At fifty-one, Clayton had been a doctor for long enough to hear her fair share of pained cries for help, but this one chilled her to the bone. She leaned around the wall that separated the office from the waiting room. An attractive young woman in a stylish brown leather jacket clutched her stomach just outside the registration window. Grisly black mascara blotched both eyes, making her look like a maniacal raccoon, and ran in long lines down a round face the color of bleached bone.
“Get this out of me!” Her voice was a ragged hiss, the torn cry of a damned soul.
Dr. Clayton ran from the reception office to the lobby, followed by Birdie. They caught the girl just before she collapsed.
“Have you taken any drugs, sweetheart?” Birdie.
The girl looked up, squinting as if trying to figure out where she was. “I don’t… I mean…” She vomited, missing Birdie by inches. “Ooohhh, please let me die… ” She threw her head back and howled in pain, voiding the contents of her bowels. She let loose a string of vehement curses, shrieking as if she’d drunk a bottle of acid.
Birdie helped steer the dizzy girl around the mess on the floor, guiding her toward the nearest trauma room. She shot a glance at Clayton. “If her head starts spinning around, I’m leaving her to you.”
With all the screaming, the ER instantly became a buzzing hive of activity. Clayton and Birdie got the girl out of her soiled clothing.
“Note the navel jewelry. We’ll need that out if we do an MRI,” the doc said, touching the gaudy stainless-steel butterfly hovering over the girl’s belly button. “Looks like it may be difficult to remove.”
A male lab tech with a receding hairline struggled to start an IV while a heavyset nurse checked vitals.
Her eyes narrowed in concern. “106.4,” she said, popping the plastic thermometer cover into the trashcan.
“Let’s see if we can get your temp down,” Clayton said before patting the girl’s cheek with a gloved hand. “What’s your name, dear?”
“Taylor Bancroft,” she whispered through cracked lips. Wracked with another spasm, she grabbed the front of Clayton’s scrubs with surprising speed and strength. “It was just supposed to be this once—” Too exhausted to even turn her head, she vomited on her chest. Grimacing, she collapsed back on the bed.
Birdie stripped off the dirty gown and tossed it in a tray for testing.
“What was just once?” Clayton asked, helping the nurse put a damp sheet across Taylor’s chest. The poor thing was burning up.
She motioned for the nurses to go ahead with the IV.
“It was all… in condoms,” the girl whimpered between ragged breaths. Tears streamed down her face. “Two thousand bucks to swallow, fly into the country, and poop them out.” Bloodshot eyes begged for understanding.
“Easy money…” Clayton sighed.
“I know, right?” The girl nodded, misunderstanding Clayton’s comment as approval. Her body tightened as another wave of pain washed over her. “I turned it all over to the guy… but one must have leaked.”
Clayton bit her lip. This girl wasn’t much younger than her own daughter. Her clothes were new and of the latest style. She was probably from a well-to-do family. “Do you know what kind of drug you swallowed, sweetheart?”
“I guessed it was coke, but he didn’t tell me.” She stared up at the ceiling, sniffling between frantic gasps. She beat dimpled fists on the mattress. “I can’t believe it leaked! It was double bagged, one condom inside another. I went straight from the airport to the address like the guy told me to.”
“This guy,” Dr. Clayton said. “Can you call him and see what kind of drug it was?”
Bancroft wiggled her jaw back and forth, looking hollow as if she was going to be sick. “No, I mean… I just met him at a club in Helsinki.” She licked her lips as the nausea passed. “He’s Spanish, I think…. There was something wrong with his lip he tried to hide with a beard.”
“Where did you go from the airport?” Clayton prodded, more to keep the girl talking than to gather any information. A blood test would show what drug she’d ingested well before they could contact the smuggler who had put her up to this.
Bancroft swallowed hard, squinting at the pain in her head. “Some warehouse down by the pier. It was a place where they stored a bunch of bank machines — you know, like ATMs.” Her body began to shake with sobs. “He told me it was safe. I mean, I just wanted to get a little extra—”
The girl’s eyes sagged in midsentence and the heart monitor went flat.
ER staff swarmed in with the crash cart, pushing medication and attempting to shock her heart back into rhythm. Nothing worked.
“Note time of death at 6:05 p.m.” Dr. Clayton sighed. Less than fifteen minutes after she’d entered the hospital, Taylor Bancroft was dead. In twenty-six years of practicing medicine, she’d never seen anyone without a gaping wound go from ambulatory to flatline that fast.
“Poor kid,” the charge nurse said, pursing her lips. “Wonder what she was doing in Helsinki?”
“Who knows?” Clayton moved to cover the girl’s face with the sheet, and was startled to find wads of blond hair that had fallen out on the pillow.
The charge nurse leaned over the body helping, her hospital ID dangling from her pink scrub top. A series of black dots traveled up the badge next to it.
“Everyone move away now!” Clayton snapped, snatching the dosimeter badge from her own lab coat.
“Shit!” She took another step back without thinking. This was no reaction to drugs leaking from a swallowed condom. In the short minutes she’d been around Taylor Bancroft, four of the small circles were now darker than their corresponding backgrounds, indicating over twenty-five rads of exposure.
Clayton rushed to the door of the trauma room, eyes frantically scanning the waiting area, where a college-age orderly worked on the mess Taylor Bancroft had made on the floor.
“Jeremy,” she snapped. “Leave it alone!”
The orderly looked up, mop in hand. He wore protective gloves, slippers, and a face mask — unlikely to protect him from the real danger. A blank look crossed his face.
“Leave it be!” Clayton said again, terror edging into her normally calm voice.
An elderly couple and a haggard mother with her small sleeping toddler sat along the far wall of the waiting room. Two fishermen types in wool sweaters and rubber boots occupied the center seats, staring up at the wall-mounted flat screen above the child’s head.
“Everyone outside,” Clayton yelled, summoning all the bravado she could muster. “The ER is closed.”
Taylor Bancroft’s insides had been cooked from radiation poisoning — and every drop of fluid that had escaped her body had turned the ER into a hot zone. If the deadly stuff wasn’t still inside her, then it was floating around somewhere out there — in the hands of someone sick enough to smuggle it into the U.S. inside a college student’s gut.
DIRTY
In the absence of orders, go find something and kill it.
CHAPTER 1
Jericho Quinn twisted the throttle on his gunmetal-gray BMW R 1200 GS Adventure, feeling the extra horses he needed to keep up with the frenetic thump of D.C. traffic. Six cars ahead, the man he wanted to kill activated his turn signal, then moved a forest-green Ford Taurus into the left lane.
The big Beemer was a leggy bike, aggressive like a mechanical predator from a science-fiction movie. Tall enough to be eye level with passing cars, it flicked easily for what some considered the two-story building of motorcycles.