Rage Of The Assassin (20 page)

Her neck snapped like a dry twig and she spasmed beneath him, her appendages twitching from nerve damage. He didn’t pause to think but grabbed her head in both hands and twisted, ending her life with a single swift motion.

His chest heaved from the exertion of the sudden sprint as he stood and stared down at the doctor’s body, and then he headed back up the stairs to begin cleaning away all traces of his presence. With any luck, she wouldn’t be discovered for some time; at least long enough for him to have concluded his business and be thousands of miles away. He glanced at his watch and did a quick calculation – if traffic was light into the city, he could make it to the airport by nightfall and be in Baltimore in time for a late night visit with the next on his list: Dr. Margaret Hunt.

Chapter 34

Baltimore, Maryland

El Rey sat in a rental car, eyeing the underground parking area of the VA Medical Center, where his target was working a night shift. He’d called her office to confirm her whereabouts after breaking into her condo and finding only her eleven-year-old daughter, whom he’d bound and left with two liters of water – potential leverage on her mother, who he suspected might be reluctant to cooperate.

The terrified girl had informed him that her mother was at the hospital, supervising a clinical trial while making her rounds. He had no idea whether working late into the night was a regular occurrence for a physician who also created doomsday potions for military contractors, but regardless, it meant that his original plan – lying in wait for her at the condo – wouldn’t work with his time constraint.

He studied the dossier that a private investigator he’d hired through a cutout had assembled for him. An intelligent woman with light brown hair and piercing blue eyes framed by soft laugh lines stared back at him from a photograph. That was from a lecture she’d given a year earlier regarding a breakthrough thermal approach to attacking malignant cells with a combination of rare metals. Her specialty wasn’t oncology, but one of her employers was pioneering the technology, and she appeared to be on the cutting edge of a promising new approach to cancer treatment.

Margaret Hunt was forty-four years old, widowed after her husband died in a skiing accident a decade earlier, and lived with her daughter, Courtney. One car, a white BMW 428 coupe. She lived relatively modestly in spite of the income from her consulting work, and seemed to be genuinely decent, continuing to see patients and run trials even now that there was no financial reason not to delegate the work to underlings.

He tried to reconcile the description with someone who could create a toxin that would cause such lingering agony in its victims, and couldn’t. But it didn’t matter. What did was that he would soon know whether she’d authored the agent, and if so, what would be involved in obtaining the antidote.

He looked over at the BMW parked across the aisle in a staff slot and compared the license number to the one in the file for the third time. It was her car. He’d already been in the mammoth facility to look around and had verified that the security was laughable, consisting of a few guards who acted as though they were serving life sentences rather than protecting anything. Not once had he been stopped or asked why he was roaming the halls, but that didn’t surprise him – he’d long ago learned that if he maintained a certain bearing, an innate authority to his stride, few would question him, assuming he knew where he was going and thus belonged there.

The assassin hadn’t seen Dr. Hunt, but he’d quickly realized that it would be problematic taking her while she was in the hospital. Knocking her out wouldn’t be an issue – he knew dozens of ways to do so swiftly and silently – but transporting her from the facility would be a risky obstacle. The security might have been a joke, but even the worst guards might want to know where he was going with someone on a gurney.

He’d decided to wait for her to end her shift and return to her vehicle, but was now getting impatient as his muscles twitched reminders of the toxin’s insidious progress. With another glance at her car, he opened his door and got out, intent on hastening her arrival.

“Dr. Hunt?”

“Yes?” Hunt gave the approaching nurse a weary smile.

“We got a call from the parking garage. There’s something wrong with your car.”

Hunt’s brow furrowed. “Wrong? What does that mean, wrong?”

“I don’t know. The attendant just said that your alarm was going off.”

Hunt made a notation on her clipboard and nodded. “Damn. Isn’t that always how it goes? Just when you’re making progress…”

“What do you want to do?”

Hunt sighed. “I think I better see what the fuss is about. Somebody might have hit it. Tell Sydney what happened and that I’ll be back shortly.” Dr. Sydney Grundwald was the director of clinical trials Hunt was partnering with.

“Will do, Dr. Hunt,” the nurse said, hovering nearby as Hunt set her clipboard and pen on a rolling metal table near the ward window, beyond which lay a row of slumbering patients hooked to identical IV drips. Hunt shrugged out of her white physician’s garb and moved to the bank of ancient elevators, and waited patiently until one of the oversized steel slabs slid open with a chime. This section of the facility was deserted at the late hour, admissions having ended earlier along with visitations, and any urgent cases were being seen in the emergency room. She wasn’t surprised when the elevator had only one other passenger, an older staffer who nodded to her as he stepped out and disappeared around a corner.

Hunt pressed the button for the parking level and eyed her watch. Still three more hours to go. She’d already been on for eight, but that’s what this kind of clinical trial demanded, and nobody was holding a gun to her head. She could have easily foisted her duties off on an underling and been at home watching a movie with her daughter, curled up with a good Chianti and some Chinese food, but she’d elected to run point, and the insane workload was the cost of her choice.

The elevator creaked downward and she tapped her foot impatiently. She hated leaving Courtney on her own, but the critical phase of the trial was only for two days, and she’d grown up with Mom having to be at the hospital for long hours occasionally. It was easier now that her daughter was old enough to not need a babysitter, but Hunt still felt guilty about leaving her baby alone.

The door opened and she stepped out, listening. Her alarm must have turned off by itself, which she supposed was good, because if something had damaged her vehicle, it would have still been howling. She moved to the car, her long legs covering the ground quickly. When she drew near, her stomach sank at the glitter of broken glass by the rear driver’s side tire. Someone had broken her back window.

Hunt swore softly and was pulling her cell phone from her pocket when she sensed movement behind her. She tried to turn, but a hand like a vise clamped onto her neck, and a stab of pain shrieked up her spine before everything went black.

El Rey caught the doctor as she dropped, the pressure point a sure bet from behind, and dragged her to his trunk. He popped it open with the remote and lowered her body into its confines, and after glancing around the deserted subterranean area, closed it and slid behind the wheel.

At the street level, the attendant took his ticket and demanded five dollars, which the assassin was more than happy to pay. He pulled up the drive and turned onto the road, which was empty except for a utility truck parked on the right with its emergency lights flashing, and drove at a moderate pace, confident that the doctor would be out for at least fifteen minutes – five more than he’d need to get her to the garage he’d rented the prior week in anticipation of CISEN betraying him.

When he arrived, he raised the roll-up door and drove inside, taking care to lower and lock it behind him. He hoisted the doctor from the trunk and sat her on a chair that had been the only furnishing to come with the monthly workspace, and quickly bound her wrists and ankles so when she came to, she’d understand the situation.

He didn’t have to wait long. Her eyes fluttered open and she took in the dark, bare brick walls and the exposed pipes running along the high ceiling before her gaze settled on him. She struggled against her bindings, but stopped when she saw his expression.

“What is this?” she demanded, her voice surprisingly strong given the circumstances.

“This is my way of introducing myself and getting information I need as expediently as possible, Dr. Hunt.”

“Information,” she repeated. “I see. And who are you?”

“A seeker of truth. That’s all you need to know. Now we’ll switch to me asking the questions, and you answering them.” He went through his description of what he would do if she was less than forthright, and she listened in silence until he was through.

“Why are you doing this? What have I ever done to you?”

“That remains to be seen. But the short answer is that I have limited time, and I require answers you may be reluctant to give.” He moved closer until he was standing in front of her. “Let’s begin with your work for Bloomington Industries. Specifically your classified projects.”

“If you know about that, you know I’m not allowed to tell you anything.” Her eyes narrowed. “Is this some sort of misguided security vetting?”

“I can assure you this is exactly what it seems. If you don’t answer my questions, I should also warn you that I am holding your beautiful daughter captive, and your willingness to cooperate will have a direct impact on her life expectancy.”

Hunt’s eyes flashed fear and fire at him. “Oh, God…no. Tell me that’s a lie.”

“Don’t worry. She hasn’t been hurt. She’s comfortable and safe, for the time being, but I can arrange for that to change if you aren’t completely honest with me. Do you understand?”

Her voice caught as she spoke. “What kind of monster are you?”

“The kind who needs answers. And whose patience is running exceedingly thin about now.”

She exhaled disgustedly. “Fine. What do you want to know?”

“You were designing special projects there, correct?”

“If you know that, why ask?”

“I’ll take that as a yes. Tell me about them.”

“I was working with custom-designed agents tailored to the specifications of the client.”

“The client. I see. Describe these agents.”

“There were a number of them. Most acted on the central nervous system.”

“Neurotoxins?”

“Yes. Or rather, all sorts of agents. But if you’re after detail, I don’t carry around specifics in my head, like recipes. So if that’s what you’re shooting for, you’re wasting your time.”

“Your clients were the government, were they not?”

She nodded and winced at the lingering discomfort from his assault on the pressure point at the side of her neck. “You seem to know an awful lot about it. Why don’t you just cut to the chase? Ask me what you are really after.”

“Dr. Hunt, you seem like a brave, intelligent woman, so before we continue, I’ll explain something to you, and perhaps you’ll understand why I’ve gone to these lengths. I was injected with a neurotoxin by the Mexican intelligence agency. That neurotoxin came from the CIA – one of your employer’s esteemed clients. Since then, every six months I’ve had to inject an antidote, but I was assured that after a full course I’d be fine. I never received the final dose. So I have nothing to lose, and while I’m not in the business of kidnapping children – or their parents, for that matter – this is a matter of life or death for me. So be very careful with your answer: does that sound like something you might have crafted for…your client?”

Her face changed as realization spread through her. Hunt’s mouth made a silent O and she closed her eyes. “I…it could be. I was responsible for a team that developed a particularly ugly one that I signed on to take through the animal trial phase, but after I thought through its only possible use, I quit the project and refused to do any further work on it.” Her eyes opened and she fixed him with a pitying stare. “I’m so sorry if it got deployed.”

“Describe how yours performed if no antidote was administered,” El Rey ordered.

“It wasn’t mine, it was the group’s. But as I recall, there were a progression of symptoms, culminating in respiratory failure. Muscle spasms, twitching, dementia, fatigue, disorientation… and in the final stages, the victim would drown in their own fluids,” she said.

“And what was the antidote course to clear the system?”

“I…I can’t be sure, in a human. But the way it worked in the trial I participated in, there was a total of six injections, six months apart.”

“Sounds like the same thing.”

She shook her head. “But I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t they give you the final shot if they’ve given you all the rest?”

“My usefulness is over. They’d been blackmailing me into performing assassinations for them, holding the injections over my head. So I did what I had to. But now they don’t want me walking around any longer. So no final shot, the problem goes away – drowns in my own fluids, as you know.”

Her face changed as she grasped what he was after. “This is all about the final injection.”

El Rey nodded. “Of course. What will you need to make the antidote?”

She frowned. “That’s not how it works. It takes weeks, even if I could remember the composition exactly, which I can’t. You’d be long dead.” She hesitated. “But if they took it through development and deployed it, there would have to be a supply. And there’s only one place Bloomington keeps all their active projects.”

“Where?”

“In their pharma labs in Northern Virginia – at least that’s how it worked when I left them six years ago. It probably hasn’t changed. I haven’t heard about them expanding.”

“How would I go about finding the antidote in a facility like that?”

“The best way would be through their computer system – in their inventory management area. Assuming you could get inside, that would direct you to its location, if you understood their numbering and classification system.” She sighed. “You don’t stand a chance unless I help you get in. That’s not a trick of some kind on my part – it’s a statement of fact. The plant is guarded, but even if you somehow snuck by security, that’s not the biggest problem. It’s a huge facility, and you wouldn’t know where to look. I wouldn’t even be sure without accessing their database, assuming they’re still calling it by its working name.”