Callsign: King

5.

Fulbright thrust Sara behind him and then snapped off a couple shots in the direction of the masked gunmen. Despite openly wielding firearms, the men seemed caught off guard. They fell back, out of view and did not reappear for several seconds. Fulbright, on the other hand, had reacted almost without thinking.

He expected this, Sara thought. He knew this attack was coming.

But there was no time to give voice to her suspicions. The man she suspected of being a CIA officer gripped her arm and all but dragged her away from the gunmen and, she hoped, toward safety. She looked over her shoulder and saw the two doctors seemingly paralyzed by the unexpected violence, and then they were lost from view as Fulbright pulled her through a doorway into a stairwell which was already crowded with people evacuating in response to the fire alarm.

Sara immediately turned toward the descending flight, but an insistent tug on her arm drew her in the other direction. Up.

“My team.”

Fulbright’s voice, like his expression, was grim. “What do you think that explosion was? If your team is still alive, there’s nothing we can do to help them. I need to get you out of here.”

Still alive? If? Sara shook her head. It couldn’t be true. It just couldn’t.

As they climbed the stairs, pushing through the fleeing horde, Fulbright took a phone from his shirt pocket and made a call. “It’s me. Things have gone to shit here. I need air evac, ASAP.” Then, in a tone dripping with sarcasm, he added: “Five minutes ago would be nice.”

As the phone disappeared back into his pocket, Sara managed to get out a question. “What the hell is going on?”

Fulbright glanced back at her, his face stony and determined. His expression made her think of Jack; she desperately wished that he was the one leading her confidently through this crisis. She half expected Fulbright to dismiss the inquiry, but he surprised her. “That woman was exposed to something-some kind of pathogen. Something that can be made into a weapon.”

The information stimulated the analytical part of her brain, and for a moment, thoughts of grief and concern for her own safety were relegated to secondary priority. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this? We could have had security in place to prevent this. Hell, we should have airlifted her back to Atlanta.”

“I didn’t expect this.” Fulbright’s tone was self-effacing. “I should have, but I didn’t think they’d try anything like this.”

She didn’t know whether to believe him, but that wasn’t the important question. “Who are they?”

Fulbright turned his gaze forward, steering her around another landing-the eighth floor-and kept climbing. The flow of people responding to the fire alarm had dried up; evidently, everyone on the uppermost floors had already exited. “I think it’s Nexus Genetics, the company Felice Carter works for. They sent her out there to find something like this, prehistoric genetic material, an ancient virus. But something went wrong. The expedition must have been exposed to something. That’s all I know really.”

“You think they found what they were looking for?”

“I wasn’t sure. Now I am. The answer is in those samples you took. We have to protect them.” He looked back at her again. “I have to protect you. And you have to figure out just what it is they found, and come up with some kind of vaccine.”

Sara nodded. “That’s what I do. But I need my team. My equipment.”

“Once you’re safe, I’ll get you what you need.” He took a breath, and then added. “We’ll find a way to contact your team.”

If they’re still alive. Fulbright didn’t say it. He didn’t need to.

The stairs ended on a landing blocked by a heavy metal door. Fuller cautiously pushed the door open and peered out. Sara looked over his shoulder and saw a helicopter sitting idle on the rooftop, about a hundred meters away.

“That was fast,” she said.

But Fulbright pushed her back and pulled the door shut. “That’s not our ride.”

In the silence that followed, Sara’s hypersensitive ears detected the sound of footsteps echoing up the stairwell-judging by the cadence, there were at least three different people-and she didn’t have to ask who the helicopter did belong to.

Fulbright was taking out his phone, preparing to make another call, but she gripped his arm, forestalling him. “They’re coming.”