Chapter 5 - Fire Behind the Door
I knew the voice. Colonel Sloane had used that same calm tone when he told Eli's wife her husband wasn't coming home.
Rourke pulled his pistol but kept it pointed at the floor. "Sir, open this door. You're interfering with an investigation."
The speaker crackled. "Colonel, stand down. You're standing beside a woman who compromised a mission."
"Then let the investigators decide," Rourke said.
Nothing.
A bitter smell slipped through the ventilation grate. Atlas sneezed, backed away, and growled. On the other side of the door, a motor started.
"That's not ventilation," Ortega said. "It's the emergency fume purge. Somebody reversed the airflow."
I pulled my shirt over my mouth. "Can we shut it off?"
He opened a maintenance panel, found a breaker, and yanked it. The motor stopped. A second later the hall alarm began screaming and a thin ribbon of smoke curled under the door.
"They're trying to burn the room," Rourke said.
He radioed for emergency response. Static answered.
Ortega ran to a small service hatch on the back wall. "These labs used to have a blast passage. It should lead into the drainage trench."
"Should?" I asked.
"Unless they filled it in."
Rourke kicked the rusted hatch once, twice, then a third time. My injured ankle screamed when I tried to help. Atlas shoved his nose along the bottom edge and whined.
"Move," I said.
He crouched. I hooked the silver whistle between my teeth and gave two soft notes. Atlas lunged at the hanging strap on the hatch, pulling in perfect rhythm with Rourke's final kick. The metal swung open.
We crawled through one by one. Rourke followed with the sealed card tucked in his vest. Behind us glass burst somewhere in the lab. We spilled into a concrete culvert as flames flashed through the hatch.
Atlas squeezed out last, his whiskers singed. I held his face in both hands and checked his eyes and paws until he nudged my chin as if to say stop worrying.
Ortega stared across the darkening base. "If the colonel did that, we can't trust anyone here."
"We need the inspector general," Rourke said.
"And we need to know what's on the card," I added.
My phone buzzed. Unknown number. One photo arrived: Eli Mercer's eight-year-old daughter, June, stepping off her school bus that afternoon.
May you like
Below it was a message.
YOU OPEN THE FILE, SHE DISAPPEARS.
