THIRTY-EIGHT
Naomi and Jasmijn walked side by side up to the lab door, Stephen and Dante trailing behind. The scientist carried the bag of sea anemones, the mesh dive bag now hidden within a an ordinary looking shopping bag. They saw no security presence. It seemed the bodies of the murdered security guards had not been discovered.
Thankfully, no surprises awaited them in the lab. It was as they left it. Even so, Stephen and Dante performed a crouching sweep of the space, making certain that no person or booby-trap lurked behind one of the lab benches.
“Clear.” Stephen stood from behind a counter by the back wall.
“Clear.” Dante popped his head up from another.
Jasmijn immediately set to work preparing the anemones. She ran tests on the water quality of one of the aquaria. Once the conditions were optimal, she carefully released the anemones into the tank, where they drifted down to the bottom. Then she moved to a rack of chemicals and began preparing a mixture.
While Jasmijn worked, the OUTCASTs circled the lab slowly like hyper-aware sharks sniffing out blood in the currents. They occasionally peered from a window, put an ear to the door, or monitored radio frequencies in their ear buds. While the male operators roved the lab, Naomi was planted beside Jasmijn at all times like a personal bodyguard, her pistol always drawn.
An hour went by, Jasmijn lost in her complex procedures, and then Stephen received a communication via his earbud from Danielle. She filled him in on the Poseidon Initiative intel, and how Tanner and Liam were en route to Maine. She cautioned them not to let their guard down in the Netherlands, since it was anyone’s guess what Hofstad was up to. They may even be planning to flex their budding international terror muscles by maintaining operations on two fronts. Stephen gave a brief sitrep on the lab and signed off.
The OUTCAST team kept a coffee pot brewing and passed the time by having one of them leave the lab for an external check every hour or so. They avoided exact, to-the-minute scheduled watches lest they create suspicion should the lab be under some type of surveillance. This type of VIP guard duty could be boring, but the specter of Hofstad’s looming deadline kept them on edge.
After a while Jasmijn moved from the chemistry equipment to a computer workstation. She placed a well slide into a machine connected to the PC and it began analyzing the compound in a program, displayed as a colorful graph on screen that meant nothing to the OUTCAST operators. Suddenly she thrust a fist in the air in a triumphant gesture.
“Yes!”
The outburst caused Dante to whirl around with his gun at the ready. He immediately lowered it with a roll of the eyes upon seeing Jasmijn staring at the computer monitor. She got up and bounced over to the anemone tank, clearly excited.
“Stage 1 is complete.” She grabbed a long-handled dip net. “I’m ready for the combinatorial phase.”
The three agents looked at one another and shrugged while she scooped two of the invertebrates from the aquarium, their tentacles waving as they were dragged up through the water. “First I need to extract the active compound from our friends here,” she said, talking to herself, or perhaps the sea anemones, as much as to her escorts, who understood none of the lab procedure and knew only that she needed to try to make an antidote to the STX in order to save lives should there be another attack.
Jasmijn took the anemones over to a wet station where she proceeded to snip tentacles from the creatures and place them in a beaker of the solution she’d prepared earlier and verified with the computer program.
“Hey, if you guys want a thrill while you wait, touch your tongue to one of these anemones,” Jasmijn said, smiling. “You know how if you touch your finger to one, they feel sticky? That’s the stinging cells — nematocysts — firing. They can’t really pierce the skin on your finger, though — it’s too thick. But on your tongue the epidermal layer is very thin. It’ll give you a nice shock, but isn’t really dangerous. If you need a wake-up shot…”
“Pass,” Stephen said without hesitation, glancing out one of the windows.
“Ditto,” Nay said, wrinkling her nose while looking at the anemones.
“I’ve licked some strange things before, but…maybe later.” Dante eyed the sliver of light underneath the lab door, then resumed his patrol.
“Suit yourself.” Jasmijn placed one of the isolated tentacles under a stereomicroscope and adjusted the device’s focus for a close look. “But you must agree. It’s amazing that this simple animal developed such a sophisticated chemical weapons system through evolution, isn’t it?”
Stephen nodded. Hopefully they’d be able to put it to use. He knew that as the hours wore on, they would find out one way or the other.
THIRTY-NINE
It was a town defined by seafood like no other — and shellfish in particular. Lobster, blue crabs, shrimp, clams, oysters, mussels, scallops… A thriving harbor fishery brought them to shore each day, and the social scene revolved around it. There were seafood restaurants galore and right now a huge summer seafood festival was in full swing at a grassy park. Tanner and Liam threaded their way among the open air booths that were crowded with long lines of tourists waiting to sample the offerings. Although the seafood looked delectable and smelled great, neither of them had the stomach to sample it, knowing that it was the ultimate source of such a deadly poison that might currently be the focus of Hofstad’s sinister initiative. They opted instead for hamburgers and corn on the cob.
The hair on Tanner’s neck raised when he saw a young boy start to throw up into a trash can. He and Liam rushed to his side, wondering how Jasmijn was progressing with the STX antidote back in the Netherlands, but after hearing the boy’s mother elicit from the child that he’d eaten three plates of lobster, they quietly walked away, leaving the mother to scold her child for overeating.
They wended their way through the park until they reached a fence on a bluff overlooking the town’s namesake harbor. There were several wooden piers with harbor tour boats, a multitude of moored fishing trawlers and shrimp boats, and numerous small pleasure craft flitting about the picturesque harbor. In the bay beyond, large sailboats plied the waters with several small islands in the background.
One boat in particular stood out — a yacht. Blue in color and easily one hundred feet long, the sailing vessel lie at anchor near the edge of the harbor, as if overlooking the entire town. Looking carefully, they could see the U.S. flag proudly displayed from one of the masts. A smaller tender vessel hung from a crane on the ship’s stern.
President Carmichael’s yacht, the Lincoln.
Tanner and Liam both knew that in addition to the Secret Service Agents on board the vessel, there would be others in some of the neighboring boats, attempting to blend in; they couldn’t tell which by looking. Liam produced a pair of binoculars and scanned the harbor, looking for suspicious vessels. He saw nothing to indicate anything out of the ordinary.
“Time to deadline?” he asked Tanner from behind the glasses.
Tanner glanced casually at his watch and replied, “Six hours.” That put the zero hour at 4:00 P.M., when the bay, harbor and town would be in full swing. The sound of gulls wheeling above mingled with the festival crowd as Tanner wondered how a scene like this could go bad. But he knew all too well that it could.
Presently his earpiece crackled with Danielle’s voice. “News update: major media outlets running a piece on The Hague embassy, how it’s still open for business. White House says it will remain open, over.”