Midnight Fever (Men of Midnight #5)(25)

Kay stood on tiptoe to embrace Metal, then nodded to Jacko and Joe. She held out her hand with a flash drive on her open palm.

"This is heavily encrypted," she said to Metal. "Do you think Felicity can decrypt it?"

"Sure." Metal shrugged. If Kay had said, do you think Felicity can stop the world from spinning, he would have said the same thing. He believed fiercely in his fiancée's powers.

"I don't know what's on it," Kay said, her lovely face frowning. She closed his hand around the flash drive, then opened her fist again. "But I do know that a man was just now killed right in front of me because of it. Because of what's on it. So, Felicity will need protection until we-" Kay's voice cracked and she looked around at them, meeting each man's eyes. "We figure out what this is and how to deal with it. There's danger not only to Felicity, but to all of us." Her eyes welled. "I am so sorry-"

"Wait." Metal held up a huge hand, palm out. "Just stop right there, Kay. You don't need to apologize. The fuckers who killed the guy should be the ones to apologize. No one is going to get to Felicity, guaranteed. And you have Nick by your side. You guys are going to a secure place and we'll all work on this together, okay?"

She swallowed. Her throat felt raw with unshed tears.

"Okay?" Metal insisted.

"Okay." Her voice was a thread but she smiled. Tried to smile. Metal put the flash drive in a pocket inside his jacket.

"SUVs have temporary plates on them," Jacko said to Nick. Which was a polite way of saying they were fake plates. ASI had a vast collection of them. "That drone is still up there, we checked. They won't know where Kay is. We'll drive out at 15-minute intervals, you'll be second. We'll both drive a complicated route back to HQ and we'll make sure we're not followed. You head on out to the Grange. We have secure comms."



       
         
       
        

He handed Nick an earpiece, an encrypted satphone and took out a tablet. He switched the tablet on and swiped until he found what he was looking for. He tilted the tablet so Nick and Kay could see it. For a second, Nick couldn't figure out what he was looking at, then his mind made the necessary adjustments. Felicity had hacked into a satellite feed. He was looking at the rooftop of the building they were in, slightly out of focus, as if from a long-distance lens. "What-"

"Our drone," Joe answered. "From a Keyhole."

Nick bent over the tablet and watched for a minute. The drone above the building was slowly circling. "Shit," he breathed.

"Yeah," Joe answered. Metal and Jacko nodded grimly. That drone was looking for Kay … and it had some kind of weapon that had already killed a man.

"Luckily, you and Kay are about to disappear." Joe held out a remote control. "The keys to the kingdom. Access codes are in the phone." It was access to the Grange, a secure facility ASI was building on the foothills of Mt. Hood.

"Guys. There's a dead man outside," Kay said quietly. "We can't just leave him there."

"How did he die?" Metal asked.

Her shoulders lifted on a sigh. She looked sad and troubled. "I-I don't know. That drone came at us. It sprayed something. Mike pushed my head down, I didn't see it very well. He wouldn't let me look at it directly."

"That might have saved your life," Nick said.

"No. Whatever was in that spray affected only Mike. My life wasn't in danger." She sounded troubled.

"Mike?" Metal asked.

"Mike Hammer. You know him?" Metal and Joe had reacted to the name.

"Yeah," Metal said. "He worked on something with Jack's wife, Summer." Summer Redding had run a famous political blog, Area 8. Now she directed an environmental e-zine. "Good guy. He's the stiff?"

Kay nodded. "The drone came in close and sprayed him with something. An odorless liquid, some kind of solution. The spray caught me, too, but I suffered no effects. There was clearly some kind of agent in the liquid that compromised his breathing catastrophically, but not mine. I could actually hear his lungs filling up with fluid." She turned to Metal. "Can you get word to the medical examiner to test for cytokine levels? And do you think it might be possible to get the results of the autopsy? I have a horrible feeling we're looking at a powerful bio-weapon, maybe weaponized Spanish flu. Certainly, whatever killed Mike did it in a minute, a minute and a half. Ricin and anthrax take much longer, so this is something new. We'll know once we unlock the files in that flash drive. I fear that's why Mike was killed, because word leaked to the wrong people that he was working on an article on exactly this. But I still don't understand why I didn't die, too."