Black Rose

CHAPTER 19

The door with the bio-hazard sign opened onto a long room and a state of the art laboratory. Like the morgue, there were no windows. Florescent lights illuminated the room in a cold, harsh glow. Nick recognized centrifuges and something he was pretty sure was an electron microscope. There were other instruments whose purpose was a mystery to him. Three stainless steel refrigerators stood against one wall. Next to them was a bulky gray filing cabinet. At the back of the lab was a glass cabinet, a sealed airlock and a large viewing window.

"Ronnie, you and Lamont start setting charges," Nick said. He took bricks of C-4 and a handful of detonators from his pack and handed them out. "Selena, you keep an eye on the door. I'm going to see what's in that filing cabinet."

"What about the samples? You want to blow the place up if we don't find them?" Selena said.

"Damn right I do. This has to be the right place. You saw that body back there."

Selena went to the door and stood near it, her MP-5 held close and ready. Nick walked to the filing cabinet. He tried a drawer. It was locked.

"Hey Ronnie. Let Lamont do the rest of that. I need you to open this lock."

Ronnie came over and took out his picks. It took less than a minute. Nick opened the top drawer.

"File folders," he said.

"What did you expect? It's a filing cabinet."

"They're labeled in German."

He pulled one out. It was labeled Testpersonen.

"You take the door," Nick said. "I need Selena to translate."

When Selena came over she looked at the folder Nick held in his hand.

"It says Test Subjects."

"How about this one?"

"Schwarze Rose. It means black rose."

She took it from him and looked at the first page.

"What does it say?"

"Black rose is a codename. These are notes about the plague."

"All right. We'll take these with us and read them later. See if there are any others you think we ought to grab. We can't take them all."

Nick left her looking through the files and went to the glass window at the back of the room. On the other side of the window was a bio containment unit. An air hose hung in yellow spirals over a work table from a rack on the ceiling. There was a door to the side that Nick assumed led into a decontamination area. The work table was clear, empty.

He walked over to the glass cabinet. The glass was thick and the cabinet door was secured with an electronic lock and keypad. Inside was a neat row of glass vials. He couldn't read the labels, but he could see that a second door on the other side of the cabinet opened into the containment room.

He took out another pack of C-4 and molded it against the glass.

"All done," Lamont said. "Ready to rock and roll."

Nick took out the radio controller for the detonators. "I'm giving it ten minutes. Mark."

He set the unit down by the containment room. Red numerals on the display began counting down the time.

"Let's get out of here."

He reached up to tug on his scarred left ear. It was beginning to itch. The itching got worse.

Nick's ear was a psychic warning system, a genetic hand me down from his Irish Ancestors. His grandmother had what the old Irish called "the sight." She'd been able to know about things that hadn't happened, bad things, death, accidents, disaster. It had made her unpopular in her small village.

Whatever it was or wherever it had come from, Nick had learned to trust it.

Ronnie saw him pull on his ear. They all knew what it meant.

"Oh, oh," he said.

"Turn off the lights," Nick said.

Selena swept her hand across a bank of switches on the wall next to the door. The room went dark. The only light was the red glow of the timer at the far end, counting down the minutes and seconds until this room would cease to exist.

Nick cracked the door open. The hall outside was empty. His ear began burning.

"Trouble coming," he said. He kept his voice low. "Time to boogie."

They moved to the T where the hall met the longer corridor that led back to the morgue and forward to the front of the building. Nick heard a soft sound toward the front, the barest whisper of something. He signaled with his hand. That way. Someone coming.

He signaled again. Ronnie, with me. Selena, Lamont, cover the way we came in. On three.

Nick held up his hand and counted off with his fingers. One. Two. Three.

He looked around the corner. Eight or nine men in dark blue uniforms, with MP-5s, coming from the front.

The leader saw Nick and shouted. His gun came up. Nick fired first. The leader went down and Nick ducked back as the hall filled with the sharp sounds of the guns and the whisper of bullets passing.

Lamont crouched low and fired around the corner. Selena reached her gun around the wall and fired blindly.

Behind them, the counter ticked down toward the explosion.

Ronnie reached into his bag and pulled out a flash bang.

"This will help them think. Cover up," he said.

He pulled the pin and tossed the grenade into the hall. It went off with a flat, hard sound. The shock wave beat against them in the narrow confines of the hall.

After-images of light danced in front of Nick's eyes. They moved into the main corridor. Blue-clad attackers writhed on the floor, hands clapped over their ears. Two still stood, disoriented. They raised their weapons. Nick and Selena shot them.

"Toward the back," Nick said.

They ran down the hall and into the morgue. Nick pulled open the outer door and was met with a blast of cold air and snow. The weather had turned into a full blown winter storm. Nick looked at his watch.

"Thirty seconds," he said.

They ran through the door, silhouetted by the lights in the room behind. Sudden spurts of flame winked at them from the dark. A heavy blow knocked Nick down into a drift. The others dove for the ground. Ronnie fired at the muzzle blast of the unseen shooter. A cry of pain cut through the muffled sound of the storm and the flashes stopped.

The charges went off.

The night erupted with flame and noise and light that turned the falling snow bright yellow and orange. The roof lifted off the building. The tall chimney toppled and crashed to the ground near where Selena and Lamont lay flat in the snow. Debris fell back to earth, chunks of masonry, bits of metal and glass, unidentifiable pieces. A mangled centrifuge landed next to Nick and lay steaming in the snow.

The light and noise faded. No one was shooting at them. A burning gas line sent a twenty foot column of bluish flame straight into the air from the ruined building behind them.

Nick stood up, holding his side. His vest had taken the round. But it hurt.

"Come on," he said.

"You're all right?" Selena asked.

"Yeah. Let's get out of here."

They made it back to the car without trouble. Selena drove. Nick sat next to her. They looked at the burning building as they passed it.

"They won't be using that for a while," Nick said.