King got his feet under him and scrambled to the back of the room. He could just make out the chest-high stack of equipment crates, and while he knew they probably wouldn’t stop a bullet, they would at least afford him a degree of concealment. He crouched low, scanning both angles of approach, and waited for the killers to make their move.
The attack didn’t come.
His vision and hearing were both returning by degrees, but neither sense gave him any hint of what was happening on the other side of stacked containers. No more shots were fired, and if the gunmen were speaking to each other, their voices were too soft for him to discern. Shouldering the MP5, he rose out of his crouch for just an instant, and peered over the top of the barrier.
The shooters were gone. King cautiously emerged from concealment, sweeping the room with the barrel of his machine pistol, but his first assessment was correct; the assault force had finished their grisly task and fallen back. King was alone with the dead.
He spied the unmoving form of the older man he had first spoken with. A ragged hole had been torn in his chest, almost certainly the result of a several bullets in a tight grouping.
Kerry Frey, he thought. He had a name. He probably had a family and friends. He worked with Sara…
Sara!
King started for the exit, but before he could cross half the distance, he saw another pair grenades sail through the air in the room. Not flash-bangs this time, but cylinders-like stubby aerosol cans-gray in color, marked with purple bands.
Incendiary grenades.
Shit.
5.
Fulbright thrust Sara behind him and then snapped off a couple shots in the direction of the masked gunmen. Despite openly wielding firearms, the men seemed caught off guard. They fell back, out of view and did not reappear for several seconds. Fulbright, on the other hand, had reacted almost without thinking.
He expected this, Sara thought. He knew this attack was coming.
But there was no time to give voice to her suspicions. The man she suspected of being a CIA officer gripped her arm and all but dragged her away from the gunmen and, she hoped, toward safety. She looked over her shoulder and saw the two doctors seemingly paralyzed by the unexpected violence, and then they were lost from view as Fulbright pulled her through a doorway into a stairwell which was already crowded with people evacuating in response to the fire alarm.
Sara immediately turned toward the descending flight, but an insistent tug on her arm drew her in the other direction. Up.
“My team.”
Fulbright’s voice, like his expression, was grim. “What do you think that explosion was? If your team is still alive, there’s nothing we can do to help them. I need to get you out of here.”
Still alive? If? Sara shook her head. It couldn’t be true. It just couldn’t.
As they climbed the stairs, pushing through the fleeing horde, Fulbright took a phone from his shirt pocket and made a call. “It’s me. Things have gone to shit here. I need air evac, ASAP.” Then, in a tone dripping with sarcasm, he added: “Five minutes ago would be nice.”
As the phone disappeared back into his pocket, Sara managed to get out a question. “What the hell is going on?”
Fulbright glanced back at her, his face stony and determined. His expression made her think of Jack; she desperately wished that he was the one leading her confidently through this crisis. She half expected Fulbright to dismiss the inquiry, but he surprised her. “That woman was exposed to something-some kind of pathogen. Something that can be made into a weapon.”
The information stimulated the analytical part of her brain, and for a moment, thoughts of grief and concern for her own safety were relegated to secondary priority. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this? We could have had security in place to prevent this. Hell, we should have airlifted her back to Atlanta.”
“I didn’t expect this.” Fulbright’s tone was self-effacing. “I should have, but I didn’t think they’d try anything like this.”
She didn’t know whether to believe him, but that wasn’t the important question. “Who are they?”
Fulbright turned his gaze forward, steering her around another landing-the eighth floor-and kept climbing. The flow of people responding to the fire alarm had dried up; evidently, everyone on the uppermost floors had already exited. “I think it’s Nexus Genetics, the company Felice Carter works for. They sent her out there to find something like this, prehistoric genetic material, an ancient virus. But something went wrong. The expedition must have been exposed to something. That’s all I know really.”
“You think they found what they were looking for?”
“I wasn’t sure. Now I am. The answer is in those samples you took. We have to protect them.” He looked back at her again. “I have to protect you. And you have to figure out just what it is they found, and come up with some kind of vaccine.”
Sara nodded. “That’s what I do. But I need my team. My equipment.”
“Once you’re safe, I’ll get you what you need.” He took a breath, and then added. “We’ll find a way to contact your team.”
If they’re still alive. Fulbright didn’t say it. He didn’t need to.
The stairs ended on a landing blocked by a heavy metal door. Fuller cautiously pushed the door open and peered out. Sara looked over his shoulder and saw a helicopter sitting idle on the rooftop, about a hundred meters away.
“That was fast,” she said.
But Fulbright pushed her back and pulled the door shut. “That’s not our ride.”
In the silence that followed, Sara’s hypersensitive ears detected the sound of footsteps echoing up the stairwell-judging by the cadence, there were at least three different people-and she didn’t have to ask who the helicopter did belong to.
Fulbright was taking out his phone, preparing to make another call, but she gripped his arm, forestalling him. “They’re coming.”
6.
The Old Mother dreamed of a place of death.
“Old Mother” was what her clan called her. The honorific was a sign of great respect; her stature in the clan was something akin to what would, many thousands of years hence, be called ‘divine.’
Indeed, it was she who had brought forth the great change, though few in the clan truly understood just how important that was. Only two of her children still lived and could recall the time before, when their fathers had been no different than the other beasts living in the valley, unable to make or understand speech, able to use only the crudest of tools, fearful of fire despite the Old Mother’s mastery of the element. She alone remembered what it had been like before that.
Her earliest recollections were of frustration. Her head was filled with thoughts which she yearned to share, but the grunts which the others in the clan used to communicate could not convey such complicated things. Worse still, the others seemed incapable of sharing her sense of wonder at the world that surrounded them. She had been thrilled by her discovery, as a very young child, that it was possible to use the sharp edges of a broken rock to cut through animal flesh, but when she had tried to show the dominant male, he had cuffed her in the head and taken the fresh kill for himself.
Yet, although she had been an outsider even among her own kind, her unique gifts served her well. The
