a surly look. According to him, the encampment was big enough and chaotic enough that he’d pass as one of them long enough to get to the lab trailer and make sure it was secure, so all she would have to do would be to make it from the fuel barrels to the lab, wearing the dead guy’s hat and army shirt and keeping her head down.

  Piece of cake, right?

  Wrong. God, what had she been thinking? She wasn’t some sort of superspy; she wasn’t even a rookie cop. She was a plant doctor, for heaven’s sake! People like her didn’t wear disguises cobbled together from a mix of her own outfit and that of a dead man, and they didn’t try to cripple high-tech drug rings whose members would stop at nothing to protect their income stream.

  “Oh God, oh God, ohGod, ohGodohGodohGod…” The whispered litany was a plea for help, for strength, for luck. Heck, for whatever she could get right now, as Jack stuck his head into the lab trailer, said a few words and then went the rest of the way into the long, narrow room.

  She knew he was in there, knew she wasn’t alone in the encampment, but with him out of sight she felt suddenly conspicuous, as if a huge floodlight was going to snap on and pin her any second now. Her heart hammered in her chest and sweat bloomed between her breasts and down her spine as she waited for him to come out and give her the all-clear signal.

  But what if he didn’t come out? What if whoever was in there knew he wasn’t one of them? Right now they could be tackling him, restraining him or worse—and her stomach congealed to a cold, hard knot at the thought—what if they killed him outright? Unbidden, her mind superimposed his face on the corpse up on the ridge. Her breath thinned to a pained whistle and her head started to spin.

  Don’t freak, she told herself. Slow down. Breathe. You’re losing it.

  Even as she tried to breathe slower and hold it together, her brain kept spinning worst-case scenarios. What if their pictures had been circulated around the encampment? What if—

  The door to the lab trailer swung open and she jolted so hard that she wound up banging back against one of the fuel containers, which made a hollow, booming noise that sounded incredibly loud to her just then, although it didn’t attract any attention from the two rifle-toting men who were nearest her, locked in a low-voiced argument as they strode toward a Humvee that was mounted with the turret gun.

  Just as her stress-crazed imagination started showing her images of them firing a barrage into the fuel stockpile where she was hiding, a couple of white-coated men came out of the trailer and headed off to some other destination, and a familiar face with ruggedly handsome features and lake-blue eyes became visible in the shadows of the lab trailer. He sought her out with his gaze, then waved to give her the all clear.

  “Jack,” she whispered, exhaling a huge gust of relief. “Thank God.” She hadn’t doubted him, she told herself. Not really. It was more that she had doubted her own luck. Usually with her, when things had a fifty-fifty chance of working out, they went the other way.

  Smothering a groan because her knees had locked up while she had crouched there for so long, she rose and emerged from behind the fuel containers, pretending to check the empty clipboard she had grabbed off the fender of one of the Humvees on the way in. She doubted she pulled off the same swagger Jack had used to get across the compound unchallenged, but she kept her hat low and her head down, and minimized the too-feminine sway of her hips as much as she could.

  It wasn’t that far to the lab trailer, but it seemed to take forever for her to make it across the dusty open space. Her legs felt wooden, the air burned in her lungs and she kept waiting for a shout, a shot, some sort of reaction from the beehive swarm of armed men who eddied around her. But they were busy with their own tasks, their own thoughts, and saw what they expected to see. No one even looked at her funny, at least not that she saw. And then, thank God, she was at the trailer, climbing the three short steps leading to the cool, air-conditioned interior, and the man who was waiting for her there.

  Jack pulled her inside, shut and locked the door, and dragged her into his arms.

  She stiffened more in delayed reaction than protest, and he let her go and stepped back. “You’re right, bad timing. Let’s get you to work.”

  But as he moved away to take up a watchful stance beside the window nearest the door, she stared after him, her heart drumming not just with fear now, but also from sudden heat. The way he had touched her just now was different, and the look in his eye as he glanced over wasn’t the same as it had been before. It made her blood hum beneath her skin, bringing new sensitivity and the thought that something had changed between them, though she didn’t know what or why.

  Or else you’re just projecting, she thought wryly. And who could blame her? She would far rather think about her handsome bodyguard than worry about the men outside or the very real possibility that she wouldn’t be able to get into the DB’s programming. Man up, she told herself. And banishing the heat as best she could, she turned and surveyed the lab trailer.

  The narrow space was efficiently organized with synthetic and analytical machines at one end, data-crunching stations at the other. Heaps of printouts, binders, boxed supplies and the other odds and ends of a working lab had accumulated at the workstations, suggesting that the R&D phase was over and the main focus was on production. She’d only had hands-on experience with maybe half of the pieces of equipment that were efficiently crammed together in stacked racks, some of which were on air-ride shock absorbers, others already packed with foam and air-filled plastic bumpers to keep them from being damaged when the trailer went mobile.

  A few of the machines were still up and running, though, and thank God one of them was her target: the DB-Auto.

  “Okay,” she said softly, swallowing to wet her suddenly dry mouth as she approached the big, boxy machine. “You can do this.” And she could, she had, only never like this before.

  The Auto was deceptively plain on the outside, with a user panel that offered little more than a basic keypad, a computer interface and injection ports for various samples and solvents. Inside, though, it contained several robotic arms and a combination of different synthetic and analytical devices that allowed it to offer everything from DNA extraction and analysis to protein synthesis, even in some cases modifying the proteins to near-lifelike end products not normally offered by compact machines.

  It was cutting-edge, very expensive…and it had at least one weakness she knew of.

  Stretching her fingers like a pianist prepping for the opening chords of a big performance, Tori took a breath, cued up the linked computer terminal and said a quick prayer under her breath as she asked for the main screen of the software, which the company had called DB-Auto-Bahn, even though its speed was more in the category of “middle lane stuck behind a heavily loaded truck.” When the screen popped up, all blue and white and vaguely cartoonish, just like she’d expected, she exhaled. “Thank you, Mr. Scientist, whoever you are.”

  “Good news?” Jack said from his surveillance post.

  “It’s not pass-coded, which is going to save time.” She dropped down into the guts of the software and got to work, clicking and typing, changing a line here, a number there. All the while, she was aware of him dividing his attention between the window and her progress.

  “I’m impressed. Maybe you should add ‘hacker’ to your résumé.”

  “Nope, I can only really mess with this one machine.” She kept going as she spoke, aware that the seconds were ticking by far too quickly. “One of my old bosses actually was a pretty good hacker. Unfortunately, he also had a really mean sense of humor, and he liked to test the people around him, to see if they were worthy of his supposed
greatness. Now and then, he would go in and reprogram some of the machines to give bogus answers, produce slightly altered products, that sort of thing. Then he’d get angry if we didn’t catch it.”

  “Sounds like a real prize to work for.”

  She made a face as she guessed wrong, hit a dead end and had to backtrack. “He was a brilliant scientist and I learned a ton from him. But, yeah, he wasn’t my favorite human being ever.” She paused as things started flowing again. “Guess I owe him for this one, though, because rather than getting paranoid about our science, the way he wanted us to, we figured out how to undo his little programming tweaks and came up with ways to shut him out of the programs entirely so he couldn’t mess with them anymore. Which is what—” she hit the final two keys “—I’ve done here.”

  His eyebrows lifted. “That was fast.”

  “I’m not in the mood to stick around.” Returning the Auto to its sleep settings, she pushed away from the console, the memories of past labs—safe jobs—draining as their surroundings came back into focus around her, bringing a renewed sense of urgency. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Your wish is my… Damn it.” His voice and features hardened. “Someone’s coming this way.” He reached out a hand for her as she crossed the room. When she took it, he drew her close and said into her ear in an undertone, “Play along, and whatever you do, don’t look at anyone. Keep your head down, you hear me?”

  When she nodded, heart pounding sickly in her ears and sudden terror welling up from wherever it had briefly subsided to, he dragged down her hat so it practically covered her eyebrows and, without warning, dropped her hand and yanked open the door.

  “Lazy good for nothing,” he snarled, grabbing her collar and shoving her out, so she stumbled down the steps and practically plowed into the two guys who were just about to start up them.