Cliff Ryder - Out of Time

“Like I said, extreme heat will kill it for sure.

You’re going to blow the whole building, then?”

Brin asked.

Alex saw her hesitation. He knew she had years of research tied up with MRIS, stored on their computers and tucked away in their files. All the work she’d been doing, all the work her colleagues were doing, would be destroyed right along with the nanoagents. He wished there was another way.

More than that, he wished she’d never been dragged into any of it.

“It’s the only way,” he said as gently as he could.

“We have to neutralize the threat, and we can’t take a chance that Rand backed up the data or kept a second sample on ice in some hidden lab you don’t even know about.”

He hesitated a second, and then added, “I’m sorry, Brin.”

“But everyone who works here—”

“There’s no one here,” Alex said. “But sometimes you have to sacrifice a few people to get the job done. It’s sounds cruel, but it would be worse if we didn’t do what we had to do. The best thing we can manage is to get moving before people start to arrive. We need to get out.”

Brin stared at him and then nodded. Alex could tell that she knew it had to be done, but she didn’t have to like it. As much as she loved him, she still couldn’t be sure whether his loyalties were with her or with Room 59. It hung in the air between them, in a place where nothing had ever hung before.

“Give me a second, then,” she said. “I’ll make sure none of it’s viable before we—” She trailed off then, not wanting to put such a horrible thing into words.

Brin opened the container and withdrew a sample, got it under the microscope fast. She felt Alex’s eyes on her and she wanted to spin on him, rage at him for all of this, the lies, the danger, the fear, the scent of gunpowder that still filled her nostrils. Instead, she stared into the microscope, focused and inspected the slide, checking carefully to be absolutely certain that the cultures were dead.

“We’re good to go,” she said at last, lifting her head. “Whatever we have to do, we can do it without releasing any of this into the air.”

“Okay.” Alex shoved the laptop off the table and began pounding furiously at it with the leg of the chair. He smashed at it until the case shattered, spraying little bits of motherboard about the room.

When he managed to free the hard drive, he gathered it up in one hand and snagged a pair of tongs with another. Once he had the drive gripped tightly in the tongs, it was a simple matter to drop it into a large beaker.

“You have anything we can pour in here that will eat through plastic?” he asked. “The drives on the inside are layered, like thick CDs stacked one on top of another. To really get all the data out of there, we need to destroy the interior disks.”

Brin glanced around the room, then said, “How about sulfuric acid?” She crossed the lab and grabbed the container and returned, twisting off the top to bypass the nozzle they normally used to apply the solution a bit at a time. She poured the contents over the drive. As the clear liquid made contact with the surface of the hard drive’s case, the solution began to bubble and froth. Then she took down another bottle and said, “Stand back.”

“What’s in that?” Alex asked.

“Water,” she said. She poured a small quantity of water over the acid and it began to spit and boil.

“Sulfuric acid is exothermic,” she explained.

“There won’t be anything but plastic soup left inside.”

The beaker sizzled and bubbled, threatening to spill acid all over the tabletop. Alex watched it carefully. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Brin—he wanted to see the damned thing melt. When he was sure it was done, he turned to her and tried a half grin.

“You ready?” he asked.

“Yeah.” Her voice had a hollow, sad sound to it.

“Where are we going?”

“Home. First we blow this place off the face of the planet, and then we go home.”

“Good,” she replied. “You have one hell of a lot of explaining to do, and you’d better start thinking about it now.”

Alex stepped forward and pulled her to him.

Despite the slight resistance she gave him, he hugged her tightly. He didn’t want to let go, but he knew they weren’t finished. “Get us out of here,”

he said softly.

Brin stepped to the cipher lock, entered the code, and the door swung wide a final time. She set it to lock behind them, and they stepped through into the hall.

Alex knew that the security cameras were still watching, but somehow he thought no one was home. If Dayne had backup, he’d have called on it when things started to go south. They must have kicked the entire security staff out for the night, or fired them outright. It was crazy, and Alex saw the desperation behind it. He wondered if maybe Dayne had come on his own, sort of a last-shot desperation tactic.

The one thing he knew he had to include in his final report was the Chinese Mafia’s involvement.

Some additional cleanup would have to be done to ensure that they weren’t expanding their operations into completely new realms of crime like bioterrorism. It made sense, though, considering the market for weapons, that the organized-crime groups of the world would seek to profit from it all.

Alex led Brin down the maintenance elevator and out through the service doors. His duffel bag was right where he left it next to the Dumpster, and he retrieved it while she watched. He had a bad moment when he thought this left leg was going to collapse. He leaned against the trash receptacle, waiting to see if the leg would come back, or if he’d tumble to the ground.

The spasm in his leg passed and he snagged the duffel bag’s handle and opened it. There were six separate charges inside. He gripped the bag tightly and turned back to the building.

“I can do this myself,” he said softly. “I can tell you where the car is and you can wait for me. I have to place all six around the perimeter on the inside. I don’t want the building flying all over town—I want it come down on itself, and to do that I have to get the placement just right.”

She hesitated.

“But I could really use someone who knows the interior layout better than I do.”

Brin nodded and they slipped back in the service doors and got to work. The building was laid out in a cross pattern, four wings shooting out from a square central lobby area. Alex chose two wings, the one directly below Brin’s office and the wing opposite, to place the first two charges. He attached them carefully to the wall at the far end of each, then returned to the center. Next he did the same for the remaining two wings, leaving two charges.

“What about those?” Brin asked, perplexed. “If there are only four wings, why do we need more than four—what are they, bombs?”

“Simple,” Alex explained. “We’ll place these two near the center, and we’ll set them off first.

Then we’ll trigger the outer charges a few seconds later. This will cause the center to begin crumbling, and when the force from the outer explo-sions pushes in, it will crumble the walls inward.

If it works right, the parking lot outside might get some debris, but no one nearby will be hurt. I doubt they’ll ever find Rand or Dayne, though.”

“Dayne,” Brin repeated. “That was his name?

Alex, he was in those videos. He had a knife, and they had you—”

“Later,” Alex said, giving her another short hug.

“There will be time later, and I’ll tell you everything. He was a bad man, though, the worst.”

“What about you?” she asked softly. “Is that what you are? Are you a bad man?”

“I hope not,” Alex replied, turning back to his work. “They tell me I’m the good guy.”