piston, sending Evan stumbling backward. By the time Evan regained his
footing, the giant had reached beneath his lab coat, produced a gun, and
raised it to Evan’s face. Horrified at the dire turn of events, Evan threw the
two cups at the man and tried to run for the fire exit. The gunman barely
reacted as the scalding coffee hit his chest and splashed up under his chin,
steam swirling into his face.
With unwavering aim, he snapped off a shot that drilled a red circle
through the back of Evan’s head and ripped open bone and skin in a
red spray as it exited his face. Evan’s body catapulted forward onto the
tiles.
It wasn’t the crack of the gunshot that caught the assistant’s attention;
it was Charlotte’s bloodcurdling scream. When through the glass partition
she spotted the two men near the elevator and Evan’s body sprawled in a
pool of blood, she panicked and darted for the metal security door leading
to the labs. She fumbled for the employee ID card clipped to her suit jacket
and slid it through a reader on the lock.
Donovan swung open a second glass door leading into the assistant’s
cubicle, dragging Charlotte behind him.
“Wait!” Charlotte protested. “Evan!” she cried.
“Stay down!”
An instant later, the door leading to the elevator let out a loud clack as
cracks webbed out from a single hole blown through the center of its tempered glass. The round thwacked into the windowpane behind Charlotte’s
head, making her snap into action.
The assistant was just making her way through the metal door, and
Donovan muscled Charlotte through right behind her. He stole a glimpse
of the large gunman, who was throwing his shoulder against the fractured
glass. A third attempt brought the door down in a thousand pieces, the
man stumbling forward into the office.
“Come on! ” Donovan screamed. He ducked into the doorway,
Charlotte at his heels. He yanked the safety door shut just as another round thudded close to the handle. “How do we get out of here?” he
panted.
“Follow her,” Charlotte replied, her tone full of dread. She pointed
to her assistant, who was already halfway down the corridor. Adrenaline was helping her to pretend that she hadn’t just witnessed Evan’s
murder.
12
******
Orlando unclipped the geneticist’s ID badge from a neck strap he’d spotted on her desk and waved it in the air. “Hey! Take this,” he called loudly. On the other side of the glass partition, his partner was trying unsuccessfully to unlock the door through which the three had escaped and was preparing to blast a hole through the lock. The facilities on this floor required higher security access than what was permitted by the badge he’d forcefully “borrowed” from the undersize tech he’d stuffed into a utility closet in the parking garage.
Kwiatkowski—his shirt and lab coat drenched with coffee; the front of his neck blistered and red—raced in to retrieve the key card.
“I’ll handle this,” Orlando said, eyeing the computer monitor. “You go.” He waved toward the metal door. “And put that away,” he ordered, eyeing the man’s Glock.
Tucking the gun into a concealed underarm holster, Kwiatkowski rushed next door, opened the metal door with the first card swipe, and disappeared beyond.
Orlando grinned when he saw a laptop patched into the workstation’s dummy terminal. Shortly after giving up Donovan’s name, the Vatican priest, Father Martin, had since called to inform him of an American geneticist’s involvement in the project too. The cleric couldn’t recall her name, but he’d remembered invoices paid to her Phoenix-based employer, BioMedical Solutions, Inc.
After Donovan had fled his shop, Orlando and Kwiatkowski had scoured Belfast for his motorcycle, with no results. It was while they were ransacking his home that the call came through on Orlando’s cell phone— results from traces run on Donovan’s passport and credit cards. By then, Donovan’s Aer Lingus flight to JFK International had already lifted off Belfast International’s runway.
Though the priest had been one step ahead, they hadn’t been far behind.
Their employer’s private Learjet had swiftly begun closing the gap. While in the air, another credit card trace came through, showing Donovan had purchased a second fare on Continental Airlines. A search of flight manifests had him en route to Phoenix—home of BioMedical Solutions, Inc. The Learjet arrived an hour ahead of Donovan’s flight, plenty of time for Orlando to make a preliminary visit to BioMedical Solutions’s downtown headquarters. While the guard at the security desk provided him directions to the nearest men’s room, Orlando had discreetly stuck a dimesize microphone to the underside of the granite countertop. When Donovan finally arrived, the adversarial conversation he had with the guards had been crisply transmitted to Orlando’s cell phone.
Next, Orlando studied the geneticist’s desk.
Luckily, whatever she had been working on wasn’t on the company’s main server. That saved lots of time and risk in trying to decrypt passwords and navigate sophisticated firewalls. He unplugged the laptop and tucked it under his arm.
Was this woman Donovan’s accomplice? Whatever the case, the fact that she was a geneticist was troublesome. Because if she’d examined the bones ...
His eyes made a quick inventory of the framed photos on her desk. Mostly shots of an older man whose facial similarities suggested he was her father. He snatched the photo that showed her face most clearly.
Next came the desk. In the top drawer, he found some business cards among the paper clips, Post-it pads, and pens. “Dr. Charlotte Hennesey. Executive vice president of genetic research,” he read, impressed. He slipped one into his pocket.
The bottom drawer gave up her abandoned Coach purse. He pulled it out, unzipped it, and rifled through the wallet. The bad news was her credit cards were left behind and there were no keys. The trail would be that much harder to follow. The good news was her Arizona driver’s license had been left behind too, so accessing all her records would be that much easier. He tucked the wallet into his pocket.
Then he hastened through the shattered glass and into the corridor.
Luckily, no other employees had come by during the commotion—less killing, fewer complications. To his right was another solid keyed entryway marked lab 11—level 4 clearance only. To his left, sprawled in front of the elevator, the dead executive lay in a swirled pool of blood, coffee, and brain matter.
“Nice suit,” Orlando said, staring into the man’s lifeless blue eyes. Sidestepping the mess, he calmly made his way to a fire exit sign that pointed to a door at the end of the hall.
13