Encrypted: An Action-Packed Techno-Thriller Read online

  “You are sure that you knocked out the satellite coverage for our entire area?” Ronnie asked.

  The young man kept typing. “Even the Chinese.”

  “Crap,” Ronnie said, hitting her palm against the bulkhead.

  “That’s good, isn’t it?” Zach asked, wincing as fire shot along a broken rib.

  Neither Quirk nor Ronnie looked in his direction. Instead, their eyes met over the monitors. Their years of working together were so very apparent. They’d clearly reached some mutual decision.

  Ronnie frowned, but Quirk was all smiles.

  “That can only mean one thing,” Quirk stated, and then turned that flirtatious smile in Zach’s direction. “We’re going to need you to strip.”

  Zach’s eyes shot a look at Ronnie. Her assistant was joking, right? From the sympathetic look on her face, Quirk wasn’t. Ronnie knelt beside Zach, placing her hand on his knee.

  “If they are staying this clear, then they must have planted a tracking device on you.”

  Damn it! Of course, Grant had planted something on him. That’s what Zach would have done if the roles had been reversed. Zach would have thought of it if his head weren’t threatening to split in two. He tugged his turtleneck up, but couldn’t quite get it over his head. It didn’t exactly help that Quirk was licking his lips.

  “Turn around,” Ronnie instructed her assistant.

  “But—”

  Ronnie gave Quirk a look that could have—seriously—lifted paint off the wall. Zach had always imagined what Ronnie looked like when silence filled their phone conversations. She didn’t disappoint. Too bad he was in hypovolemic shock.

  Quirk huffed, grabbed a laptop, and turned to the pilot.

  “You have other clothes for me, I assume?” Zach asked.

  Ronnie looked at Quirk, who glanced over his shoulder, more than a little contrite. Ronnie cocked her head to the side, ready to scold her assistant.

  * * *

  “What?” Quirk demanded. “I was already 3 percent over budget.” Ronnie tried to get a word in edgewise, but Quirk overrode her. “You are the one who said no more spending, period!”

  Oh, try and just to squirm out of that one, little missy. Quirk knew that Ronnie wanted to look all in-charge for her lover boy, but Quirk wasn’t taking the fall for this one.

  “Quite the well-prepared jailbreak,” Mr. Hunk-o-Matic said, and then gritted his teeth in pain. Was it wrong that Quirk found him even more appetizing when his eyes squinted just so?

  “It’s our first,” Ronnie said to Zach, seeming to accept the fact that Quirk had won their last little exchange until she turned to him. “Give Zach your pants.”

  “No!” he protested in horror.

  “Quirk!”

  “I can’t,” he said, a bit sheepish. “I’m going commando,” he admitted.

  Of all the days…

  Seriously, what did Ronnie expect after giving him only three hours to plan, prepare, and execute the most kick-ass rescue in the history of mankind? Some small details may have slipped past. Like underwear.

  “Um,” Zach said with a frown. “Can’t I at least keep my own briefs?”

  “No!” both Quirk and Ronnie answered. At least they were on the same page about some things.

  Ronnie turned to the very confused-looking FBI agent. “The CIA has been experimenting with fiber-thin passive wire elements that can be activated from up to three miles away. We can’t take the risk with any item that they had access to while you were detained.”

  “So if anyone is going commando…” Quirk commented. Of course, Ronnie gave him her finely honed “if looks could kill I’d be serving life imprisonment” look. Quirk was about to preemptively respond when a pair of brown camo pants landed on his head.

  Snatching them away from his face, Quirk turned to find the pilot in nothing but his nice, tight, form-fitting long johns.

  “My, my,” Quirk said, smiling. “This day is looking up.”

  * * *

  Amanda maxed out the additional bandwidth Jennifer had gotten to broaden her search. How her assistant scrounged around for access to the CIA’s Web search monitoring software so quickly, Amanda didn’t know—and quite frankly, didn’t want to know. They could be convicted of espionage later. Because they certainly couldn’t ask for help from their CIA liaison, could they?

  She glanced over at Devlin, who didn’t even bother pretending to work. If the CIA liaison wasn’t using the bandwidth, why shouldn’t they borrow it?

  Rapidly, she sorted through the searches for “Black Death,” and “Bubonic plague.” The numbers were staggering. In the hundreds of millions. Really, those were not the ones that she needed. Those represented people infected or worried about infection. Those were definitely not the Hidden Hand.

  No, she honed in on keyword searches, such as “spread of the plague,” and “real-time death count,” words that would be more consistent with an organization monitoring the spread of their weapon. She also looked up “survivor stories,” and “instances of resistance.” The Hidden Hand would be very interested in such information. And with the plague raging throughout the country, those who did not have any form of natural immunity would be identified much faster than the regular Black Death cycle.

  Jennifer nudged Amanda.

  She looked up as her assistant indicated the infirmary around them—crammed with beds and patients. In fact, there were so many that the newer victims were being set up in the cafeteria. In the end, Amanda had no doubt that every single one of the seventy-nine inhabitants of Plum Island would end up on an IV drip.

  Amanda cocked an eyebrow to her assistant as Jennifer nodded toward the back of the room. The one where the first patients had been admitted.

  The beds were filled with scientists and guards. Exactly what one would suspect, given that this was Plum Island, after all. Wait. There wasn’t just one guard down here, but all of the guards. And they were the sickest. One was even on oxygen already. His bubonic plague had become pneumonic plague—the most deadly of the plague strains.

  “They infected the guards first.”

  Jennifer nodded solemnly.

  Getting the guards sick first certainly did not seem accidental.

  “Special Bulletin” blared from the television just before Anderson Cooper came back on.

  “The governors of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut have agreed that hospitals within the entire tristate area are now at maximum capacity, and all three states have adopted the ‘Antibiotic Home Delivery’ system.” Anderson pierced the camera with those eyes of his. “Please, listen. Medical personnel urge you to stay home if you are not infected yet, and to please place a red ‘X’ on your door if you are. Medics will begin delivering antibiotics within the hour. Please do not panic. Help is on the way.”

  But help wasn’t on the way. Not really. Even with the most sophisticated of intravenous antibiotics combinations, Jennifer was no better. And Amanda could feel her own lymph nodes swelling and her fingertips tingling as the plague clogged her capillaries.

  And now, knowing that the guards had been incapacitated? The Hidden Hand not only wished to eliminate any threat to finding a cure for the plague—they clearly were planning on taking over Plum Island at some point.

  Jennifer slammed her laptop cover closed and motioned for the nurse to come over.

  “What are you doing?” Amanda asked.

  Her assistant’s only response was to slam Amanda’s laptop cover closed as well. When the nurse walked over, Jennifer tugged at her IV line.

  “Don’t,” the nurse said. “You could yank it out.”

  With the fierce look in Jennifer’s eyes, that was exactly what her assistant wanted to happen. To get unhooked from the IV so they could go back upstairs and get to work at full throttle.

  Amanda turned to the nurse. “Cap us off.”

  “These medications are vital to your—”

  “I’m lead on the bubonic plague,” Amanda explained. “Don’t mak
e me contradict you.” She indicated the other patients. Amanda lowered her voice. “We’re just rearranging chairs on the Titanic.”

  The nurse knew that “the treatments” were simply to make them more comfortable until…well…until the end. Finally, the nurse sighed, and began the process of untethering them.

  Amanda grinned at Jennifer. They were getting back to work, all right.

  CHAPTER 15

  Nearby, somewhere over Mexico

  10:19 a.m., MST

  Grant hated helicopters. They were noisy, dirty, and usually smelled like ass. And this charming piece of scrap metal the Mexican army called a helicopter? Let’s just say that in comparison, the bar last night had a Parisian bouquet.

  But the ends would justify the means. They had better.

  He had not spent a year of his life wearing cheap suits and pretending to care about law enforcement without an impeccable exit strategy. If he didn’t get back into his Armani suit soon, he feared that his skin would simply slough off.

  Oh, and when he delivered the Robin Hood hacker to his superiors? And helped stop the single largest threat to national security since the Civil War? Um, yeah, he’d get his Armani suit back, and so much more.

  “Well?” he demanded of the mustached pilot. Grant would never understand Latinos’ fascination with bushy facial hair.

  “We have a lock,” the man replied in a thick accent.

  Grant looked at the digital screen that had hastily been mounted onto the rusting dashboard. Zach’s chopper was tracking northwest, just as he had guessed. Soon, this damned assignment would be over.

  Good thing, because Grant had his tailor on standby.

  * * *

  Ronnie glanced away as Zach finished dressing. Not that she didn’t want to look. Um, even bruised, those abs were to die for, but they reminded her of the beating he took. For her. Had it tainted his feelings?

  Since meeting on that dusty road outside the CIA safe house things had been well, strained. Granted, Zach was badly injured, and they were fleeing for their lives on a helicopter, but still. The butterflies just wouldn’t go away. Each time she caught a glimpse of that strong jawline or those eyes, Ronnie felt as though, somehow, she had entered her own surveillance footage. He really couldn’t be here, with her, could he?

  “So the metal blocks the signal?” Zach asked Quirk, as her assistant stuffed the FBI agent’s clothes into an aluminum tube.

  Quirk’s well-manscaped eyebrow shot up. “Hardly. We want it amplified.”

  God, her assistant could be such a queen sometimes. She would have stepped in to spare Zach the drama, but she was having a hard time calibrating the ultrasound machine.

  “But um,” Zach asked tentatively, “Aren’t we just dumping the clothes over the side?”

  “And have them get a quick visual that we outwitted them?” Quirk snorted as he pulled out a model airplane. Okay, Quirk would kill her if she ever used the term “model” for that piece of high-tech awesomeness. It was more like a souped-up fighter jet, only scaled down to be two feet long. “I am way cooler than that.”

  Quirk turned to the pilot. “Speed?”

  “377 kph,” the pilot answered in his usual brusque manner.

  Quirk typed the number into the small jet’s onboard keyboard, but then paused. “377?” Oh, my. That man knows how to handle his stick.”

  “Quirk…” Ronnie warned as she came to Zach’s side. If she had any hope of not chasing the FBI agent away, Quirk was going to have to keep the not-so-subtle innuendos to a minimum.

  Of course, her assistant did not oblige. While checking the tube’s attachment to the plane’s fuselage with one hand, Quirk waved his other hand in the general vicinity of Zach.

  * * *

  “Oh, sure,” Quirk said as he put the finishing touches on his baby. “We can risk our lives to save your squeeze, but I can’t take a moment to—”

  “Quirk!”

  Yes, Ronnie, the truth did hurt. But there was no point in pursuing her unjust behavior, since their chopper was being pursued. By men with guns.

  “All right. Here we go.” He turned to the pilot, who just needed his beard trimmed a bit to really accentuate his jawline. “Ready?”

  “Always,” the pilot grunted.

  Those slightly yellowed-by-cigar teeth and squinting, flint eyes captured Quirk.

  “You did say that we were ready, right?” Ronnie interjected before Quirk got weak in the knees.

  “On my mark,” Quirk announced as the pilot gripped the joystick tightly. “Three…two…one…”

  In unison, almost like great sex, Quirk felt the pilot turn the chopper as Quirk opened the side door and released the decoy plane. It flew straight and true, directly on the path they had been heading. The metal of the chopper vibrated, making Quirk’s teeth chatter as it laid over, gaining speed, taking them nearly 90 degrees away from the plane’s trajectory. The decoy plane carrying Zach’s tracked clothes should throw those CIA goons off their track by miles.

  Once the chopper leveled out and Quirk shut the door, he made a show of dusting off his hands. “I am that good.”

  “Maybe,” Ronnie admitted, “but now, we wait.”

  Yes, waiting. Quirk’s least favorite part.

  * * *

  “Why don’t we have a visual?” Grant demanded. The damned digital readout showed that they should be right on Zach’s ass by now, yet he could see nothing but blue skies all around.

  The pilot just shrugged. Did the man not know that Grant’s career—no, life— depended on the next few minutes? However, the mustached pilot seemed to have little regard for career advancement.

  “There,” the Federale pilot said, pointing ahead.

  Grant had to squint to make out the faintest exhaust trail. “That’s no chopper.”

  Instead, it was a toy plane. A freaking toy plane.

  They must have realized that Zach’s clothes were traceable. He’d have to yell at the techs back home who swore that the thin metal fiber couldn’t be found.

  “Fire on it.”

  The pilot popped the safety off the trigger and locked onto the tiny plane.

  A warning flashed in bright red on the screen. “Better Luck Next Time.”

  The Robin Hood hacker’s tagline.

  “Fire!” Grant yelled, knowing that destroying the plane would in no way get back at Zach and that binary bitch, but he did take a measure of satisfaction as the small plane blew up, scattering Zach’s clothes, and about a hundred thousand dollars in tracking equipment, to the wind.

  Oh, they might have thought that they won the day, but clearly the Robin Hood hacker didn’t realize that Grant had an unlimited budget for this mission.

  Sitting back in the flight seat, Grant gave the order. “Activate the secondary tracking device.”

  The pilot nodded, punching in the code.

  Zach wasn’t getting away. The sanctimonious prick wasn’t going to live another day.

  * * *

  “How long until we land?” Ronnie asked the pilot. If they were on schedule, they should be able to pick up their getaway car and cross back into Texas within the hour.

  Before the pilot could answer, Quirk shouted, “We’ve got two fast-moving bogeys approaching from the east!”

  Ronnie spun on her heel. That couldn’t be. They’d knocked out all eyes in the air and had gotten rid of the tracking device on Zach. But looking down at the radar screen, Quirk was correct. Actually, another two blimps popped up on the readout.

  “I am telling you, they’ve perfected it,” Quirk insisted.

  The FBI agent raised an eyebrow. “Perfected what?”

  Ronnie really didn’t want to believe that it could be true. “They are at least five years away from field-testing it.”

  Quirk shrugged. “Guess we are getting a look into the future, then.”

  Zach leaned forward, guarding his injured ribs. They had shot him full of antibiotics, steroids, and painkillers—sometimes Quirk’s hypochond
ria and encyclopedic knowledge of remedies did come in handy, but pain still etched the FBI agent’s face.

  All for her, and here she couldn’t even save him. Ronnie sat down next to Zach. Gently, she ran her hands over his arms.

  “How long were you unconscious?” Ronnie asked.

  “I wasn’t,” Zach stated, but when Ronnie cocked her head, he cast his eyes down. “No more than a few minutes.” He looked back up. “Did they shoot me up with something?”

  Quirk snorted. “You could say that.”

  Ronnie glared at her assistant. As if they didn’t have enough to worry about. She resented having to be sarcasm patrol as well.

  “They’ve been experimenting with an ultrathin metal fiber that—”

  “I know,” Zach interrupted. “The clothes.”

  “Yes, well, no,” Ronnie said as her hands coursed over his wide shoulders and back. Oh, to be in such close physical contact for some other reason than trying to save their lives. “What I am looking for is even more advanced. The metallic ions are inert until they are hit by a burst of microwaves, and then they realign, transforming that microwave energy into a narrow burst of radio signal.”

  The helicopter jolted, nearly sending Ronnie to the floor. It was only Zach’s strong hands that kept her seated. For a moment he held her there, despite the danger of them both falling over. Their body heat mingled. God, how she wanted to taste those cracked and bruised lips. Zach leaned in. Ronnie leaned in.

  “Um, yeah,” Quirk interjected. Ronnie snapped back and began her gentle probing of Zach’s skin, trying to find the insertion point. “Once that burst of energy is released, the ions revert to their inert, impossible-to-detect state.”

  “Nearly impossible,” Ronnie corrected him. They had to find the thin, metal thread—or they were worse than sitting ducks.