Blind Eye (27 page)

Connecticut

“W
hy would they have guns? They're medical personnel.”

She blinked. Her fingers started moving again. The pencil was beneath her fingers. He put it back in her fist, and she began to write again.

“Saw?”

She blinked.

“You saw a gun?”

She gave him a long blink and dropped the pencil again.

They had moved her. She had a different view. She thought they were bad. He remembered the pact he'd made with himself to not question her. Sid immediately searched in his case and grabbed his cell phone. She'd been trying to tell him that something was wrong shortly after the two men had walked into the room. He called 911. It took a couple of minutes of rapid explanations before the dispatcher understood the nature of the urgency and agreed to connect him to the police cruiser that was following their ambulance. It seemed to take forever before the officer came on the line.

Sid introduced himself before getting right into it, telling them about what Amelia saw.

“Okay,” the officer said. “We'll call for support and stay behind you. As soon as the traffic starts moving freely, we'll have the ambulance pull over.”

“What do you mean, when the traffic starts moving?” Sid asked. The ambulance was flying along the highway.

“Just what I said. There's a construction slowdown ahead. So when the traffic opens up—”

“Where are you?”

Pause. “On I-84. The traffic is backed up before the I-691 exit. It shouldn't be too long.”

“Well, we're moving. We're not sitting in any traffic jam. Can you see the ambulance?”

“We're right behind it. You're crawling. We don't consider that moving.”

The ambulance made another sharp turn. They were off the highway. Sid realized that they'd been off the highway for some time.

“That's not us,” Sid told him. “Check for yourself. Look, I just found out that these people are armed. I believe they're trying to kidnap her. Remember what they tried to do last night.”

“Where are you?”

“I can't tell. They covered the window to the driver's seat.”

The vehicle made another sharp turn, this time to the right. From the sudden rough surface, Sid could tell they had just turned onto an unpaved road.

“We're on some kind of back road. Gravel, I think,” he said, guessing from the sound of the tires crunching beneath the vehicle. “Listen, I have to get ready for them if they stop.”

“Keep your cell phone on. We'll trace it.”

Sid left the phone open and dropped it in his bag. He looked around him for something that he could use as a weapon. His options were limited.

He felt like an idiot for not asking more questions. No one had. Even the cops had assumed these two were legit. And how difficult was it to steal an ambulance? These killers were smart enough to plan out everything last night. How they had got clear of the escort, he had no idea.

The ending would be no surprise. Sid didn't have to wait until the ambulance stopped to know what they were going to do with them. He moved to the back door and tested the handle. It turned. He remembered one of the police officers had been the one to shut the door.

He couldn't jump out of a moving ambulance with Amelia. She could be seriously hurt. Also, the drivers would know as soon as he tried.

Sid felt the adrenaline rushing through him. They could stop anytime. And then it would be too late.

He looked at what he had available. His brain was racing. He looked at Amelia. She was watching him steadily.

“Don't worry. We'll get out of this,” he said with as much conviction as he could muster.

She blinked.

Beyond her, strapped to the side wall of the ambulance, two pressurized oxygen bottles caught his eye.

“Oxygen,” he whispered to Amelia. “All I need is a match.”

Nuclear Fusion Test Facility

S
taring at the watch gave Marion something to occupy her mind, but it also got her thinking again of what would happen to the region when she was gone. It was a countdown to the end.

The space beneath the elevator was cramped and growing increasingly stuffy. Moving slowly, she could shift from side to side, but she had to be careful not to come too close to the electrical wires. She also wanted to stay out of the light that edged the bottom of the elevator. Her face was inches away from the steel-framed bottom. Listening to every noise, she'd thought that at any minute they'd discover her whereabouts.

She was feeling more and more claustrophobic as the minutes ticked by. She had to take her mind off the tomblike confines. She had to stop thinking about whether there was enough air and worrying what would happen if she had to sneeze or cough.

Pulling the watch from her pocket and staring at the changing digits had given Marion that other horror to think about. The time on the watch was all any of them had left.

The searchers spoke to the man in the elevator above
her every ten or fifteen minutes. They were moving from room to room, carefully going through storage spaces and closets, checking under the beds, and searching above the drop panel ceilings. Opening ventilation ducts.

She stared at the watch face.

Thirteen hours, twenty-five minutes before the first sample leaked.

The man watching the elevator crouched down. He stood. At some point she heard him relieving himself in that same hallway where they had killed two of her colleagues. These men are scum, Marion thought.

Time dragged on.

He was again standing in the elevator door when his radio again beeped. One of the searchers, she heard, was changing into protective clothing and going inside the test lab.

They obviously knew enough that elevated levels of radiation were present inside the lab. Once inside, Marion wondered if they would recognize that there had been a test in progress that needed to be stopped. She doubted it.

She waited, thinking as the time ticked by slowly that perhaps they did know about the test samples and the impending disaster. Perhaps they had come down to find her…but also to secure the radioactive samples.

Eleven hours, seventeen minutes, fifty-seven seconds…fifty-six…fifty-five.

The voice on the radio. No, she had been right in the first place. They had no clue. They were out of the test lab, and approaching the elevator.

And Marion couldn't think of a single place that they hadn't checked.

Connecticut

T
his was no time for second-guessing. No thinking about the fact that he'd been trained to help people and not to hurt them.

Sid checked again to make sure he was ready. He glanced at Amelia, tucked against the back door, the mattress from the gurney wedging her in.

“All set?” he whispered.

Blink.

“I'm going to put the blanket over your face now. Like I said, the glass could go everywhere.”

Blink.

Sid gently turned Amelia's face to the door and covered her head, using a box of bandages to create an air passage for her to breathe.

This was it. He'd have only one shot at this.

Standing up and bracing his feet as well as he could, Sid opened the valve on the oxygen bottle, busted the regulator and smashed the head of the tank through the glass separator into the driver's section of the ambulance.

“What the…?” one of the men shouted.

Sid could hear the fast-escaping oxygen and saw the man grabbing the bottle and feeling for the valve.

The driver slammed on the brakes. Throwing Sid up against the divider.

He wasn't going to give them a chance to get out. Straightening up, he lit a match, set fire to the entire book of matches and tossed it through the window at the oxygen tank. He barely had time to duck.

The entire driver's section immediately lit up like a torch, flames shooting into the rear of the ambulance through the window, as well. The two men in the front were screaming.

Ignoring their cries, Sid moved quickly toward Amelia. The sudden stop caused her to slide forward, twisting her on the floor beneath the gurney. He pulled the blanket from her face, and she looked up at him.

Sid shoved the back doors open and leaped over her onto a dirt road. Pulling her toward him, he hoisted her, still wrapped in a blanket, over his shoulder.

They were on a wooded road. He had no idea where. It looked like a fire road. There was no sign of any houses. Just woods on either side. He didn't hesitate or look back. Moving off the road, he ran straight down a slight incline into the woods. He wanted to get as far away from the burning vehicle as possible.

There was no saying that the two might not get out of the burning ambulance. He didn't want to stick around. Also, the odds were that these two had others waiting to meet them. They could be just around the next bend.

Sid was breathing heavily, tiring quickly. Low-hanging branches scratched at them, and he tried to protect Amelia as much as he could by pushing through the thick brush with his free hand. One of her arms had
worked free of the blanket, and it was dangling by his butt. No sound came from her.

He didn't know how far they'd traveled when he heard the explosion. A second blast followed immediately after the first.

For the first time, he turned around. Not too far in the distance, he could see smoke rising above the trees.

Sid turned and looked in every direction. There were no buildings that he could see, no paths through the woods. He had no idea what part of the state they were even in. From Waterbury, the highways ran in every direction. His only guide now was the smoke and burning ambulance. He turned his back to it and started again through the woods.

Draped over his shoulder, Amelia had still made no sound. He tried to twist around to get a view of her face. She weighed practically nothing.

“Are you okay, Amelia?” he asked, wondering if he should put her down to at least check on her.

He was relieved when she tapped his hip. She was giving him a sign.

Sid stopped, reached around and held her hand for a moment.

“We're okay,” he said. “We're going to be okay.”

But they were still not far enough away from the ambulance, and Sid knew it. They were still not far enough away from the people who wanted to kill her.

Taking a deep breath, he plunged deeper into the woods.

Nuclear Fusion Test Facility

T
en hours, twenty-seven minutes.

When the searchers all converged at the elevator, Marion learned two things. First, the killers decided that she had made her way into the Test Drift sector of the underground labyrinth. Second, their group was larger than the three men who'd come down to search the facility. The search party had communicated via phone to the security office in the building above. Whoever was up there had told them that the small building sitting atop the elevator shaft leading up from the far end of the WIPP storage facility was being watched. So far, there had been no sign of her.

Terror raced through Marion as she thought about how they would gain access to the Test Drift tunnels. Based on the plans she'd seen, there should have been two doors in the elevator, one to the research lab and the other to Test Drift. But the killers knew that the elevator wouldn't have been available to her. If they decided to follow her steps, then they'd send the elevator up, pry open the doors, climb down the shaft, and climb through into Test Drift.

Except they wouldn't have to go any farther than looking into the shaft. She didn't want to think of that.

An argument had broken out right above her about the safety of going through the Test Drift tunnel. They seemed to know that the subterranean storage facility was operated robotically…and for a reason.

Finally, one of them used the closed-circuit phone in the elevator to communicate with others on the surface. After making the call, they waited for instructions. She could see them through the small hole. One liked to pace, another was impatient to get out of here. The third one, who'd stood guard for the entire time down here, crouched quietly in the door. He said very little, but there was a coldness in the low tenor of his voice that sent chills through her.

Panic once again threatened to overwhelm her mind. The temperature of the air in the confined space had risen. She was sweating. She could feel something crawl on her scalp. She rolled her head from side to side and flinched at the pain shooting through the back of her head. The crawling sensation stopped, but only for a second before starting again.

Marion closed her eyes. She felt as if every inch of her body was hurting. She was exhausted, hungry, thirsty. She wanted to go to sleep and wake up to find this was all a dream. That didn't seem to be a possibility.

Then, Amelia was in her thoughts. Her sister was frightened. Marion wondered if it was her own fear or her twin's she felt. She had to be calm for both of them.

Her eyes opened. She lifted the watch closer to her face.

Nine hours. Thirty-nine minutes. Forty-two seconds. Forty-one. Forty.

The phone in the elevator rang. The man who paced picked it up and listened. “Got it.”

Marion heard the other killer approach.

“We go up,” the man who'd answered told them. “We're to go up and get the special protective uniforms we need for that side. And dosimeters. And we have to pick up the key that opens the elevator door into the other facility. There are also other keys for doors farther on. We need them.”

“She'd have had those keys?”

“She could have. Eaton had a set down here. Let's go.”

A surge ran through her. Marion knew exactly what she would do. There was power in the facility. As soon as the elevator went up, she would climb back into the lab. The computers would be back on. She could contact someone, anyone, via the Internet. They wouldn't search the research lab again. They'd go into the Test Drift.

She could contact the outside world for help and then get inside the lab and start the cementation steps.

Nine hours, eighteen minutes. She'd need every minute to secure the test samples.