Page 14 of Jacob

“Yes. He went to Vail over the Christmas season and to Aruba in March. Any of us can do that, of course, except none of us actually do because we rarely have the time. And he’s been on a quest to eat at the top twenty restaurants in Atlanta in a month. He actually said that in our rec room.”

Stupid fuck. He might as well have taken out an ad.Just sold my country out.

She shrugged. “I never really thought about that much, except in hindsight.”

“Because he disappeared,” Jake said.

She bit her lips. “Because it looks like he disappeared.”

Jake leaned forward. “Tell me about it. It’s only a couple of days but you’re worried. There must be a reason for that.”And I hope to God it’s not because you love the fuck.

She hesitated. “This has national security implications.” It was the second time she’d said that. Considering where she worked, this could be very dangerous shit.

Jake didn’t smile and didn’t frown. He kept his voice even. “I spent eight years on classified missions. BI works for Homeland Security on a continuous basis. Hell, we work for the CDC. No one’s going to talk.”

“I know you work with the CDC,” she confessed. “It’s one of the reasons I chose to—to approach Black Inc. However, for a moment there, while I was being shanghaied and flown halfway across the country, it occurred to me that BI was very closely tied to the CDC and that maybe I’d made a mistake. That maybe I’d walked into the lion’s den and you would try to… to shut me up.”

Jake kept quiet. There was nothing to say to that. He would see the CDC burn to the ground rather than see her hurt in any way.

She sipped her tea and leaned forward to place the cup on the coffee table. “Elias was working on something that has profound public health consequences, and that in the wrong hands…” She drew in a deep breath, puffed it out. “But what if Elias isn’t missing? What if he had a family emergency and hasn’t had a chance to tell anyone? What if he is sick with the flu and simply refusing to answer any of his phones? What if?—”

“You think he’s missing,” Jake said. “That’s good enough for me.”

She closed her eyes. “Thank you. The thing is that we are working on a project together in the BSL-4 lab. That’s?—”

“I know what that is,” Jake said quietly. A BioSafety Level 4 lab was terrifying. It was used for the hottest of hot agents. A BSL-4 lab followed the strictest possible protocols to ensure that the diseases could never escape. They were under protective negative pressure and the scientists who worked in a BSL-4 lab worked in space suits as tightly insulated as those astronauts wore. There was an hour of decontamination after working in a BSL-4 lab. There were something like only 50 in the world. There were 12 of them in the US and only scientists who were tops in the fields ever worked there.

Jake’s blood ran cold at the thought of Alex in a BSL-4 lab. The suits were overengineered to be safe, but sooner or later everything failed. One tiny hole, a second’s breakdown in the air supply, a tiny slip of the hand and Alex would die an agonizing death behind steel vault doors that would never open again.

Jacob had lost two of his operators—excellent men—because of tears in their suits at a ricin factory in Syria. They had died horrible deaths and there was nothing he or his teammates could do.

She nodded. “Okay. So I don’t have to explain that. You get it that once a team has begun a trial, no member of that team can be replaced. Something people don’t always realize is how—howphysicalour job can get. We’re scientists, yes, but a lot of what we do requires a great deal of manual expertise under difficult conditions. Few people can physically do what we do. And most trials require constant surveillance, otherwise the data can be lost or rendered null and void. Nobody disappears in the middle of a trial, no one. Elias has his issues, but I cannot imagine him just… disappearing like this. Without telling anyone. And yet, there it is. For this section of the experiment, it’s just Elias and me and Elias being missing has brought everything to a grinding halt.” Alex’s beautiful face looked distressed. “We’re alone during this stage of the trial. If I report that he has abandoned the experiment halfway through, that he is AWOL—his career is over. He’d be on a blacklist and would never work in a legitimate lab again. On the other hand, if something has happened to him, if he’s been kidnapped or if—” That long white throat bobbed as she swallowed.

“If he defected,” Jake finished for her.

Alex nodded. “Yes. If he defected. If he did, then I would be in very deep trouble for not reporting it right away.” She turned, reached down into her briefcase and pulled out her cell.

“And then yesterday I got this.” She tapped the screen and held it out to him. Jake took it and listened to a screeching warbly series of sounds that lasted two minutes.

“Scrambled,” Jake said.

“Yes.” Alex left the phone with him. “I’m not good enough to unscramble it. As you can see, the number is blocked.”

“Not for long.” Black Inc. had developed an app for this. Inside of a minute, Jake had a number. He turned Alex’s phone around so she could see it. “The message is scrambled beyond reconstruction, but I’ve unblocked the number. This is the number that called you.”

“Oh.” She stared at her screen then raised her eyes to his. “That number, + 380. What country does that correspond to?”

“Vostokova,” Jake answered. He was already planning his phone call to Nick. Nikolai Garin, Ukrainian-American with a feel for Eastern European countries. A real badass, former SEAL. He and Nick went way back and Nick was one of his VPs. Plus, he could be counted on to do everything in his power to fuck with anyone who was fucking with a country in that part of the world. Especially Russia.

“Oh, no,” Alex whispered. She’d turned ice white again. Jake shot out a hand to steady her. She was trembling and didn’t pull away, which scared him.

“Alex?”

“Vostokova.” She swallowed convulsively. “What part of Vostokova?”

Jake pulled out his cell and Googled the prefix, frowning at his display. “Says here a place called Zalny.” He watched her face as it turned even whiter. “Where is Zalny?”

“Not where,” she answered. “What. What is Zalny. A tiny town of no importance outside the capital, but it was the site of an old Soviet lab, decommissioned after the fall of the Soviet Union. There was a strong suspicion the Soviets were working on bioweaponry during the Soviet period. I read the reports of our guys who went over to check on former Soviet bioweapons labs, because stockpiles were disappearing. The CIA was more worried about the bioweapons than nuclear weapons. This is—this is awful, Jake. Particularly considering Elias’s specialty.”

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