The Winning Element (28 page)
Beaker nodded, and, signaling for us to stay, TL and David took off into the woods.
I felt bad for Nalani having to be my babysitter. I knew she’d probably prefer to be down in the action. “Sorry you have to stay here with me,” I mumbled.
Nalani shook her head. “It’s not like that.” She pointed out different men on the screen. “Those are all known terrorists. We’re raking in quite the bundle on this bust.”
Taking my eyes off the screen, I studied the side of her face for a few seconds. “I know about you and TL.” He would kill me for saying that.
She glanced over at me with a sad smile. “I know.”
Why are you two so distant? I wanted to ask. “Is everything okay?” I questioned instead. “I saw you crying . . .”
Nalani switched her attention to my laptop screen, drawing mine as well. More chemicals had been sold and moved to the chem lab. But no bombs yet. As I watched, Eduardo carried a flask of green liquid to a table.
“Our life is . . . unusual. We, um . . .” she hesitated, like she was trying to decide how much to tell me. “We knew each other when we were kids. We spent time in the same foster home.”
Nodding to the screen, she put her finger over her lips, signaling no more talking. I focused in on the laptop as the buyers moved into the lab portion of the warehouse.
Eduardo distributed safety gear, and, as the men suited up, he went to the front of the lab. The men began pouring chemicals, mixing, firing up burners. White smoke trailed upward as one guy poured his solution into a small metal container. He connected a wire and a small timer box.
“That’s what we needed,” Nalani said. She pulled her collar up and whispered into an attached mike, “Move in.”
Turning from the laptop, I focused down the hill at the warehouse.
A patrolman silently dropped to the ground.
I blinked. What the . . . ?
One of our guys pulled him under a SUV to hide him. Wow, I didn’t even see him there.
On the other side of the warehouse, another patrolman quietly dropped, and an agent slid him behind a huge palmetto.
I scanned the area, searching for more agents, unable to locate them.
One by one patrolmen dropped, and our guys slid them from view. I didn’t ask if the bad guys were dead or alive. I didn’t want to know. They may have been highly trained, but turning bad apparently had taken away their skills.
With all ten patrolmen disabled, the place sat very still. I saw nothing. I heard nothing. No good guys, no bad guys. Just cars, the warehouse, darkness, and an occasional frog croak.
I’d never actually watched a takedown of this magnitude before. We’d discussed it once in one of our PTs. But seeing it live . . . well, it was just plain impressive. These agents were amazing.
On cue, everything happened at once. Piles of sand lifted and agents crawled from beneath them. Palmetto branches stirred and other agents slinked out. Shadowed figures materialized from the darkness, hidden only by the night. A tree rustled to my right, and I jumped as someone emerged.
I glanced at Beaker. Her wide-eyed expression mirrored my thoughts exactly.
Wow.
Some of the agents wore black, others green, and others tan. A few had palm fronds sticking to their clothes. They all wore hoods to hide their faces.
No wonder I hadn’t seen any of them.
Stealthily, they crept through the night, weaving around the parked cars until they surrounded the warehouse. Six agents shinnied up the aluminum sides all the way to the roof. How they shinnied, I couldn’t tell. I saw no ropes or wires. It reminded me of the Rissala mission and how Wirenut had effortlessly Spider-manned it up the side of a castle with air-lock suction cups.
In the moonlight, I saw the agents make hand signals to one another, from the ones on the roof to those on the ground. Quick flashes of gloved fingers, brushing their shoulders, their faces. Like the signals TL used with us.
An agent on the roof threw back a hatch at the same time the agents on the ground crashed through the front door and busted down the back. Light poured out as our guys rushed in.
Gunshots popped.
I flinched.
Screams.
More shots.
Shouting.
My heart lurched. Where was David? TL? Mr. Share? Adam and Curtis and the rest of Team One?
Nalani grabbed the back of my jumpsuit. I looked over at her. Her whole face tightened, and she nodded once, silently telling me to hang in there.
Me? What about her? She had to be scared to death for TL.
I moved my gaze back to the warehouse.
A man in a lab coat bolted out the back door. An agent followed, tackling him to the ground. He planted his knee in the man’s back and cinched his hands to his ankles.
More gunshots went off.
My whole body tensed. Had David gone in with everyone else? With their hoods and camouflaged outfits, everyone looked the same. What had David been wearing? My mind raced to remember. Black. He’d been dressed in all black.
Screams and more shots sounded.
God, what’s going on? I can’t stand this.
I covered my ears with my hands and squeezed my eyes shut. I couldn’t look anymore. I couldn’t listen anymore. My heartbeat thundered in my ears. My breath rasped.
My parents had died this way. Violently. Gunshots exploding. That horrible sound was the last thing they’d ever heard.
Suddenly, the place fell completely and utterly silent.
Slowly, I opened my eyes and slid my hands down my face.
Nalani let go of my jumpsuit. “All clear.” She signaled Beaker and Ms. Gabrier. “Let’s do it.”
Beaker grabbed her small suitcase, we pulled our knit caps over our faces, and we left the trees to jog down the sandy hill. My heart thumped in my chest in slow, deep surges. We were about to defuse bombs.
Disheveled people stumbled from the warehouse, men dressed in safety gear and the slinky dressed women, all with their hands secured behind their backs. Blood trickled down their faces, their arms, their legs. Most of the women were crying. The men all looked really pissed off.
Agents shouted orders at them, pointing, kneeling them in the sand. With all the gunshots, I could only imagine what the scene was inside the warehouse.
I followed Beaker and Ms. Gabrier through the back door and caught a quick glimpse of blood and bodies. Someone moaned. My gaze flicked to the person making the painful sound. Dressed in a dark suit, a man gripped his bloody stomach as he sluggishly rolled over. Somewhat hypnotized, I watched him, my mind whirling back years ago to the plane crash. To the bodies that had floated past me . . . My vision blurred as I turned a slow circle, trying to recall what I was supposed to be doing.
Nalani steered me toward the chem lab. “Don’t look. Focus on the objective.”
I blinked my eyes a few times and swallowed, refocusing.
We wound through stacked wooden crates and pushed through heavy hanging plastic into the lab where Adam and Curtis were already waiting.
“Nobody touch anything,” Beaker ordered.
Quickly, yet with the most intense focus I’d ever seen, she began walking around studying the flasks of liquids, bowls of powders, piles of clay, copper wire, magnets, tubes of thick substances, boiling flasks, dishes of crystals. In her chemistry notebook, she jotted down the measurements off scales, weird-looking meters, timers, scopes, syringes, burners, bottles.
Ms. Gabrier gave each of us a heavy lab coat, goggles, and the scenario papers Beaker had drawn up. I swallowed a gurgle of hysteria as I realized a lab coat and goggles would do nothing to protect from a bomb exploding.
Hurry!
I wanted to yell at Beaker, but I knew the necessity of intense concentration when everything was on the line. I slipped my black hood off and donned the safety gear.
I wanted to yell at Beaker, but I knew the necessity of intense concentration when everything was on the line. I slipped my black hood off and donned the safety gear.
Beaker cycled back around the room. She pointed to two silver canisters with blue liquid flowing in a glass tube between them. “Curtis. Scenario two hundred and three. You have five minutes.”
I blinked. She’d memorized the scenarios? All four hundred and eleven? Oh my God.
Curtis hurried over, flipping through his pages, locating his scenario. Quickly, he silently read it. “What’s leum acid?”
“It’s that black liquid in the syringe,” she answered without glancing up. “It’s next to the silver canister.”
With a nod he slipped on gloves and carefully took the syringe. I focused back on Beaker.
“Nalani, this one’s yours.” Beaker indicated a bowl filled with what looked like grape Jell-O. A small copper wire very simply, almost innocently, stuck out the top. “Scenario sixty-eight. Do
not
touch the bowl.”
not
touch the bowl.”
Locating her scenario, Nalani crossed the room. I watched as she picked up tongs, and then I refocused on Beaker. Pick me next, I silently implored. I wanted to get this over with.
Beaker stopped at a flask of boiling pink liquid with yellow smoke puffing up. She inserted a skinny piece of pink paper, brought it out, and studied the end. It turned white. “Adam. Scenario one hundred and twenty-seven.”
She moved on as Adam made his way around the table Nalani stood at, reading his scenario as he walked. He stopped, scanned the lab, then went across to where Curtis worked and slid an unused thermometer from the table.
Nervously, I focused in on Curtis and watched as he gingerly unscrewed one of the silver canisters. I glanced back to Beaker. Pick me next, I silently pleaded. My stress was about to explode my brain cells.
She indicated a station with a two-foot-tall silver pot. “Ms. Gabrier. This’ll detonate in exactly two minutes.”
Two minutes?!
“Scenario four hundred and one,” Beaker calmly instructed.
How could she be so calm? And for that matter, how could everybody else? I scanned the room taking in my team’s focused, patient movements. I didn’t understand. My heart was about to leap from my chest.
"GiGi.”
I snapped my attention to Beaker.
She stuck her finger in a gold powder and touched it to her tongue. She waited for a few seconds with her tongue out, the spit on the floor. “Scenario five.”
I raced over, my eyes dropping to scenario five. It read vinyl alcohol, odatedrogen, and silver nitrate. Silver nitrate was the only name I recognized. It said to grate metal naph across the top and then stir slowly counterclockwise for ten seconds. My heart gave a relieved beat. Sounded simple enough. Wait a minute, grate? How much. A light scattering or a thick covering? “It doesn’t say how much to grate.”
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