“Got it.” He went over to the door’s key code panel and typed in the override code. “Nothing.” He sighed. “Could this room have a different code?”
“Let me find out. Problem is, all the bosses, techs and lab people are in there with you, sleeping.”
“Not to mention the Russians, Swedes and Israelis. Be quick.”
Drake listened as Hayden checked with the team. All was quiet, eerily so. Then Smyth growled through his coms.
“Movement on the eastern staircase. Here they come!”
“I got movement on the western one,” Mai reported. “Hurry.”
“Hold those elevators,” Hayden said. “We’re gonna need them real soon.”
Drake considered shooting the glass. No doubt it would be bulletproof and potentially dangerous. There were glass cabinets in the outer room too, stocked with tubes and canisters that might contain any number of poisons.
Lauren shouted out a new code. Drake punched it in. The door swung open. He ran for the back of the room, slipped open the cabinet and started searching for the canister. Hayden stayed behind. Watching their backs, each team member keeping line of sight with the next.
Drake sifted through canister after canister. Each one bore an imprint in black, bold letters and numbers, and they weren’t organized. A minute passed. Smyth opened fire up his staircase and Mai did the same a few seconds later. They were under attack, praying nobody was idiotic enough to send a grenade into the fray.
“Got it!”
He lifted the canister, took half a second to remember it contained a bio-weapon that could destroy at the very least — America, and tucked it under one arm. “Time to go.”
As one, coordinated, they began the retreat. Mai and Smyth covered the stairs until Drake and Hayden reached the corridor and then Yorgi and Dahl covered them. Mai and Smyth retreated fast as Alicia pressed the elevators’ button.
Doors whooshed instantly open.
“Faster!” Mai shouted, appearing fast around a corner. “They’re seconds behind me.”
She fired back, pinning them down.
Smyth came the other way, shielded now by Dahl, both men backpedalling for the doors.
And then the alarms began to sound, a huge claxon-like booming that filled the ears and sent the senses into overdrive.
“What the fuck is that?” Drake shouted.
“No. Oh no!” Lauren screamed back. “Get out of there. Get out of there now! They just released something into the system.” She paused. “Oh my God… it’s sarin.”
It was already flooding through the roof vents of the corridor and the side vents of the elevator.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Drake quelled the initial surge of fear at the mention of the name sarin. He knew it was deadly. Knew it was considered a weapon of mass destruction. He knew Smyth, Yorgi and Kenzie had taken their masks off.
And he saw how what was said to be a colorless, odorless liquid seeped through the vents.
“I never doubted they stored sarin here.” Hayden jumped at Yorgi. “But this…” She grappled with his mask.
Drake knew almost anything could be manipulated, engineered or generally re-imagined. The only limit was the imagination. A liquid nerve agent was infinitely pliable. Now he went hard for Kenzie, but saw Alicia and Mai were already there. They had the Israeli’s mask on, but her eyes were already closed, her body slumping.
Sarin could kill in one to ten minutes depending on the dose.
“No,” Drake said. “No, no, no.”
Smyth slid down the side of the lift, already unconscious before Dahl managed to jam his mask fully over his face.
The elevator shot up, back to the ground floor.
“What do we do?” Hayden shouted over the comms. “How long do they have?”
“Who?” Lauren reacted naturally. “Who’s hurt?”
“Just get a goddamn lab rat or a doctor and tell us what to do!”
Kinimaka hefted Smyth over one shoulder as the doors swept open. Drake saw him about to rush out, then threw himself out first, knowing the Hawaiian had probably forgotten about the waiting Swedes, Russians and Israelis. Immediately he could see what looked like a faint steam leaking through all the high-level vents. His heart dropped. “It’s been released up here too.”
“The whole facility,” Lauren said. “I have a lab technician right here.”
“Don’t need him,” Kinimaka breathed. “We need atropine. Where’s the fucking atropine?”
A new voice came on the line. “How many people infected? And to what level?”
Drake swept the area, ran for cover, weapon aimed. Alicia backed him up. Movement ahead made them pause.
“Fuck that!” Hayden cried. “We have three of our own and dozens of people already unconscious in the lab. You have to get in here with an antidote, and you have to do it now!”
“Sarin is deadly,” the man said. “But it can take an hour to kill. We’re on our way, believe me. We were prepared for this. Tell me, are the victims having difficulty breathing?”
Drake looked back. Hayden took a moment to check. “Yeah,” she said with a catch in her throat. “Yeah, they are.”
Drake saw Dahl now move over to Kenzie, gently remove her from Alicia and cradle her in his arms. He stared straight at Kinimaka. Nobody else. Nowhere else. The world was gone and only one thing remained in the Swede’s conscience.
“Mano. What do we do?”
The big Hawaiian sniffed. “Atropine, and an auto-injector.”
The voice responded immediately. “Med bays are situated on every floor. Several antidotes are included in each bay and atropine is one of them. You’ll find auto-injectors there too. Just stab it into a thigh muscle.”
“I know what to do!”
Drake waited for the lab tech to tell Kinimaka where to go then led the way. No sneaking, no dodging behind tables; this time they went heads up and balls out, holding their fallen friends, daring any rogue nation to be stupid enough to take them on. The floor was still littered with bodies, only now those sleeping forms were curled up, wracked with pain, some already shuddering.
The front doors were destroyed. Men wearing masks and suits rushed in.
Drake kicked a chair aside and then spied the med bay in one corner of the room. He sprinted. A Russian body lay to the right, clad in Kevlar, the one they’d shot. Two more lay next to it; convulsing and dying. The sarin hit them hard too. The release of the chemical had effectively stopped the battle, and SPEAR still held the bio-weapon.
Hayden forged ahead, not holding a weapon, and wrenched the med bay door open. Inside, a dozen ampoules faced them, all full of glistening liquids. They were clearly marked, and Kinimaka bellowed at the atropine; Mai pulled out an auto-injector and filled it. Kinimaka jammed the needle into Smyth’s face just a few seconds before Dahl did the same to Kenzie. Alicia and Mai handled Yorgi and then the team sat back on their haunches, exhausted, numb, scared that the hope that filled their hearts now felt so desperate.
Minutes passed. Drake turned to Kinimaka. “What happens now?”
“Well, atropine blocks the effects of sarin. They should come around.”
“Watch for side effects,” the lab tech said. “Hallucinations, mostly. But dizziness, nausea, blurred vision…”
“Don’t worry,” Alicia said. “All of that’s nothing worse than a pub lunch for Team SPEAR.”
“Dry mouth. Fast heart rate…”
“Yup.”
Still more minutes passed and Drake stared helplessly at Yorgi’s face, wishing a hundred times a second that some life would flood back into it. Hayden asked the tech if they could flood the sarin out of the system and allow everyone to remove their masks but the situation was barely under control. Whoever released the sarin still might have other plans.