Under the Wire: Bad Boys Undercover (18 page)

“For example?”

“You were here on a job within a job. The documentary was your cover.” When she nodded, he continued. “What if some of your team members were also on a second job, one that differed from yours?”

“You’re asking because of the Russian commandos.”

He knew she’d get it. She likely put the pieces together long before he did. “The expedition is a government-sanctioned event in support of the documentary. So, why the armed attackers?”

“The CIA believes there is something going on here that needs investigating.” She made a face that suggested she was working out the factors in that impressive brain of hers. “Maybe we did stumble over something and found something we weren’t supposed to find.”

“Then why did they give the expedition permission to be up here at all? It’s too risky.” Someone was paying the bills and pulling the strings. Niko, but the CIA was involved as well. That made for two players with two agendas. The Russians added a third.

Reid wondered how many schemes they needed to unravel to figure this out. As if dealing with one group of bad guys wasn’t enough.

He could almost see her mind clicking into action. Give her a puzzle and she’d work it and work it until she solved it. They could use those skills right now.

“If you wanted to hide a research lab up here—even from the government—where would you put it? Lock it away so that you needed a scientist to find it and work in it?” When she glanced around he knew she wasn’t thinking complex enough. “Keep in mind the supplies you’d need. Temperatures. Space. Equipment.”

“Somewhere like the mine.”

“Too obvious.” That would have been his first guess, too, but he’d checked the tunnels and one was flooded. Nothing lingered in there except for themselves and maybe a few rats. A fact he did not intend to point out to her.

“What about all the old hunting cabins and work camps in and out of this area?”

Another good direction, but they’d exhausted it, or at least ruled it out in light of the two-man armed scouting teams. “Tasha and Caleb checked all of them. The satellite photos show Russian special forces investigating them as well, but no evidence that points to an ongoing operation.”

“A room carved into these hills.” Her gaze slid over the mountain towering above them.

“Out in the open.” Reid walked through the parameters out loud. “Hidden but not really. A place no one would think to look.”

“But it would need to be tucked away to some degree. It sounds weird, but you’d need to be open to get materials in yet not
that
open as to be seen.” She shrugged. “There, that narrows it down.”

He waded through her sarcasm to her point.
Open yet not.
A place with natural cover. Obvious but not too obvious.

He turned and stared at the steep drop-off beside him. “Like in a valley.”

Her eyes widened as she ventured to the edge of the hill and looked down. “Where does this lead?”

“Not sure, but we know from personal experience it’s not the first place armed guards check.” The perfect hiding place. He took Cara’s hand. “You any good at sliding?”

She looked at the incline then at him again. “I have a feeling it would be easier to roll.”

“Whatever you need to get down there.”

Before she could balk, he started moving. Walked down sideways, letting his boots grab the earth and then leaning into the slides as the soles glided over pebbles and dirt. She followed behind him, keeping one hand on the ground beside her for leverage. It was a longer process than he intended but neither of them rolled into the water, so that was a plus.

At the bottom, standing on the bank, he glanced up and down the waterway. After a double-check of the coordinates from Caleb and Tasha, Reid started walk
ing. In silence they trudged along the water’s edge. The walls of the valley muffled the sound, and no person or animal crossed their trail.

When they reached the one mile point, Reid started to doubt this was the place. “Let’s turn around.”

She nodded, still quiet. At first he thought the silence counted as punishment of some sort. Then he noticed her eyes kept scanning. She walked and watched. Took it all in. As he looked for footprints or other signs of human activity, she focused on the earth around them. Picked up a rock here and there. Frowned at more than one of the things she saw, but he didn’t know why.

After another ten minutes he was ready to declare this trip a waste of time. If something obvious stuck out then it was too obvious for him to see it. He thought about dragging Parker in here with him. Possibly getting Tasha to acquire a drone and fly low along the river to cover more ground and obtain photographic evidence.

Because flying drones wouldn’t attract attention. He almost laughed at his internal joke. But nothing about the situation struck him as all that funny. “Nothing.”

She shook her head as she crouched down. “Something.”

“What?”

She held a rock that looked like every other rock. “This is wrong.”

He wasn’t even sure if he knew the right questions to ask. “I don’t know how to respond to that.”

She stood up with the rock in her hand. “I could throw a whole bunch of terms at you about this area back when it was covered by an ocean. Paleozoic sedimentary rocks and evidence of rift activity.”

“I’m begging you to not to use any more terms like that.”

“I know what we should find on the banks of the river.” She held the dark gray lump out to him. “Not this.”

He took it and felt the weight in his palm. What struck him was the perfect cut to the rock. It hadn’t been chipped away. It looked as if it had been chiseled.

He still had no idea what that meant. “Okay.”

“Limestone generally lines the riverbeds in this area.” She took the rock back. “This is grabbo. It forms when magma is trapped beneath the earth’s surface.”

He must have had a blank look on his face because after a quick look she nodded then kept going. “It contains minerals like nickel, cobalt, gold, silver. In the case of this one, and the ones dropped here, they’ve been shaved down. They are too perfect in shape.”

He’d never been so happy to have a geologist on his team. “Why?”

“I don’t know yet, but I think your lab is here somewhere. Right here.” She pocketed the rock. “And someone is using this, though I have no idea what for.”

That still didn’t solve the question of the actual location. They had educated guesses and some rocks that
might or might not matter. Not a lot to go on as they walked around in the light rain.

Reid looked down the length of the river and forced his mind to focus. He shut out the sounds of the water and the presence of the woman beside him. Instead of looking for what was there, he shut off and searched for what wasn’t.

His gaze slipped from one side of the bank to the other. Bushes, rocks. Patches of grass. Scanned one section then moved down. He repeated the process several times, not seeing anything out of order.

His attention zipped back to the left bank about twenty feet ahead. Something stuck out. Something he couldn’t quite figure out at first. He kept turning the facts over in his mind. Green and brown. Patches . . . that’s it.

“Found it.” He almost took off running, but stopped.

She stood beside him. “Tell me what you’re looking at.”

“Nothing.”

“What?”

He knew the answer sounded ridiculous but it actually made sense. “A few feet up the hill on the left side. Look for the solid block of brown. No patches of grass. No tumbling rocks. When you block everything else, the patch sticks out.”

She smiled. “A door.”

It didn’t look like anything, but he agreed with her guess. “We’ll know in two seconds.”

Once they walked up and stood over it, the differ
ence between that one square of land and all the rest became more obvious. He didn’t see hinges or a handle. The makers of the entrance had been smarter than that. Still, it would open. He’d bet his life on it.

“Stand back.” The problem with dropping into a space was that anyone could be down there.

He felt around the area, trying to find a way in. When that didn’t work he put his foot on the middle of the suspect block. Not all of his weight, just a little. He heard a shallow thumping sound.

“Metal.” Cara made the observation as she dropped down and ran her hands over the space.

After a click, the door under his foot gave way and fell an inch below the rest of the land. Now Reid knew where to push. Throwing some weight behind it, he got the slim doorway open and looked down at the ladder leading to . . . somewhere. Lights attached to the wall showed the way.

Cara shifted as if she planned to step inside.

He wasn’t about to let that happen. “I’ll go first.”

“I’m coming with you.”

He didn’t bother arguing because he didn’t want her waiting out there without him. “Nice and slow.”

He slid his body inside the hole and fit his boot to the step. A small clanking sound echoed around him every time his foot hit a new rung, but he kept moving. Hand over hand he climbed down, glancing up now and then to watch Cara hurry down behind him.

When he got within a few feet of the floor, he jumped
and lifted her to the ground with him. Water dripped down around them and the tunnel smelled dank. There weren’t any sounds other than the dripping of water and no one came running, but the entire area was outlined in metal. Kind of a dead giveaway something was happening down here.

They walked for a minute then turned a corner. A steel door led to a separate room. A very different room. One lined with plastic and filled with light. Containers and what looked like freezers. Metal cases lined the walls. Tables covered in paperwork and computers on one side. Rocks and microscopes and a whole bunch of equipment he couldn’t identify on the other.

A working lab.

Cara walked around the tables. She didn’t touch anything but she studied rocks and more than one metal device. When she got to a stack of papers she picked one up. Then another. Looked through a microscope.

Laptops and computers lined one wall. None of them flickered with life. He didn’t try to turn them on for fear that would make it too easy to track their location. Someone with expertise different from his could handle that.

“Cobalt.” She said the word from the middle of the room then slumped against one of the tables.

He didn’t like the look on her face. Worry mixed with an edge of excitement, but the latter flashed and then disappeared. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“I’m not sure.” Her finger swept over the lines of equations on the paper. “This isn’t my specialty, but I know cobalt and there are all sorts of bad things people can do with it.”

“Like?”

She swallowed hard enough for him to see her throat move. “At the worst end? Build a cobalt bomb.”

It took a second for the words to register in his brain. When they did, he could only think one thing: that sounded pretty fucking bad. Literally, the Doomsday Device referenced throughout history. The one that could wipe out life.

“I’ve read reports about the possibility, but again, like some of the other possibilities we’ve talked about with what could be happening around here, they all read like science fiction. There are rumors Russia has one armed and ready to go if the U.S. ever launches an attack, but no one knows if that’s true.” There had been dire warnings but never any evidence it was real. Talk about how in some parts of the world cobalt was much easier to obtain than other materials. Freaky, scary shit. “You think that’s what we’re looking at here?”

She didn’t say yes or no. “It would be a nuclear weapon, but worse than the type we’ve known. It’s actually called a salted bomb—”

“Meaning the goal is to cause radioactive fallout that would make large areas uninhabitable.” Yeah, he got that part. It was something out of a terrorist handbook.

“Yes, enhanced radiation for a longer period of time.” She walked around. Scanned more notes. “But I agree with you. This has always been considered theoretical, with countries pretending to have the ability and using that as a deterrent. But the general consensus is these bombs aren’t being built.”

He feared the right term was
weren’t.
“But?”

She lifted her head and stared at him with eyes filled with fear. “From the look of this lab, someone seems very serious about trying to get the process going. And this isn’t about just one. These notes reference multiple storage areas, which suggests more than one cobalt bomb.”

“All this hidden in a space near the water in the mountains of Russia.” The place seemed too small and insignificant to play host to that much death and destruction.

She glanced at the small kitchen station and empty coffeepot. “Where is everyone? Why wouldn’t this be guarded and under watch? There’s no way the Russians would risk having this be found.”

Which raised the issue of a third player—not the CIA, not the Russians, possibly not even Niko. It looked like someone was playing games on Russian soil. “All good questions. Now we need to answer them.”

T
HEY SLIPPED
back out of the underground science bunker without any trouble. Cara half expected to pop out into the open to a sea of men holding guns. The in and out proved too easy. That sort of lab should have alarms and specialized tech protections. Having it out there, open and vulnerable, made the entire world vulnerable.

She was about to point out the need for guards when Reid started fiddling with his magical watch. She leaned over and watched him note the coordinates of the hatch. Mapped it out. Not with a huge X but so they could find it again. Then he produced a tiny camera and took a few photos. Those got uploaded to the watch next.

She guessed he was sending all of the information to Tasha. Getting all of the Alliance up to speed and ready to move in.

Good.
Let her bring in her men and knock it all down. “Can we go?”

Reid glanced up at her and his gaze searched her face. Finally, he nodded. “Sure.”

They took off. She almost ran but settled for a near sprint. Well, to her. Reid took it all in his long strides. Didn’t look winded or worried about the pace. She never dreamed she’d be so desperate to get back to that mine, but she didn’t want any part of whatever her science brethren had planned for Russia and the rest of the world.

She still couldn’t grasp the enormity of what they’d found. The pure destructive firepower of a weapon like that. Setting that off would change everything. Forget about evening the playing field. It could level it.

No wonder the CIA had people on the ground and wanted tests done. Bringing in experts with specialized knowledge would have been smarter, but it was possible the CIA didn’t know what it truly was hunting for. The people in power were right to panic. She’d slipped right into get-me-out-of-here mode.

After about five minutes of racing along the bank, Reid touched her arm. “You okay?”

She glanced up to find him staring, the worry obvious on his face. She wanted to comfort him. Wanted him to say something soothing to her. Her brain, the one part of her she counted on to be sensible, was a jumbled mess of need and fear.

She inhaled, trying to think of the next steps. They’d need a Hazmat team and scientists with nuclear training. Engineers. Armed guards.

They could start with the basics now and get to the more complex stuff later, including the intricate international relations issues that went along with all of this. “We need to let Tasha know. That has to be dismantled and the intel destroyed.”

Reid’s expression went blank. “Okay.”

That fast she had a new target for the ball of anger and frustration growing inside her. “I don’t like that tone.”

He held up a hand. She hated when he did that. The gesture looked innocent enough, but underneath it was all bossy and commanding. He just disguised it in a reasonable request.

“Hear me out,” he said in a coaxing tone.

And there it was. She didn’t need to weigh her response or pick her words. “Reid, no.”

“We will handle it, but not yet.”

That was the totally wrong answer. He was a smart guy. From all he said down in the makeshift lab, he understood the importance of this type of finding. This was end-of-the-world stuff. Not the time to be throwing on the brakes and reevaluating options. “Please be kidding.”

“There could be more sites.” When she started to argue about the idea of having the world blanketed in a radioactive cloud, he showed her that hand again. “You know I’m right. You read the notes and said this could be one of many. Dismantling one won’t resolve the bigger issue.”

“Which is?” Reid’s point about possible other sites
stuck in her mind. That was too horrible to think about, but they had to. There had to be a specialized test they could run. She’d look that up later.

“We don’t know what we’re dealing with here or how big it is.”

“Is there something bigger than worldwide annihilation?” She was a scientist, and the horrors playing in her mind dealt with overzealous experiments and losing the line between what they
could
do and what they
should never
do. Those were ethical concerns she dealt with every day. He was about finding and fixing. Today she wanted his usual way. Locate the problem and remove it.

“We don’t know who’s behind this,” he explained. “I can’t stop some unknown ‘they.’ I need to know the scope, how many people. Who is in charge.”

She went with the obvious because spinning this into something else didn’t make sense until she ruled the clear solution out. “Russia.”

“You said yourself the lab setup didn’t make sense.” He glanced around and up the side of the hill. “There are armed guards walking around this area. Why aren’t there any in the lab or along this waterway? Something of this magnitude would be locked away, deep underground and buried under layers of security if the Russian government sanctioned it.”

The arguments all made sense. She mentally clicked a box and moved to the next possibility. “You think this is some rogue player.”

“Yes. Likely someone the special forces guys here are trying to find before the CIA or anyone else does.”

She hated this part of the job. She knew when she signed up for the expedition she’d be playing with people who preferred mind games and mass destruction to science. She’d convinced herself she’d survived danger before and this was really about getting the necessary intel. Her job would be easy. It sure as hell hadn’t turned out that way.

That would teach her to seek adventure. She’d been trying so hard for so long not to be the good little girl who enjoyed paintings and her piano that she might have flipped too far to the other side. If she was honest with herself, she’d been taking bigger and bigger risks ever since the kidnapping. Since losing Reid.

She did not want to examine the psychological reasons behind that. She had enough to deal with right now, including the very real possibility she might have been hired by a sociopath. It was a cover, but still.

“Niko. You think the foundation is really a front for . . . what?” The man had a history with Russia, but this made him out as some sort of undercover spy.

“Moving weapons. Selling them. I wish I knew.” Reid shrugged. “But he has the money and connections on the ground here.”

When his voice trailed off Cara knew some other thought was bouncing around in his head. “What?”

“It’s just that Russian special forces is all over this.
It’s as if they’re trying to find what we just found.” He walked a few steps up the riverbank. “If they suspect Niko at all, think his expedition is behind the bomb, then why let you guys in the country? Niko is in Russia. Why not bring him in for questioning?”

“Niko is here?”

“Did I forget to mention that?”

Another example of his inability to share, but she decided not to point that out. Not now.

“That leads us back to someone else. A third party.” She did not find any comfort in having yet another person running around collecting dangerous materials. Then there was the idea that any member of her expedition could be working against them. Not just against the reason for the documentary, but in opposition to the CIA and to Reid’s Alliance.

“Or Niko, and he’s really damn good at pulling this off.”

She was about to tell Reid that he needed to pick a theory and stick with it when she heard a steady thumping. They were a good distance away from the hatch now and making their way back up the hill. This sound came from above them.

She glanced at Reid. “What’s that?”

He was already moving. He had his gun out and was pushing her toward the ground. In an instant he stiffened and clicked into action. Morphed into the lethal protector. Even his expression changed. “Down.”

They both hit the dirt on their stomachs. The footsteps grew louder and she picked up the sound of gasping breaths. There was a grunt and then a body flew over the side of the hill boots first. A male body, long and wiry, launched up and into the valley. Hit the dirt and rolled.

He threw his arms to the side to stop his slide. Pebbles rained down and the rough skid filled the air with thuds and strings of whispered profanity. Being dressed in head-to-toe black with all his skin covered helped slow and then bring him to a halt. It also made him look like one of the special forces guys, only without the gun and protective helmet.

But there was something. A memory tickled in the back of her mind. The look . . . that voice. She shook her head because it didn’t make sense. She was about to tell Reid she’d officially lost it when he started scrambling.

On his hands and knees, Reid hurried to the guy, flipped him over, and froze. “What the fuck?”

Blond hair and in his late thirties. Even with the cuts on his face and black eye, Cara recognized him. “Simon?”

His eyes popped open. He continued to inhale deep breaths but his gaze roamed over the landscape before settling on Reid. “Who are you?”

Reid didn’t lower his gun. It pointed right at Simon’s head. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

He was. Cara would have sworn to it. She remembered his lifeless body on the floor near Cliff back in the abandoned work camp. She shimmied her way over to the men. Confusion numbed her whole body. She couldn’t get her muscles to work or her brain cells to fire.

She lifted a hand, almost touched Simon, then snatched it back. “You were on the ground. Covered in blood.”

The vision still played in her head. All that loss. She’d been lucky and now she knew why. Cliff had gotten her out of there. But the others? She thought they’d lost Simon even though his body hadn’t been found.

“Cara?” Simon tried to sit up.

Reid pressed a hand against his chest and flattened him against the ground again. “Stay right there.”

Anger flashed across Simon’s face then disappeared. He turned to Cara and the sad pleading returned to his voice. “You disappeared back at the tents.”

“I was dragged away.” For some reason it felt right not to tag Cliff as her hero. Not now, not to Simon. She should be happy to be alive and grateful—and she was—but none of this made sense to her. Until it did, she wasn’t offering any extra information. Not saying anything that anyone could later twist around.

Reid tapped Simon’s arm with the side of the gun. “How did you get out of the work camp?”

“The what?” Simon scooted on the ground, clearly trying to get away from the gun. “Listen, I was grabbed
by men with weapons that night when they attacked the tents. They took me with them and kept moving locations. They questioned me about some lab.”

“And?” Reid asked in a sharp tone.

Simon’s mouth dropped open. “What?”

“Why aren’t you with them now?” Reid emphasized each word.

Cara knew from experience his patience was running low. She couldn’t blame him. Simon stammered and balked. All fair for a guy running from armed men. It made sense . . . but for some reason it didn’t.

“They killed Brad in front of me.” Simon turned to her again. Shot her an intense terrified look with those dark eyes. “He started talking about cobalt and a cave and they went to work on him and I got away. I’ve been running ever since.”

The information made sense. The special forces guys were looking for the hatch, just as Reid thought. They found Simon and Brad and those two bore the brunt of the examination. Not that Simon looked tortured. He didn’t. Even the matted blood in his hair back at the prison camp was gone. It was as if he’d been washed up and sent out again.

For some reason she could not get around those facts. She wore half-clean clothes only because she’d made it back to the expedition’s compound and grabbed a bag. Without that she’d have been running around in blood-soaked ripped shreds.

She glanced at Reid then back to Simon. “Where did you get the change of clothes?”

For a second his victim mask crumbled. His eyes narrowed and a red flush stained his cheeks. “What is with all these questions? We need to get out of here before they come for—”

“Shut up.” Reid put a hand around Simon’s neck. “If you say one word I’ll shoot you.”

“Who are you?” Simon whispered the question.

Cara thought it was the wrong one. “Just listen to him.”

She’d been following Reid. He was the only reason she was alive. Despite the jumping in her stomach and strings of panic that kept filling her brain, she trusted him. He would get them out of here . . . somehow.

She motioned for Simon to stay down and hunkered down next to him. She held her gun in her pocket, careful not to show him she was armed. If Simon made a stupid move, she’d be ready.

A vehicle rumbled to a stop above them. She suspected it was too much to hope they wouldn’t come to the ridge a second time. There were no voices. No yelling of directions or moving around.

This was a hunt, and somewhere along the line she’d become one of the prey. The stalking, preparing to launch from above. She could see it all play out in her mind and waited for the attack to start.

She glanced over and watched Reid type something
into his watch. One of these days she’d take the thing and examine it, figure out what it could do. She just hoped she’d get the chance.

Simon turned over onto his stomach and lay next to her. He looked like he wanted to say something. She shook her head to get him to stop.

The silence dragged on. No one moved. It was as if one side waited for the other to fire. Little did they know that Reid could wait forever. He’d sit, half crouched, for hours if that’s what he had to do. Gun up, ready to fire.

A bang rang out above her head. She swore she could hear the bullet whiz by. She heard a ping then a splash. Still, Reid waited. He’d inched up higher and she wasn’t even sure how or when. He now waited above them, more than halfway up the steep sloping side.

When a head peeked over the hill, Reid jumped up and lunged. Grabbed the attacker’s pants and yanked. Dragged him right into the valley and sent him tumbling. Then he stood up and fired. Two shots and the world went silent again.

The whole thing happened in a few seconds. Each moment spooled in slow motion, but she knew it zoomed by her. Her mind went to the first man who’d come down, and she spun around, ready to fire at anything that moved at the bottom of the hill. Seeing his body and the way he landed, the odd angle of his neck and one leg, she knew she didn’t have to.