“It’s two in the afternoon,” Carrick told them. “You’re at Xenexgen headquarters. How did you get here?”
Moose shook his head and said, “I have no idea.”
At the same time, Melissa said, “Two PM?! No wonder I feel like crap. I need my medicine.”
“We have it right here,” I told her, and shook a pill out of the bottle.
She dry swallowed it and said, “I think I need a doctor.”
“Sure thing,” I said. “But first we need to get you out of here.” I squeezed her shoulder reassuringly. “There’s been some violence outside. People have been killed.” Her eyes went wide. So did Moose’s. “We had to fight our way to get you, and we’re probably going to have to fight our way out. So you’ve got to keep it together and try to keep up, okay?”
Carrick tried to give Moose his backup piece, but he didn’t try too hard, as though maybe they’d had this conversation before. Melissa was in no shape to handle one, even if she wanted to.
“Okay,” I said, “you two just stay behind us.” I told them the route we’d be taking. “Stay close and be ready to run like hell when we do.”
Moose put his arm under Melissa’s to steady her. But when I opened the door, there was no sign of the two dead guards, no blood on the floor, nothing. Carrick and I stopped so abruptly that Moose and Melissa stumbled into us from behind.
“What is it?” Moose whispered loudly.
Carrick and I looked at each other, but I didn’t have any answers and apparently neither did he.
He turned to Moose and put a finger to his lips. As good a response as any.
We walked around the spot where the two dead guards had been, then crept along the opposite side. Carrick took the lead. He didn’t bother taking out his badge. We were done with that for now.
The next hallway was clear and so was the stairway. No bodies, no blood, just a divot in one of the steps and a sprinkling of concrete chips that ground under our feet.
Melissa seemed oblivious, just trying to keep up, but Moose studied the looks passing between Carrick and me. We kept moving because we had to, but frankly I would have liked to stop right there and talk it out.
The first floor was empty, too. I was mostly relieved, but something weird was going on and it was getting weirder. Carrick slowed, so I took the lead. The exit was twenty feet away. The car sixty yards farther. I just wanted to get us the hell out of there. But as I was about to open the door, I heard another door open behind me. I looked back to see Carrick checking the room where we had cuffed the first two guards.
He shook his head — it was empty — then joined us at the exit.
Just then my phone let out a long buzz, startling me, a string of texts from Bug, as if service had been cut off and now it was back. The texts asked what was going on, then were we okay, then said backup was on its way. The last one was another thermal scan, showing just four figures — us — approaching the back door. No one else was in the building. No one was patrolling the lawn. The accompanying text said, Is that you? What’s going on in there?
“What is it?” Melissa whispered.
“Yeah,” Moose said. “What’s going on?”
“We’ll talk about it later.” Carrick shook his head. “Let’s get out of here.”
Stepping outside, I would have known even without the scan that no one was out there. It was absolutely quiet except for a soft breeze. As we crossed the lawn toward the tree line, I heard the distant thump of rotor blades approaching.
Moose and Melissa looked to the sky as the helicopter appeared over the trees. Carrick tensed, still holding his gun.
Another text came in saying, We have your visual.
“They’re with me,” I said.
He relaxed slightly and Moose stepped up next to him, raising his voice over the throb of the helicopter blades.
“Thanks for getting us out of there,” he said. “Now, can you tell us what the hell’s going on?”
As we waited for the chopper, Carrick filled them in on most of what had happened, and what little we knew about why. By the time he was finished, they both looked dazed again. Then he looked over Moose’s head and said, “The containers are gone.”
I turned and saw he was right. In the ten minutes we’d been inside, the entire row of containers had disappeared. After that it was too loud to hear any of us speak, and I was relieved. The chopper dropped fast but landed softly. Four SEALs in tactical gear hit the ground just before the chopper did, followed closely by a pair of medics.
I held up my badge and three of the SEALs fanned out past us, alert, lethal, ready for anything, and surprised to find nothing. The leader came up to me, looking around as he did. “Ledger?”
I nodded. “Pretty sure the place is deserted. Just secure it until my team can evaluate it. And don’t touch anything.”
He nodded and trotted off, speaking into his throat-mic. I grabbed one of the medics and pointed toward Moose and Melissa. “She’s missed two or three doses of this. We just gave her one, but she’s in bad shape. And they both seem like they were doped, so check them for signs of chloroform, Rohypnol, anything like that, okay?”
The medics nodded and then guided Moose and Melissa over to the chopper. The blades had stopped spinning. As they passed, Moose leaned toward Carrick and said, “Might be a while before I go foraging again.”
Carrick slapped him on the shoulder. “You’ll be fine.”
That’s when Bug jumped out of the chopper and ran over, looking around to see if things were hot.
“They’re gone,” he said just as Carrick came up beside me and said:
“We need to figure out what the hell that was all about.”
I introduced them and they shook hands, then Carrick continued. “Seriously. Apart from whatever happened out in the woods, they kidnapped two people, drugged them, did who-knows-what,” earning an alarmed look from Moose. “We need to find them and arrest them. Get to the bottom of all this.”
Bug shook his head. “They’re gone,” he repeated. He held up a tablet computer with a thermal scan showing the entire complex empty except for the four of us crossing the grass.
“Then we need to find out where they went,” Carrick said.
I nodded and turned to Bug. “We’ll find Bortman. And we’ll send a team to their offices in Oslo.”
Bug shook his head again. “Joe, you don’t understand, they’re all gone. According to Mind—” He glanced at Carrick and caught himself. “According to our electronic surveillance, Xenexgen’s computers don’t even exist anymore. The company has been dissolved. As of an hour ago. The assets were liquidated. Everything. The leases on Bortman’s penthouse apartment in Oslo and his mansion in Waverly expired today. Even this whole complex,” he said, waving his arm. “Some holding company bought it at a steal. I don’t know how long the deal’s been in the works, but it’s done.”
“That’s crazy,” Carrick said. “You can’t make an entire multinational corporation disappear in a matter of hours.”
Bug shook his head. “I wouldn’t have thought so, either, but apparently these guys did. They’re gone completely.”
Melissa broke away from the medics and came over. “They can’t be gone,” she said. “Why would they go to the trouble of engineering a terrestrial plant with a totally alien nutritional profile if they weren’t planning on staying?”
“An alien nutritional profile?” Carrick said, laughing. He rolled his eyes and opened his mouth as if he were about to say something sarcastic. But then he stopped, as if suddenly things made sense. His face turned pale as he looked to the sky.
“Melissa’s right,” I said. “We need to scour this place for clues. Their Oslo facilities, too. And the spot out in the woods. We need to find out as much as we can about these guys. They might be gone for now, but I’m pretty sure they’re coming back.”