‘Was there anybody inside?’ Ethan demanded, grabbing the arm of what looked like the most senior of them.
‘Two,’ the old man said, his features twisted with fury and fear. ‘Goddamned activist is still in there with one of my people.’
Ethan didn’t wait to hear anything further, turning and plunging through the shattered glass of the entry cubicle and into the foyer. A galaxy of glass crystals twinkled on the blue carpets as he dashed forward toward a narrow corridor filled with a haze of swirling blue smoke. The thick taint of cordite stung his throat and seared his eyes, but he pushed on until he saw a poster warning of hazardous chemical spills. Ethan hesitated, sudden thoughts of infectious diseases and spores floating on the air flashing through his mind.
‘It’s okay.’
He whirled as Lopez appeared behind him, a simple fabric mask covering her nose and mouth. She handed one to him. ‘I checked, no hazardous chemicals.’
Ethan snapped the mask over his face and advanced further down the corridor. Ahead, another cubicle stood with its glass walls shattered by the shockwave of the detonation. Ethan recognized it as a pressure chamber of some kind as he passed through and into the laboratory beyond.
His gaze was quickly drawn to the smoldering remains of what looked like two huge computer mainframes, sparks hissing and spitting from severed power mains and junctions.
‘Anybody here?’ Ethan shouted, not sure of how else to quickly locate any injured scientists still inside the lab.
‘Here!’
The voice was feeble and coming from behind a row of worktops to Ethan’s left. He hurried across and saw a young woman in a white coat with what looked like a monkey wrapped in her arms.
Ethan rounded the corner of the workbench. ‘Are you okay?’
Before the woman could answer, another woman leapt up from behind the far end of the bench with a sawn-off shotgun.
‘Freeze, hero.’
Ethan obeyed, standing silent and looking at the young girl glaring at him from behind the barrel of the shotgun. The girl glanced at Lopez. ‘You, Chiquita, on your knees and face the wall.’
Lopez blinked.
‘Kiss my ass you little bit—’
‘Lopez,’ Ethan warned quietly, ‘be a good girl and shut up, okay? The gun’s pointing at me.’ Lopez, scowling, turned her back and knelt facing the wall. Ethan looked at the girl standing not ten feet away. Her belligerence had flickered, momentarily stunned by Lopez’s hostility. He edged forward.
‘This lady is injured,’ he said carefully. ‘We need to get her out of here and—’
‘The lady is fine and so is the fucking monkey,’ the girl hissed. ‘Shut up and follow me.’
Ethan shrugged and followed the girl, noting the hard line of her jaw and the thick blonde hair tied up behind her head. She was wearing the cloak of the fearless eco-warrior, but Ethan could see she was gripping the shotgun so tightly her knuckles were white and the barrel of the weapon was trembling.
‘Easy,’ he said soothingly. ‘No need to let this get out of control.’
‘Out of control?’ she spat. ‘Not the sharpest blade in the kitchen, are you?’
‘What do you want?’
The girl gestured to the shattered bulk of the computer servers.
‘I want you to crawl behind that and look for anything rolling around back there.’
‘Such as?’ Ethan asked, maneuvering himself alongside the server. The girl kept the shotgun trained on him.
‘Things that go bang,’ she hissed at him with a humorless smile.
Shit. Ethan guessed that the grenade he had heard had done the damage to the server and that there must be another one that had failed to detonate. Thoughts crashed through his mind. If it was a fused grenade then it had a three-second delay from releasing the pin. Most modern grenades were highly reliable, unless you were unlucky like some Marines who had served in the jungles of Vietnam, where wiry bushes and twigs had pulled the pins from where they hung on the soldiers’ belt-kits. The girl watching over him wouldn’t likely have access to modern military-grade munitions. That would mean the grenades were probably old, maybe even vintage, black-market devices crudely reactivated using gunpowder and improvised fuses. Unreliable. Volatile. Sensitive to movement.
Ethan knelt down and peered behind the server, flinching as showers of sparks splashed and crackled round him. Through the acrid wisps of blue smoke he saw the grenade lying three feet away from his grasp, faintly illuminated by shafts of light beaming through the wall behind where shrapnel had punched through to the outside world. Prefabricated double-skin aluminum walls, no insulation.
‘I can see it,’ he coughed to the girl standing watch over him.
‘Good,’ the girl shot back. Ethan heard her call out to Lopez and the scientist. ‘Get out of here, all of you!’ Then back to him. ‘You, get off your knees and out of there.’
Ethan scrambled to his feet and backed away as the girl jabbed the shotgun at him, prodding him back into the lab as she moved to look down the back of the server. Ethan glanced over his shoulder to see Lopez herding the scientist out of the labs and away down the corridor.
‘You’re trapped,’ he said to the girl. ‘The servers are destroyed, so whatever you’ve come here to do, you’ve done. Why not put the weapon down while you still can, before the police get here?’
The girl looked at him for a brief moment, as though considering the suggestion, before shaking it off.
‘The police are otherwise occupied,’ she said tartly, ‘and we’re done here.’
‘Yeah?’ Ethan chuckled. ‘And what the hell are you going to—’
Ethan whirled as the girl swung the shotgun to point at his head, and in a fraction of a second he knew she was going to pull the trigger. With an instinct born of self-preservation his legs propelled him without conscious thought sideways as he dove for cover behind one of the benches. The shotgun blasted a round over his head and smashed the ceiling above where he’d been standing. Ethan hit the tiled floor hard on his knees and elbows, sprawling as he did so. He squinted through swirling smoke to see the girl take several steps back from the servers and then point the shotgun at the grenade and fire again. A deafening blast ripped through the frame of the servers amid a spray of sparks and clouds of blue smoke from burning relay circuits.
Through the haze and a fine hail of plaster chunks Ethan saw the girl suddenly dash out of sight behind the server, her small frame squeezing through the narrow gap. Ethan scrambled to his feet and rushed to the wall as sparks showered down around him, just in time to see the girl’s feet vanish through a ragged hole torn into the building’s aluminum skin. He took a deep breath and pushed his way behind the server, heading for the hole, when the barrel of the shotgun appeared suddenly through the gap and a voice hissed at him, ‘Don’t even think about it, hero.’
Ethan cursed silently to himself as he dragged himself backwards out of the gap and then turned to sprint through the laboratory.
13
‘She’s gone.’
Lieutenant Enrico Zamora was outside the laboratories as Ethan burst out into the bright sunlight. A small fleet of patrol cars and ambulances, supported by two fire trucks, had arrived to line the edge of the main road, their lights flashing as though a traveling fairground had pulled up in town.
Ethan glanced at the paramedics treating the injured scientists before looking at Zamora.
‘She can’t have gotten far,’ he said. ‘She must be in the woods somewhere.’
‘You got a description of her?’
Ethan described the girl, and was surprised when Zamora unfolded a picture from his jacket pocket and showed it to him.
‘That’s her.’ Ethan nodded. ‘No doubt about it. Who is she?’