Page 49 of Jacob

They picked up their bags from the back of the SUV and carried them in. The only thing Alex could carry was her backpack. They headed straight for the elevators.

“Don’t we have to check in?” she asked.

“Already done,” Nick said absently, watching the floor numbers. They stopped at the last floor, the 12th. The elevator doors swooshed open and they were in an elaborate foyer with huge bouquets of fresh flowers. “So, you guys have the entire top floor to yourselves. Two of my guys will be stationed out here at all times, in shifts. If you order room service—and it’s not bad here—the food will be delivered to your guards and they will deliver to you. Jacob, at every shift change, you’ll get notification on your phone together with the ID of the men standing guard.”

That sounded really thorough to Alex. She and two colleagues had been assigned guards on a mission to a Malaysian island known for both pirates and terrorists and they hadn’t known who the guards were until they showed up.

Jacob’s phone pinged and he ushered her to a couch. “The Queens,” he said. “They’ve got something.” He put the video up on a big flat screen on the wall over the bar.

It was Riley, the blonde. “Hey Jacob, hey Alex.” She smiled. “Hey Nikolai, good to see you!”

Nick settled in an armchair with a sigh and a glass of brown liquid in his hand. “Riley! Run up any buildings lately?”

She rolled her eyes. “Not lately, no. But wedohave some intel on what Alex asked for. So—it looks like a company called Teknolab has ordered several of the following.” Riley checked another screen. “Here we go. Two CRISPR-Cas9s, thermal cyclers, DNA sequencers, fume hoods, flow cytometers, spectrophotometers. That sound about right?”

Alex’s heart dropped. “Sounds perfect—especially if you’re planning on creating a bio monster. If what I’m dreading is true, they will also have live samples of smallpox, though that wouldn’t be on any register and will not be recorded.”

“How big would the sample have to be?” Jacob asked. “Carried in a truck?”

“It could be carried in a purse or a small backpack,” Alex answered grimly.

Silence.

“There’s more,” Emma said, in a new popup window.

Alex sighed. “More?”

“Yeah. We tracked traffic between this lab and the former Soviet site and there’s been a lot of traffic. Several trucks a day. But not in the past week. Not too sure I get that.”

Alex did. “It took a while for the Zalny biolab to come online. In the meantime, they were using the labs at Teknolab. But there might have been a breakthrough and they might not need Teknolab anymore. Or else they have built up the former Soviet lab to the point they don’t need Teknolab anymore. Whichever, it’s bad news.”

Silence again, until Emma broke it.

“Jacob, Nikolai, we’re sending you as much information as we could find on the lab. They’ve got two addresses. One is the administrative headquarters and the other is the research lab itself. Sending you the schematics of the lab. Someone wiped it from the internet, but Felicity, who is sneaky and understands that part of the world, found it again in the original building permits, which they forgot to wipe out because they clearly thought that the government security—which was for shit—was enough.”

Schematics of a laboratory complex came online and Alex leaned forward to study them. She flipped through the pages on the screen, very familiar with how labs were structured.

“Everything seems normal here, except…”

Jacob put a hand on her shoulder. “Except what, honey?”

She quickly glanced around, but no one so much as blinked. She was so unused to this. To being considered part of a couple. For a moment she flashed on the fact that her life had changed in the blink of an eye, it seemed. She’d had a few affairs, but had never been paired up in other people’s eyes. This was completely new.

Well, she’d think of that afterward, when this mess was over. Hoping that she and Jacob wouldn’t be living in a dying world.

Alex sat back. “The lab is sort of… primitive. Good enough for basic research, more than adequate, but not for much more. This would not be a lab that Elias would find suitable for the work he’s used to doing. But maybe there’s another lab, say underground? Though there isn’t an underground lab in the schematics, it could be a secret lab? I don’t know. You guys will have to figure that out. All I know is that what I see here is a very ordinary research lab without the resources, or even the space, to carry out advanced bioengineering.”

Jacob turned to Nick. “Can you find out if there’s more than one lab at the site. We have to feel our way here. And ladies—” he addressed the Queens. “Can you find out the ownership structure of this company?”

“Sure thing,” Emma said, nodding, her rich red curls bobbing. “We’ll get a full report to you as soon as we can.”

Alex was beginning to understand the Queens. She was sure they’d get a copy of the ownership structure as fast as humanly possible.

“Thanks.” Jacob nodded at the screen and the Queens winked off.

“Right.” Nick slapped his knees. “My men and I are going to do some recon tonight, report to you in the morning.” He slid over a leather covered menu. “Order from room service, you won’t be unhappy. See you in the morning.” He nodded at Alex and Jacob and left.

Alex sat back and tilted her head until she was looking at the ceiling. It was ornate, with stuccoed embellishments and looked a little like she imagined a French bordello would look.

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