by Jan Coffey
“Mr. Dunlap?”
Shawn turned around and looked at the two men standing a few feet from him. One of them already was holding out a badge.
“Mr. Dunlap?” the man asked again.”
“Hold on,” Shawn said into the phone before answering. “Yes?”
“Sir, I’m Special Agent Mendoza and this is Special Agent Sirnio. We’re with the FBI.” The other one took out his badge, too. “Could we have a word with you, sir?”
Shawn could feel the eyes of everyone around them in line.
“Of course.”
As an attorney specializing in international law, Shawn had for most of his career, simply worked on closing foreign business deals. There hadn’t been too many times when he’d had to deal with law enforcement officers. He checked their identification.
“Does this have to do with Cynthia?” he asked, guessing.
The one who’d made the introductions nodded.
“She’s okay. Isn’t she?” he asked. Shawn noticed that his cell phone was still open and the operator was saying something on the other end. He closed it. The agents were not answering, and their faces were serious, giving away nothing.
“Would you come with us, sir? We need to talk privately.”
“Why?” he protested. “I want to know what’s happened to my fiancée. Is she okay? Where is she?”
“We’ll take you to her,” the one introduced as Agent Sirnio said quietly.
A minute ago, he’d been told that Cynthia was no longer at the hospital. Shawn shrugged and walked with them to the curb. Immediately, a dark SUV pulled in front and Shawn climbed into the back seat with Sirnio.
The vehicle pulled back into traffic.
“What’s going on?” Shawn asked impatiently. “Where’s Cynthia?”
“We had to move her to another location…for her own safety,” Agent Mendoza said, turning in the front seat to look at him.
“Her own safety?” Shawn repeated. “What happened to her Sunday morning wasn’t an accident, was it.” It wasn’t a question.
“We don’t believe so,” the man turned back in his seat, staring at the traffic.
Shawn waited for either of the agents to say more. Neither did. The driver had said nothing, either, since they’d left the terminal.
“Why Cynthia? And how is it possible that the intensive care unit at a hospital wasn’t safe?”
More silence.
“Are you going to explain to me what’s going on?” Shawn barked. He was too tired to care how they took his tone.
The driver stared at him in the mirror. The agent sitting in front finally turned around.
“We’re at a critical stage of a major investigation. No names or events can be released at this time,” Mendoza explained. “I can tell you, though, that we had a call from another field office that there could be a possible threat on your fiancée’s life. Local law enforcement determined that the details of her ‘accident’ were suspicious, to say the least. In light of the call we received, we took over this end of the investigation. We set up our own security for the wing of the hospital where she was located. As expected, there was a security breach that could have been part of an attempt on her life. The perpetrators were not apprehended, but we are following leads right now. With regard to your fiancée, the decision was made to move her to a safer location.”
Shawn felt like he still was in the dark. “The last time I spoke to her doctor, they were contemplating surgery to release some of the pressure building up from internal bleeding in her brain. Was she in any condition to be moved?”
“Yes, she was. And she’s already been operated on and our understanding is that a stent was put in. That’s all we know.”
They were taking Shawn to her. He decided he could ask his medical questions of the doctor who was looking after Cynthia’s care. He rubbed his neck. He was upset, but at least he now felt closer to the situation.
“Helen Adrian,” he said remembering Cynthia’s mother. This explained why she hadn’t been answering her phone. “I assume she’s with her daughter.”
“No, she isn’t,” Sirnio, the agent sitting next to him, answered. “We’ve been trying to contact her.”
“Did you send someone to Cynthia’s condo? She might be there. She can’t have just disappeared.”
Sirnio shook his head. “She wasn’t there. Actually, we were hoping you might know where she is.”
CHAPTER 57
Connecticut
“Why would they have guns? They’re medical personnel.”
She blinked. Her fingers started moving again. The pencil was beneath her fingers. He put it back in her fist, and she began to write again.
“Saw?”
She blinked.
“You saw a gun?”
She gave him a long blink and dropped the pencil again.
They had moved her. She had a different view. She thought they were bad. He remembered the pact he’d made with himself of not questioning her. Sid immediately searched in his case and grabbed his cell phone. She’d been trying to tell him that something was wrong shortly after the two men had walked into the room. He called 911. It took a couple of minutes of rapid explanations before the dispatcher understood the nature of the urgency and agreed to connect him to the police cruiser that was following their ambulance. Sid felt like it took forever before the officer came on the line.
Sid introduced himself before getting right into it, telling them about what Amelia saw.
“Okay,” the officer said. “We’ll call for support and stay behind you. As soon as the traffic starts moving freely, we’ll have the ambulance pull over.”
“What do you mean, when the traffic starts moving?” Sid asked. The ambulance felt like it was flying along the highway.
“Just what I said. There’s a construction slowdown ahead. So when we the traffic opens up—”
“Where are you?”
Pause. “On I-84. The traffic is backed up before the I-691 exit. It shouldn’t be too long.”
“Well, we’re moving. We’re not sitting in any traffic jam. Can you see the ambulance?”
“We’re right behind it. You’re crawling. We don’t consider that moving.”
The ambulance made another sharp turn. They were off the highway. Sid realized that they’d been off the highway for some time.
“That’s not us,” Sid told him. “Check for yourself. Look, I just found out that these people are armed. I believe they’re trying to kidnap her. Remember what they tried to do last night.”
“Where are you?”
“I can’t tell. They covered the window to the driver’s seat.”
The vehicle made another sharp turn, this time to the right. From the sudden rough surface, Sid could tell they had just turned onto an unpaved road.
“We’re on some kind of back road. Gravel, I think,” he said, guessing from the sound of the tires crunching beneath the vehicle. “Listen, I have to get ready for them if they stop.”
“Keep your cell phone on. We’ll trace it.”
Sid left the phone open and dropped it in his bag. He looked around him for something that he could use as a weapon. His options were limited.
He felt like an idiot for not asking more questions. No one had. Even the cops had assumed these two were legit. And how difficult was it to steal an ambulance? These killers were smart enough to plan out everything last night. How they got clear of the escort, he had no idea.
The ending would be no surprise. Sid didn’t have to wait until the ambulance stopped to know what they were going to do with them. He moved to the back door and tested the handle. It turned. He remembered one of the police officers had been the one to shut the door.
He couldn’t jump out of a moving ambulance with Amelia. She could get seriously hurt. Also, the drivers would know as soon as he tried.
Sid felt the adrenaline rushing through him. They could stop anytime. And then it would be too late.
He looked at what he had
available. His brain was racing. He looked at Amelia. She was watching him steadily.
“Don’t worry. We’ll get out of this,” he said with as much conviction as he could muster.
She blinked.
Beyond her, strapped to the side wall of the ambulance, two pressurized oxygen bottles caught his eye.
“Oxygen,” he whispered to Amelia. “All I need is a match.”
CHAPTER 58
Nuclear Fusion Test Facility
Staring at the watch gave Marion something to occupy her mind, but it also got her thinking again of what would happen to the region when she was gone. It was a countdown to the end.
The space beneath the elevator was cramped and growing increasingly stuffy. Moving slowly, she could move from side to side, but she had to be careful not to come too close to the electrical wires. She also wanted to stay out of the light framing the bottom edges of the elevator. Her face was inches away from the steel framed bottom. Listening to every noise, she’d thought that at any minute they’d be discovering her whereabouts.
She was feeling more and more claustrophobic as the minutes ticked by. She had to take her mind off the tomblike confines. She had to stop thinking about whether there was enough air and worrying what would happen if she had to sneeze or cough.
Pulling the watch out of her pocket and staring at the changing digits had given Marion that other horror to think about. The time on the watch was all any of them had left.
The searchers spoke to the man in the elevator above her every ten or fifteen minutes. They were moving from room to room, carefully going through storage spaces and closets, checking under the beds, and searching above the drop panel ceilings. Opening ventilation ducts.
She stared at the watch face.
Thirteen hours, twenty-five minutes before the first sample leaked.
The man watching the elevator crouched down. He stood. At some point she heard him relieving himself in that same hallway where they had killed two of her colleagues. These men are scum, Marion thought.
Time dragged on.
He was again standing in the elevator door when his radio again beeped. One of the searchers, she heard, was changing into protective clothing and going inside the test lab.
They knew enough that elevated levels of radiation were present inside the lab. Once inside, Marion wondered if they would recognize that there had been a test in progress that needed to be stopped. She doubted it.
She waited, thinking as the time ticked slowly that perhaps they did know about the test samples and the impending disaster. Perhaps they had come down to find her…but also to secure the radioactive samples.
Eleven hours, seventeen minutes, fifty-seven seconds…fifty-six…fifty-five.
The voice on the radio. No, she had been right in the first place. They had no clue. They were out of the test lab, and continuing toward the elevator.
And Marion couldn’t think of a single place that they hadn’t checked.
CHAPTER 59
Connecticut
This was no time for second guessing. No thinking about the fact that he’d been trained to help people and not to hurt them.
Sid checked again to make sure he was ready. He glanced at Amelia, tucked against the back door, the mattress from the gurney wedging her in.
“All set?” he whispered.
Blink.
“I’m going to put the blanket over your face now. Like I said, the glass could go everywhere.”
Blink.
Sid gently turned Amelia’s face to the door and covered her head, using a box of bandages to create an air passage for her to breathe.
This was it. He’d have only one shot at this.
Standing up and bracing his feet as well as he could, Sid opened the valve on the oxygen bottle, busted the regulator and smashed the head of the tank through the glass separator into the driver’s section of the ambulance.
“What the…” one of the men shouted.
Sid could hear the fast escaping oxygen and saw the man grabbing the bottle and feeling for the valve.
The driver slammed on the brakes. Throwing Sid up against the divider.
He wasn’t going to give them a chance to get out. Straightening up, he lit a match, set fire to the entire book of matches and tossed it through the window at the oxygen tank. He barely had time to duck.
The entire driver’s section immediately lit up like a torch, flames shooting into the rear of the ambulance through the window, as well. The two men in the front were screaming.
Ignoring their cries, Sid moved quickly toward Amelia. The sudden stop caused her to slide forward, twisting her on the floor beneath the gurney. He pulled the blanket from her face, and she looked up at him.
Sid shoved the back doors open and leaped over her onto a dirt road. Pulling her toward him, he hoisted her, still wrapped in a blanket, over his shoulder.
They were on a wooded road, but where, he had no idea. It looked like a fire road. There was no sign of any houses. Just woods on either side. He didn’t hesitate or look back. Moving off the road, he ran straight down a slight incline into the woods. He wanted to get as far away from the burning vehicle as possible.
There was no saying that the two might not get out of the burning ambulance. He didn’t want to wait to find out. Also, the odds were that these two had others waiting to meet them. They could be just around the next bend.
Sid was breathing heavily, tiring quickly. Low hanging branches scratched at them, and he tried to protect Amelia as much as he could by pushing through the thick brush with his free hand. One of her arms had worked free of the blanket, and it was dangling by his butt. No sound came from her.
He didn’t know how far they’d traveled when he heard the explosion. A second blast followed immediately after the first.
For the first time, he turned around. Not too far in the distance, he could see a smoke rising above the trees.
Sid turned and looked in every direction. There were no buildings that he could see, no paths through the woods. He had no idea what part of the state they were even. From Waterbury, the highways ran in every direction. His only guide now was the smoke and burning ambulance. He turned his back to it and started again through the woods.
Draped over his shoulder, Amelia had still made no sound. He tried to twist around to get a view of her face. She weighed practically nothing.
“Are you okay, Amelia?” he asked, wondering if he should put her down to at least check on her.
He was relieved when she tapped his hip. She was giving him a sign.
Sid stopped, reached around and held her hand for a moment.
“We’re okay,” he said. “We’re going to be okay.”
But they were still not far enough away from the ambulance, and Sid knew it. They were still not far enough away from the people who wanted to kill her.
Taking a deep breath, he plunged deeper into the woods.
CHAPTER 60
Nuclear Fusion Test Facility
Ten hours, twenty-seven minutes.
When the searchers all converged at the elevator, Marion learned two things. First, the killers decided that she had made her way into the Test Drift sector of the underground labyrinth. Second, their group was larger than the three men who’d come down to search the facility. The search party had communicated via phone to the security office in the building above. Whoever was up there had told them that the small building sitting atop the elevator shaft leading up from the far end of the WIPP storage facility was being watched. So far, there had been no sign of her.
Terror raced through Marion as she thought about how they would gain access to the Test Drift tunnels. Based on the plans she’d seen, there should have been two doors in the elevator, one to the research lab and the other to Test Drift. But the killers knew that the elevator wouldn’t have been available to her. If they decided to follow her steps, then they’d send the elevator up, pry open the doors, climb down the shaft, and climb through into Test D
rift.
Except they wouldn’t have to go any farther than looking into the shaft. She didn’t want to think of that.
An argument had broken out right above her about the safety of going through the Test Drift tunnel. They seemed to know that the subterranean storage facility was operated robotically…and for a reason.
Finally, one of them used the closed-circuit phone in the elevator to communicate with others on the surface. After making the call, they waited for instructions. She could see them through the small hole. One liked to pace, another was impatient to get out of here. The third one, the same who’d stood guard for the entire time down here, crouched quietly in the door. He said very little, but there was a coldness in the low tenor of his voice that sent chills through her.
Panic was once again threatening to overwhelm her mind. The temperature of the air in the confined space had risen. She was sweating. She could feel something crawl on her scalp. She rolled her head from side to side. She flinched at the pain shooting through the back of her head. The crawling sensation stopped, but only for a second before starting again.
Marion closed her eyes, wishing she could go to sleep. She felt as if every inch of her body was hurting. She was exhausted, hungry, thirsty. She wanted to go to sleep and wake up to find this was all a dream. That didn’t seem to be a possibility.
Then, Amelia was in her thoughts. Her sister was frightened. Marion wondered if it was her own fear or her twin’s. She had to be calm for both of them.
Her eyes opened. She lifted the watch closer to her face.
Nine hours. Thirty-nine minutes. Forty-two seconds. Forty-one. Forty.
The phone in the elevator rang. The man who paced picked it up and listened. “Got it.”
Marion heard the other killer approach.
