by Ethan Cross
Nic raised his eyebrows and said, “You realize that I am still a cop.”
Burke stuck a cigarette in his mouth but didn’t light it. He said, “Then arrest me for vandalism.”
On the home’s interior, they found more of the same. Furniture that had never been sat on. A TV with a dusty screen that had probably never been watched. Still, someone had to come by and clean the place, probably a service. Burke knew the exact date the GoBox facility in Henderson had been erected, 734 days ago, and the house would have fallen into disrepair quickly without basic cleaning and maintenance. Someone mowed the yard and watered the plants. Maybe it was a vacation home, a pair of snowbirds who only lived here three months out of the year. Or maybe that’s just what they wanted people to think.
Knowing there was only one way to be sure, Burke said, “We need to find the basement.”
Nic and Carter both had their weapons drawn and cleared each room like professionals. He had been so caught up in solving the puzzle and finding the thieves’ point of egress that he hadn’t even considered the potential danger.
“Here are the stairs,” Carter said. “Nic take point.”
Nic pulled a flashlight from his tactical vest, handed it to Carter, and then produced another for himself. In what Burke recognized from his studies as the Graham technique for low-light tactical entries, Nic stuck the small light between his index and middle finger, and still using two hands to stabilize his pistol, he pressed the end cap button of the flashlight against the knuckles of his right hand to activate the light. Keeping the weapon close to his body and his knees slightly bent, Nic descended the stairs.
Burke didn’t hear anything from beneath them. The stairs were simple two-by-sixes, indicating the basement was unfinished. Carter went down next, and Burke followed a few seconds after.
From below, Nic said, “I’ll be damned, kid.”
Burke rushed past Carter to reach the bottom.
A neat rectangular section of the basement floor was missing. Jutting up out of the hole was a small platform with a scissor-lift bottom, similar to ones Burke had seen at construction sites. They had blown out the concrete and rebar to a depth of about five feet, which then connected to a pre-built shaft, and had used the lift to ride up and out.
“The CIA team may already be down there,” Carter said.
In the dim light, Nic smiled. “Then let’s go say hello. I’m ready to find out what they’re hiding.”
Chapter 71
August Burke found it strange that he wasn’t afraid or anxious. Most of the time, when he was out in the world among people, he felt an elephant on his chest and a deep worry in his heart, even with the medication to help him deal with the stress of social situations. But for some reason, in this situation, descending into a dark pit of unknown dangers, he felt perfectly calm, at peace even. As if he knew that he was in the right place, doing what he was meant to do. As if some higher power was telling him that he was finally on the right path and calming his sometimes uncooperative mind and body.
Small chunks of concrete and dust still littered the floor of the scissor lift, even though the lift was likely shoved into place after the initial blast. As they started to descend, Burke pushed a small piece of concrete down the shaft and listened for the impact. From the length of the fall and approximate weight of the object, he was able to extrapolate a depth of about forty-five feet. From that, he made some educated guesses on the weight capacity of the industrial lift and determined that whatever object was stolen would have most likely weighed under 600 pounds, the average maximum capacity for lifts of this height. Unless they made multiple trips on the lift, but he felt that was unlikely. If he were to bet, he would propose that they were after one object and research data, perhaps a case of the biological weapons and the formula to create more.
Nic operated the controls in his take-charge manner. Burke still wasn’t sure what to think of Officer Juliano. The big man had apologized, said all the right things to indicate friendship, connection, and acceptance of him, even going as far as calling him “little brother”—a gesture which seemed to demonstrate his acceptance of Burke as a fellow law enforcement professional and even a member of his team. But in his experience, people who seemed to go out of their way to make him feel at ease and part of their group, really only wanted something from him, and would toss him aside like the wrapper of a candy bar once they had what they really wanted. And what they wanted was not his companionship.
At the bottom of the shaft, a long tunnel dimly lit with red emergency lights descended at an almost forty-five-degree angle. The height and width of the tunnel indicated a design for people of a height less than six feet and for the escapees to exit single file. Nic had to hunch over to proceed, and the giant South African would have had to almost crawl on his hands and knees to traverse the passage.
Burke was just under six feet and was able to proceed with ease. Nic took point again with his flashlight and Sig Sauer pistol. As they walked, Burke’s mind pictured the landscape above and estimated their approximate location relative to the landmarks on the surface. As he kept the image of the tunnel in his mind’s eye, he added another view beside it of them walking along the surface.
They moved through the backyard, into the barren field of future expansion. The field was perhaps ten square acres by his rough estimates, but it was a rectangle and much longer than it was wide. Perhaps only two square acres wide, and there were 43,560 square feet in an acre with the average walking speed of an adult pedestrian being 4.95 feet per second. Assuming the two acres were square in size that would make them approximately 417.42 feet deep. So it should take them 84.3 seconds to cross that distance. Maybe a bit longer considering the forty-five-degree angle. Then it was a matter of estimating the distance to the facility and the precise location of the vault. Best guess, he figured it would take them between one minute and forty-five seconds and two minutes to traverse the tunnel.
All of the calculations were made before they’d traveled ten feet, and so Burke spent the rest of the time counting down the seconds to see if his estimates had been correct.
At the end of the concrete tunnel, they found a massive steel door, a curious amalgam between the vault door of a bank and the steel bulkhead door found on a naval vessel. Burke surmised that, under normal circumstances, this door would have been sealed from the inside, in the off chance that someone discovered the emergency exit. But today, the security door stood open.
Nic entered first with Carter behind him, both men kept low and tight, pivoting cautiously and scanning the corners and angles for potential threats. The exit door sat in the back of a storage room, perhaps a fifteen-foot-by-fifteen-foot square lined with shelves filled with miscellaneous office supplies and lab equipment. Nic pushed through a door into the next room.
Burke saw the blood before he saw the bodies. Bullet holes perforated all of the victims and the walls, many of the dead workers still at their stations or making it only a few feet before being gunned down. He could see where others had tried to hide beneath tables but had been found and eliminated. The victims closest to the exit appeared to have been killed with a sub-machine gun, while the ones farther from the exit had died from shotgun blasts.
The lab was perhaps 70 feet wide by 100 feet long with 15 foot walls. It held several aluminum tables lined up in rows and topped with computers and lab equipment. It felt cold, and the air smelled unnaturally clean and tinged with an electrostatic element. Burke guessed that this was a clean room similar to ones he had seen for producing microchips and experimenting with deadly viruses.
The equipment at the workstations was all wrong, however. There were no test tubes or microscopes, but electronic components, multimeters and all manner of sophisticated-looking machines whose purpose was a mystery to him. The more he looked at the equipment, the more Burke was reminded of the thermal chambers and battery cyclers he had read about at General Motors’s new $25 million battery lab, which was dedicated to the devel
opment of the power sources for the company’s electric cars.
“Burke, mind the blood,” Carter said. “This is a crime scene now.”
Burke looked down, not having realized that he had moved to one of the tables and stood beside one of the bodies, his feet resting in an ever-expanding pool of bodily fluids. He could still smell hints of gun powder and the coppery odor of blood, but the lab’s air scrubbers had ionized most of it.
He forced himself to look at the dead scientists. They were a mix of nationalities and genders. He memorized their faces, trying to remain distant from the terror he saw on their features and their glassy, dead eyes. He had seen cadavers before and dead people at funerals, but never anyone freshly killed at a crime scene. He tried not to think of them as people, merely as more clues, details to be analyzed.
He approached one of the workstations and tried to power it on, but it displayed an error stating that the hard drive was missing.
“Look at this,” Nic said.
Burke walked over to where Nic stood beside one wall of the lab that appeared to hold a long glass viewing panel. On closer inspection though, Burke guessed it was actually several inches of some type of explosive-resistant polycarbonate. The room on the other side of the clear barrier looked like it was used for testing explosive ordnance of some kind. The walls had been charred from apparent explosions. Or perhaps, sudden bursts of electrical discharge?
A pair of robotic arms hung from the room’s ceiling, and Burke saw the controls mounted beside Nic. The arms appeared to be all plastic and non-conductive.
But there was something more important inside the long metal chamber. He pushed Nic out of the way and rushed toward a vacuum-sealed, insulated door separating the lab from the testing chamber. He engaged the electronic locking mechanism, and the door came alive with a gentle whirring of electric motors.
“Be careful,” Carter said. “We don’t know what—”
But Burke ignored him. He knew there were no dangerous pathogens to be found inside this lab.
When the door opened, he stepped into the room and cursed at the shattered mess of aluminum casings, green computer wafer boards, memory chips, disk platters, and read/write arms. Burke recognized the components as a destroyed mess of solid state and traditional hard drives.
“What is all that?” Nic asked from beyond the door.
“They pulled the hard drives from all of the computer terminals, probably a central server too, and smashed them to pieces.”
Carter joined Burke inside the testing chamber and surveyed the damaged pieces. “They seemed to be damn thorough with it. Looks like he started with the shotgun and then beat whatever else was left to pieces. I thought they could just zap these with an industrial magnet or something.”
Burke shook his head. “Magnets can work part of the time if you’re in a big hurry, but the only way to be sure that the data can’t be recovered is to physically destroy the components. Melting them down would be best, but this is pretty effective.”
“Do you hear that?” Nic asked.
Burke and Carter walked back to the main room, and Burke strained to hear something beyond the hum of the fluorescent lighting and air scrubbers. Then he knew what had drawn Nic’s attention. There was a door at one end of the lab, not far from where they stood, leading to what he presumed to be additional rooms that they had yet to see. The echoes of voices and footsteps coming from that direction was unmistakable.
Chapter 72
Kruger lay still and quiet in the darkness. The space around him was constricting and coffin-like, but it didn’t bother him. He had laid in wait in much less comfortable positions and harsher environments than this. Zarina had picked them up in a minivan at the house that concealed the lab’s exit point. He could still smell the blood on her skin. Their prize hummed beside him, and Zarina lay on top of him. Her blonde hair tickled his neck as she rubbed against him. He knew that his wife burned with desire at that moment. She always did after she killed someone. This had never disturbed him before, but since the village, he had looked back on all those times she had been turned on by death and found something about it disgusting and unnatural.
He wasn’t sure whether he should be more frightened by the humming of the device to his left or the small blonde woman on top of him. Both, equally, he supposed. Zarina had always scared him as much as she excited him. Even when they were children, he knew that her scars cut much deeper than the ones she had received from the lions the night his mother died. The scars on Zarina’s neck were nothing compared to the black gashes on the fabric of her soul.
He didn’t know her birth name, and neither did she. She remembered little from the days before her missionary parents had been slaughtered in a village near the one in which he was born. For a while after killing her parents’ murderer and her captor, she had been like a feral animal, starving and filthy, scrounging for food and killing anyone who stood in her way. She moved from village to village, but always staying on the outskirts, more at home with the beasts. They had called her dhahabu shetani—the golden devil.
But when he and a few of the boys from his village came across the alleged monster, he had recognized that she was nothing more than a terrified little white girl with no home or family. Still, he acknowledged the bloodlust and wild ferocity in her eyes immediately. He didn’t realize until years later that it was the predator in her that had attracted him, called out to him.
Like a stray dog or cat, she was wary of people, but he had coaxed her in a little at a time, stealing what meager food he could from their reserves and offering it as sacrifice to “the golden devil.” Once the trust was built, she attached to him like he was a lifeline in a storm. He remembered holding her for the first time, her whimpering and sobbing against his chest like an injured animal.
He had thought his mother would turn her away, but to his surprise, she took to the girl as much as he had. Young Idris had no siblings, and he knew his mother had always wanted more children. He would never forget his mother bathing the feral child and combing the knots and clumps of dirt from her long, golden hair.
His mother had asked her name, but the girl had just shaken her head and clung to his mother’s waist, more tears flowing. “From now on,” she said, “your name will be Zarina. It means Golden One, and you will be part of our family.”
And from that moment on, she had been his family. First, as a younger sister, and later as his lover and wife. She was the only person in the world he trusted. The only one who would ever accept him for the monster he was and the life he lived. The only one who could understand his pain. Zarina had known him when he was simply Idris Madeira, before Kruger had been born and become the driving force of his life. He wondered if she would still love him if he tried to become that boy again, if he let go of Kruger and allowed himself to be a person again. As a child, Idris had been the one who saved her from starvation and death, but as a woman, it was Kruger, the predator and killer, who excited her. More than anything, he feared she would not accept what he was becoming, or rather, unbecoming.
He felt the minivan roll to a stop and heard Dr. Raskin’s voice and that of a man, most likely a police officer. He held his breath, even though he had little doubt they would pass through unmolested. The hidden compartment had been built specifically for this mission but was based on designs perfected over many years by the cartel’s drug smugglers. It would hold up to all but the most thorough of inspections, and the police were unlikely to pay much attention to an American soccer mom when they were looking for a seven-foot foreign terrorist.
After a moment, he heard the minivan’s small engine rev up again as they gained speed, heading toward Las Vegas and away from the net cast by the police.
Chapter 73
Nic had been waiting all day to find out what the hell this was about. Unfortunately, he was more confused than ever. This place didn’t look like a lab for creating biological or chemical weapons. It seemed more industrial in nature, computers or micr
ochips or something of the like. He supposed it could have been some kind of bomb that they were developing down here, but he didn’t see anything indicative of explosives, timers, detonators, or ignition assemblies. He didn’t recognize a single piece of equipment, and explosives was one subject he knew quite a bit about.
And now, he supposed he may never find out.
He turned to Burke and Carter and said, “Time to pack it in boys. Company’s coming.”
Burke looked at the mess of scattered computer parts on the floor of the sealed chamber and said, “Hand me one of those trash cans. We’re taking these pieces.”
Nic didn’t know nearly as much about computers as Burke, but even he could see that the drives were beyond salvaging. “No time. We need to go now.”
“He’s right, August,” Carter added. “Who knows what they’ll do if they catch us down here. This is obviously a secret worth killing over, and I’d prefer we not be added to the casualty list.”
Burke ignored them with a shake of his head and picked up one of the small metal trash receptacles sitting beside the nearest workstation. He dumped the contents, a few papers and wire sheaths, and started scooping the broken hard drives into the can.
“You two go,” he said. “I’m taking these.”
“Damnit, kid. It’s not worth your life,” Carter said, looking to Nic for help.
Nic shrugged. Even in the short time he’d known him, he had learned that when August Burke made his mind up to do something, you might as well help or get out of the way. Plus, it would take longer to drag him out than to help him.
Burke, oblivious to the danger, swept the scattered parts into a pile with his foot. Nic fought for a solution. Maybe they could close the door to the chamber and wait out the CIA? No, that was stupid. They’d all be caught or, at best, trapped down here for hours.
