protocol, but by god it had better be the last. And I’d say the same thing if you were my own daughter.”
“I’m sorry.” Tears burned in the corners of her eyes.
“Yeah, well … Shit. I don’t mind that you spoke with Grace Courtland, but you know goddamn well that it had to be an off-the-record thing. Nothing official, and no copies of a report that I haven’t frigging well okayed.” He drummed his fingers on the desk blotter. “Okay, here’s the deal. The Goddess stuff is over. Give me your final report and then you’re off the project effective now.”
“But that’s not fair, Hugo. I—”
He held up a warning finger. “It is so important to your future that you not finish that sentence, kiddo.”
She clamped her mouth shut.
“I’ve got another project that is career valuable but also off-site. I want you way the hell off the DMS radar for a while. I’m sending you to London. You’ll be our liaison for the
“But—”
He cocked his head and glared at her.
“Yes, Hugo,” she said contritely.
“This isn’t a demotion and no one will see it as such. Hell, it’ll probably help you sell more books. But I want you out of T-Town in case your end run brings down any heat. Which it will. So, go pack and, Circe … do us both a favor—stay out of my way for a couple of days.”
“Yes, Hugo.”
She sniffed back her tears and left the office.
Chapter Thirty-one
Fair Isle Research Endeavor
The Shetland Isles
December 18, 2:54 P.M. GMT
“I’m at the door,” I said quietly. I was in a hazmat-augmented HAMMER suit with a bunch of
“No visible booby traps. Dalek, what’s the call on the lock?” We’d switched to call signs only. Redcap was Prebble; Church was Deacon. Dr. Hu’s call sign was Dalek. He was a nerd on several continents.
“The outer door is nothing special, Cowboy,” replied Hu. “All of the special locks are inside.”
“Nothing visible through the glass,” I said. “Proceeding inside.”
I took a very careful hold of the metal door handle. No shocks and nothing exploded. I pulled gently and the door yielded, but I stayed on the balls of my feet. If I felt the tension of a wire or heard a click, I was going to set a new land speed record for a scared white guy in a hazmat suit.
The door opened with a wonderfully boring lack of explosions.
I went inside. The reception area was empty and sparsely furnished with a functional desk, a file cabinet, two ugly plastic visitor chairs, and a glass coffee table littered with magazines that were three years old. The walls were covered with posters about bacterial research and its benefits to the fishing industry, a map of the coastal waters, and a complex set of tide tables. I quickly searched the whole room and came up dry. No traps, no surprises.
And that, by itself, was surprising.
There was a set of double doors behind the counter that looked cheap and fragile, but the wood grain was a clever fake and when I ran a finger along the surface I felt the cool hardness of steel. A keycard scanner was mounted in a discreet niche in the wall. All DMS agents have a programmable master keycard, and the key codes to this facility had been uploaded to mine. I swiped the card and was surprised that it worked. I’d expected the codes to have been changed or at least disabled.
I did not, however, take that as a sign that all was well and that the wacky professor was brewing a pot of chamomile for us to share with a plate of ginger snaps. There are a lot of ways to lay a trap.
The door opened with a click. I unclipped a handheld BAMS unit—a bio-aerosol mass spectrometer—from my belt. It was one of Hu’s sci-fi gadgets, a few steps up from what they use in airports. The BAMS allowed for real- time detection and identification of biological aerosols. It has a vacuum function that draws in ambient air and hits it with continuous wave lasers to fluoresce individual particles. Key molecules like bacillus spores, dangerous viruses, and certain vegetative cells are identified and assigned color codes. Most of the commercial BAMS units were unreliable because they could only detect dangerous particles in high density, but Church always made sure that Hu had the best toys. Ours wasn’t mounted on a cart like the airport model.
I checked several spots in the room and the light stayed green. If there were pathogens loose in here, the concentration was too low for the BAMS unit to detect.
I moved inside.
The door opened into a faux vestibule that was actually a low-level air lock. As I key-swiped the inner door, the one behind me swung shut with a hydraulic hiss. With the BAMS unit in one hand and my Beretta 92F in the other, I moved out of the air lock. The inner room was large and empty. Computer workstations and wheeled chairs, flat-screen monitors in the walls. A Mr. Coffee on a table. Coffee cups.
The scanner was still green, but I had an itch tickling me between the shoulder blades. It was the kind of feeling you get when you think someone’s in the tall grass watching you through the crosshairs of a sniper rifle. I crept across the room, moving on the balls of my feet, checking corners, checking under desks, looking for trip wires, expecting an attack. Doing this sort of stuff for a living does not totally harden you to the stress. Sure, you get cooler, you learn the tricks of ratcheting down the tension on your nerves, but you aren’t a tenth as calm as you look. It’s one of the reasons we take precautions, like keeping our finger flat along the outside curve of the trigger guard. You keep your finger on the trigger and you either shoot yourself or shoot the first poor son of a bitch who wanders into the moment.
Like the kid who opened the side door to the staff room.
I never heard him, didn’t see him, had no clue he was there until he spoke.
“Are you him?”
I instantly spun around and screwed the barrel of the pistol into soft flesh between a pair of large watery green eyes. In the split part of a second it took for me to pivot and slip my finger inside the trigger guard I registered how short and how young he was.
Maybe seven.
Fire engine red hair, cat green eyes in a freckly face that was white with shock as he stared cross-eyed at the gun barrel. In a movie it would have been a comical moment. In the flesh it was horrible on too many levels to count.
“I.I … ,” he stammered, and I stepped back and pulled the gun away, but only just. Kids can kill, too. They can pull triggers and they can wear explosive vests. The only reason he didn’t get shot was because his hands were empty.
“Who are you?” I demanded.
He had to try it several times before he could squeeze it out. “M-Mikey,” he said. “I’m Mikey Grey.”
“Hold your arms out to your sides. Do it now,” I ordered, and after a moment’s indecision he did it, standing there like a trembling scarecrow as I clipped the BAMS unit to my belt and patted him down. He was wearing jeans and a Spider-Man T-shirt. Sneakers and a SpongeBob wristwatch.
A couple of tears boiled into the corners of his eyes, and despite his best efforts to be brave, his mouth
