Red Alert (21 page)

Annette Foulke, vice chair of the chemistry department.

They’d been so busy looking for the money angle, they’d overlooked the other major motivating force for crime.

Power.

“I know you’re out there,” she said. She didn’t focus on the desk, though. Instead she addressed the lobby at large, including the open office doors in her sweeping statement. “I know you’re listening, that you’re scrambling to figure it out. But what’s to figure? You want her. I have her.” She smiled now, a cold twist of lips that wasn’t quite sane. “I’m done being subtle. You couldn’t figure it out on your own?
Well, let me help you. I want what’s coming to me, or she dies. You’ve got five minutes.”

She disappeared back through the doorway and pulled the chair away, letting the door shut and seal in her wake. That left Erik with almost nothing to go on besides two critical pieces of information. One, Annette Foulke had gone over the edge. Two, she had Meg.

They were looking at a hostage situation, damn it.

He swore under his breath, and grimaced when he realized his leg had cramped from the awkward position. He crab-walked around the desk, staying low, and opened the various drawers of Jemma’s desk.

He hit paydirt on drawer three with the discovery of a small compact mirror. It was no more than two inches across, but it would have to do.

Breathing shallowly through his mouth, he eased away from the desk, toward the closed door. He was hoping for a crack, a gap beneath the panel that would let him get the mirror through, let him get a look at the situation. But that was a no-go. The lab door formed a tight seal around all four edges. No gaps. No cracks.

It made sense, he supposed. They would need to be able to seal off the lab space in case of a problem with radioactivity or chemicals. But that left him with too few options, too many questions.

He heard the rise and fall of Foulke’s voice, heard the crash of something falling, and felt a jolt of adrenaline, the fear of being too early or too late. Weighing his options, he decided to risk it. He eased
the mirror up the solid half of the door, to where the window began, and angled it so he could see a small slice of the lab beyond.

A clatter from the far side drew his attention. He tilted the mirror and saw Annette kick a piece of lab equipment, saw the expensive machine list to one side.

She was losing it. She was close to boiling over, and she’d put them on a deadline. Five minutes.

But five minutes for what?
Until
what?

He reversed the angle of the mirror and scanned the rest of the lab, almost afraid to see— There. He had her.

Meg’s reflection shook until he steadied his hand through force of will. He squinted to make out details, and saw that she sat on a rolling chair with her hands behind her back and her feet bound in place. She was positioned between two of the large picture windows that ringed the lab, and seemed unhurt.

As he watched, she turned her head toward him—or rather toward the door and its stealthy mirror—and gestured with her head.

Fierce relief ran through him. She was okay. She knew he was here. Or rather, she knew someone was here. After their fight, he doubted she’d be too happy to learn it was him holding the mirror.

The thought brought an anxious twist. So many things to fix. Maybe not enough time.

He wanted to signal her, but he didn’t dare. A quick turn of the reflection showed him that Annette was still occupied killing the piece of lab equipment.
But for how much longer? He couldn’t be sure, but felt the seconds tick away.

He returned his attention to Meg while his mind spun. When she gestured a second time, jerking her chin upward, he followed the motion.

At first he didn’t see it.

Then he did.

Terror sliced through him. She was positioned directly beneath the emergency shower, a spray head connected to the water main, designed as a first line of response in case of a chemical spill. If a lab worker was accidentally splashed with a toxic chemical, the emergency response protocol dictated that they jump under the shower and yank the handle, which would trip an alarm at the same time it released a gush of water.

Only this shower wasn’t connected to the water main anymore. Even in the small mirror, Erik could see that the line had been interrupted. Now it led to three interconnected jugs of liquid, all fitted to what looked like a high-pressure pump.

It was a good bet those jugs didn’t contain anything as benign as water.

Acid,
his mind supplied on an adrenaline rush of horror.
Or a strong base.
It didn’t matter which—both ends of the pH spectrum were equally dangerous, equally capable of melting flesh off bone on contact.

“Ssst!”

Erik whipped his head around at the hiss, tensing to duck and run while he got off a few shots of covering fire.

Through the half-open lab door, he saw Detective Peters hold a finger to his lips, signaling quiet.

Backup had arrived.

A muffled voice yanked Erik’s attention back to the mirror. In an instant, his blood iced. Foulke’s body blocked the reflected image. Her silhouette approached the door. The crank handle turned. The door eased open.

He slipped the safety on his weapon, going stone-cold at the knowledge that he would have only one chance.

Then he heard Meg’s voice say, “Getting paranoid, Annette? Afraid they’ll come for you? Afraid they’ll get around the explosives you’ve set on the doors? Or are you afraid they
won’t
come for you?”

The door slammed shut, muffling Annette’s angry words.

Erik stifled the urge to yank open the door, roll in low and start firing. Too early. He had no plan. Too late. Annette had the doors wired somehow, apparently on a trip system that let her open from her side, but would blow if he opened it from his.

Like the other traps, it was clever and crude at the same time, and almost indefensible.

Almost.

Though it nearly killed him to do so, he pocketed the mirror and eased away from the door. He crossed the lobby, staying low and moving fast, and didn’t let out a breath until he was back in the stairwell. The small space was crowded with bodies in bulletproof
vests. Detectives Sturgeon and Peters were there, along with a handful of other cops wearing protective gear and guns. Jemma crouched at the edge of the group, lips pressed in a determined line. When she met Erik’s eyes, she said, “I know the lab. I know how to get you in the back.”

Erik shook his head. “She’s booby-trapped the front and back doors of the main room.” He quickly sketched the situation, trying to keep the emotion out of a voice that cracked on the strain. But the images were there in his brain—Jimmy’s blood-soaked body sprawled on the road outside a corner bank, Meg’s face when he’d told her of his plans for the NPT technology, the defiant timbre of her voice when she’d warned him of the trap.

The soft curve of her cheek and shoulder in the dimness as they’d made love the night before.

He traded a look with the head of the SWAT team, cop-to-cop. “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do.”

ANNETTE’S BREATH was sour on Meg’s face when the older woman leaned close. Her hair was stringy and unkempt, but her clothes were laundered and smelled of fabric softener. The effect was jarring and just
wrong.

“You think you’re so smart,” Annette hissed in a wash of poor hygiene so different from the hardworking, focused researcher she’d always seemed. “You think just because you’re Robert Corning’s daughter that you’re untouchable. Well, you’re not!” She jabbed a honed fingernail into Meg’s shoulder,
bringing a stabbing pain sharper than the ringing in her head or the dull ache of her bound joints.

“What does this have to do with my father?” Meg demanded, wanting to keep Annette talking past her arbitrary five-minute deadline. “I moved out when I was eighteen.”

“You have his name,” Annette said flatly. “He was a Nobel Prize winner, for God’s sake. All your success trickles down from him. Men make the world go around. Women live in their shadows.” She gestured to her outfit. “You see, Mother was right. Edward was always better than me. If I dress like him,
become
him, I can go places and do things a woman can’t.”

Meg shook her aching head and felt confused, desperate tears press. It was all too much—the buckets looming overhead, a noxious pairing of hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide, the mirror she thought she’d seen in the doorway, the crude devices wired to the only two exits…

Keep her talking,
her sense of self-preservation insisted.
If she’s talking, she’s not doing—whatever she’s going to do.

Meg sucked in a breath. She thought she might have cracked a rib, but didn’t know when, and tugged at her bonds, which had no give. “Who is—”

The lab intercom buzzed live, making both women jump. Then a male voice said, “Dr. Foulke. We’d like to talk to you.”

For a wild, wishful moment, Meg thought the
voice belonged to Erik, just as she’d imagined he had been holding the small mirror in the doorway. But it didn’t.

“This is Reid Peters of the Chinatown station,” the detective’s voice continued. “I’ve been authorized to ask for your demands and act on them, but only if we have proof that Dr. Corning is alive and well.”

That earned her a glare from Annette. “You’ve got an
intercom?
Bitch.” She leaned over Meg’s main lab bench, puzzled over the phone for a few seconds, then stabbed the appropriate button. “She’s alive, but I’m not talking to you. Get Zachary Cage. And make it fast.”

Without waiting for an answer, she used a nearby rolling chair to climb up onto the lab bench, as she had when she’d first rigged the buckets to the emergency shower. Now, she pulled an old-fashioned kitchen egg timer from the pocket of her overlarge sweatshirt, cranked the timer to the halfway point, and attached it to the contraption overhead.

Then she returned to the phone. “You’ve got five minutes or the bitch is dead. And this time I mean it.”

Meg heard the ticking overhead and started to count the seconds. She imagined the chaos outside her lab, cops and lab workers waiting to see what would happen next, or planning something desperate and futile that would never work.

There was no real way in or out of the lab except the doors. And the windows, of course, but they were five stories up and the radiation safety geeks made sure the sashes were kept locked. The vents
were all self-contained and shielded, in case of a leak. Annette had inadvertently trapped her in one of the most secure locations on the hospital property.

Or, Meg thought, looking upward, maybe it wasn’t an accident. Annette had been a step ahead of them all along. She had probably planned this.

But what was her goal? What did she want?

There was no answer as Annette stood in the center of the room, off by the automatic DNA sequencer she’d wrecked in a fit of rage minutes earlier. Her stillness and the contrast from the earlier violence was frightening.

The seconds built to minutes. A single drop of liquid fell from above and landed on the granite lab bench near Meg. There was no bubbling hiss of reaction—the benches were impervious to most chemicals—but she knew what would happen to human flesh. Burning. Pain.

Liquefaction.

She shuddered and tugged at her bonds again. They felt like rope, or maybe torn fabric. Another drop fell. Then another. The clock ticked down and an ominous whirring sound began to build overhead as the strange-looking mechanism attached to the shower began to activate.

Panic surged, overriding fear. Meg looked over and saw that Annette was still frozen in place, lips moving, attention turned inward.

Knowing this might be her only chance, Meg used her bound feet and weight to turn the chair around
and scoot back against the lab bench. She raised her wrists and pressed them to the table.

And felt the burn when the first drop of acid landed.

ERIK LISTENED to the terse reports filtering into his earpiece, and gritted his teeth. He was balanced on a narrow cement ledge, five stories up, edging his way to a lab window Max swore he’d left open that morning, when Jemma’s dust allergies had overridden the radiation geeks’ strictures.

“Who’s dumb idea was this again?” he muttered, knowing damn well it’d been his.

Detective Peters’s voice crackled in his ear. “You say something, Falco?”

“I said I’m almost to the corner.” He risked a look down and really wished he hadn’t. The cars below were too far away, the air too empty.

He wasn’t much higher than he’d been with Luke Cannon the day before—with one glaring difference. Well, three if he counted the lack of ropes, padding or belay buddy separately. It all added up to something he didn’t want to deal with.

Yet he was dealing. For Meg.

He pressed his face to the rough wall and slid his right foot, testing for the next solid foothold.
Check and recheck your purchase,
Cannon’s voice said in his head.
It’s not that you shouldn’t trust your bad leg—but you should proceed with caution.

Only there wasn’t time for caution, wasn’t time to be weak or broken. With his cane tucked in his belt
alongside his weapon, more talisman than crutch, he needed to rely on himself, and on the climbing skills he’d grossly exaggerated to Peters.

No sweat,
he’d told the detective,
I could walk that in my sleep.
Only now he was sweating bullets as he reached the corner, where the narrow ledge fell away, only to reappear on the other side of the building. After that, it was just a few feet to the window that was supposedly open.

He swallowed, trying to find a hint of moisture in his too-dry mouth. “Any progress inside?”

“Cage is working on her now. Foulke keeps talking about someone named Edward, and how she should have had Meg’s lab, should’ve had tenure, should’ve had a ton of things Meg got because of her father’s name.”

“You’re kidding.” Erik stopped dead on the realization that for all Meg’s lectures about the purity of academia and the evils of industry, the danger had come from one of her own co-workers, over something as small—or as large—as tenure.