Joe Ledger: Unstoppable

STRANGE HARVEST BY JON McGORAN

The hotel carpet muffled my footsteps so completely that for a moment I wondered if it wasn’t just blindingly hideous but somehow deafening as well. Then I saw the door to Room 517 ajar and heard drawers and cabinets opening and closing inside. Easing the door open, I saw a broad-shouldered man who was not Melissa Brant searching her room.

I was supposed to be on vacation, a few quiet days in the Poconos catching up on some much-needed rest while Junie was doing her UFO conference thing, and then eating, drinking, and fooling around with her while she wasn’t.

The first night had been great. Junie’s friend Melissa, a charming if tightly wound young astrobiologist, was supposed to join us for dinner, but she called to cancel, saying she was on to something really big that she’d be announcing at her presentation in the morning. Junie had put down the phone, climbed on top of me in bed, and whispered that she was on to something big, too, but she’d be keeping it to herself.

Things had gone great until the following morning, thirty minutes ago, when Junie woke me up saying Melissa had missed her big presentation and apparently disappeared.

Junie wasn’t one for melodrama, but I had thought she was overreacting. Until now.

I’m never completely on vacation, completely at ease, but so far that weekend I had been close, content to be “Joe Ledger, Civilized Man,” leaving my darker selves in the background. That was the point of the getaway. The work I do, the things I see, sometimes the Civilized Man at my core gets edged out of the way.

Like right now. I took out my badge, the one that said I worked for Homeland Security. I didn’t. I worked for the Department of Military Sciences, or DMS. There was no badge for that.

As I entered the room with my gun out and my badge held high, the Cop inside me told the Civilized Man, I’ll take it from here.

Before I could yell, “Freeze!” the guy turned around. And he had a gun, too. Before I could think about it, I kicked it out of his hand. My badge dropped to the floor as my hand clenched tight and rocketed toward his face. I didn’t put everything behind it, just enough to eliminate any disagreement about how things would be going from there.

He was quicker than I expected, bobbing his head out of the way. Rage flared deep down inside me and burned closer to the surface when the guy backhanded my gun out of the way. The Warrior inside me reveled in that rage, tried to elbow Joe the Cop out of the way. You don’t win a fight pulling punches, said the Warrior’s voice.

I ignored it, or tried to, slamming my elbow into the guy’s face. But he landed a solid left under my ribs that weakened my resolve not to go full Warrior. I landed a left of my own, and felt the exhilaration of the other man folding. The Warrior wanted off the leash, to press this momentary advantage into triumph, beat this guy down, and ask questions later.

As I paused, conflicted for a nanosecond, an uppercut clipped my chin, and in my head, I heard the Warrior in me telling the Cop, You might not want to watch this.

I could feel air on my teeth as I launched myself, grinning, at my enemy. The guy was bringing something up in his hand — a knife, a gun, I didn’t care. He wouldn’t have it for long. The right-left combination that was going to shatter his nose and close off his larynx became a right-left-right that would disarm him first. My right hand chopped the bundle of veins and nerves and tendons on the underside of the guy’s wrist, and whatever was in his hand went tumbling through the air. As my left fist tore through the air with everything behind it, from the corner of my eye I saw the object tumbling through the air: leather, gold, leather, gold, leather, gold.

A badge. Then the guy said, “Police!”

My shoulder locked, the muscles in my back and arm twisting and seizing as I applied the brakes to the ball of knuckles rocketing through the air. My fist stopped three inches from his face.

“Police?” I said, looking down at him.

“Police,” the guy said, looking down even farther.

I followed his gaze and saw he had a second gun, and it was pointed at my midsection.

That’s why you don’t pull your punches, the Warrior growled in my head as it returned to the depths where it spent most of its days.

That’s why I do, I thought to myself.

“Me too,” I said out loud, stepping back, giving the guy some space.

He kept the gun on me as he retrieved his badge from the corner of the room. “Really?”

“More or less.” I picked up my own badge.

The guy looked it over. “Joseph Ledger,” he said, then handed it back, “Homeland Security, huh? I know some people there.” He rattled off a few names.

I shook my head. “And who are you?”

He held up his badge. “Doyle Carrick. Philly PD.”

“And what are you doing here?”

“I might ask you the same thing.”

“You might, after you answer me.”

Carrick’s mouth formed a tight smile. “A friend of mine has gone missing. Bruce Scott. Goes by Moose. The girl staying in this room, Melissa Brant, was the last person who saw him.”

“Missing?” I could feel the situation getting more serious around me. I thought back to Melissa’s call, saying she was on to something big.

“How’d you get into the room?”

“The lock was busted. Fried. Moose’s room, too.” He raised an eyebrow at me, reminding me it was my turn to explain.

“Brant’s gone missing, too.”

His eyes darkened. “Since when?”

“She was supposed to give a big presentation this morning. She didn’t show. No one can find her.” I looked around the room. “Did you find anything here?”

“Her computer’s gone, but the case is here. Handbag’s next to the bed. These were inside it.” He handed over a prescription bottle, Tapazole, and an iPhone.

The phone was locked, but the display showed two medication reminders: YOU HAVE MISSED ONE DOSE OF TAPAZOLE and YOU HAVE MISSED TWO DOSES OF TAPAZOLE.

There were also five missed calls.

“Two of those calls are from Oscar Tubbs, a mutual friend of theirs. The rest are from me,” Carrick said, holding up a different phone. “Calling from Moose’s phone. I could hear her phone buzzing from out in the hall.”

“Not quite probable cause, is it?”

He shrugged. “I’m out of my jurisdiction anyway. We’re twenty hours away from the local police starting a search. I’ll worry about probable cause later. Right now, I’m worried about my friend.”

Fair enough. “How’d you get into his phone?”

“It wasn’t locked.”

I nodded. “So, they’re friends, Melissa and Moose?”

He shook his head. “They met last night, through Tubbs. How do you know Brant?”

“She’s friends with my girlfriend. They’re here at the conference together.”

“The foraging conference?”

“No, the UFO conference.”

Carrick snorted and looked away.

My face darkened as I fondly thought back to three minutes earlier when I’d been kicking his ass. Junie had long since stopped being bothered by people’s reactions to her field of expertise. I wasn’t quite there yet.

Carrick straightened out his face. “Okay, then.”

“You said Melissa was the last person to talk to Moose but they weren’t friends,” I said as I started looking through Melissa’s things. Carrick had searched the place, but I hadn’t. “What’s the deal with that?”

Carrick sat on the bed and watched me. “Moose is here for the foraging conference. I drove up yesterday from Philly to see him. I figured we’d have a few beers at the hotel bar, maybe grab breakfast the next day, but instead he wanted to take me foraging.”

“What do you mean by foraging?”

“Apparently, he hunts for wild delicacies out in the woods, mushrooms and stuff, and sells them to restaurants.”

“Really?” I said, moving from the desk to the bathroom.

Carrick shrugged. “Says he makes decent money at it. Anyway, so he wants to show me this secret, hidden spot he found a couple summers ago, where there’s something called tiger cress growing. A half-hour drive and a twenty-minute hike later, we climb up this steep little hill and down into this tiny valley, and it’s carpeted with these plants. I was actually a tiny bit impressed, but then Moose says, ‘It’s not right.’ I ask him what he means, and he says, ‘It’s the wrong color and it shouldn’t be growing so thick.’ Then he steps on it and it stinks like hell, like sulfur mixed with menthol.”

I was done searching, but I would have stopped at that point anyway. Carrick smiled. “I know, right? I’m thinking maybe it’s like cheese, like the stinkiness is why it’s so expensive. But he says it shouldn’t smell like that at all.”

“So what was it?”

Carrick shook his head. “He said it was the tiger cress, all right, but different. He bagged some up and took it to Tubbs, who’s a botanist at Gareth University, not far from here. Tubbs checked it out and contacted Brant. He thought she might be interested, for some reason.”

“Tubbs thought Melissa would be interested?”

“Yeah. Why?”

I shrugged. “Just weird. Melissa’s an astrobiologist.”

“Meaning…”

“Her specialty is extraterrestrial life.”

Carrick smiled but then saw how much I wasn’t and straightened out his face.

He clearly didn’t believe, but I’d seen stuff that I was pretty sure he hadn’t. I didn’t need him to believe, but I wanted him to take it seriously.

“Do you think you could find your way back to this place where you found the plants?” I asked.

“No. But I’d recognize it if I saw it.”

“Where was Tubbs when you called him this morning?”

“His lab at the university.”

“I’d like to talk to him in person.”

Carrick nodded. “I was thinking the same thing.”

We dropped in unannounced. Carrick didn’t suspect Tubbs of anything nefarious, but he was the only connection between Moose and Melissa and we couldn’t rule anything out. If he had something to hide, a surprise could make him slip up.

During the twenty-minute drive, Carrick and I talked a little about our backgrounds. We both had our secrets. We both told some lies. We both seemed comfortable with that.

Mostly, we talked about Melissa and Moose, found photos of them online, and compared notes on what we knew about them. We needed more information to begin forming legitimate theories. The illegitimate theories — the connections between Moose’s bizarro weed patch and Melissa’s bizarro specialty of extraterrestrial life — we kept to ourselves.

We found Tubbs in his third-floor biophysics lab surrounded by clicking and whirring machines and the vague smell that could have been the sulfur and menthol Carrick had described. Tubbs’s head, shaved clean where it wasn’t already bald, was bent over a microscope.

Carrick knocked gently on the door frame, trying not to startle him. It didn’t work.

Tubbs jumped as if the microscope had bitten him. “Who are you?” he demanded.

Carrick put up his hands reassuringly. “I’m Moose’s friend Doyle. The one who called earlier.”

Tubbs’s eyes shifted to me. “Who’s he?”

I held up my badge. “Joe Ledger. Homeland Security,” I said. “I’m a friend of Melissa Brant. She’s gone missing, too.”

Tubbs’s eyes filled with dread and he looked down at the floor. “I’ve been trying to call her.”

“We’re trying to find them both,” Carrick said. “So you need to tell us what’s going on.”

He gestured at his microscope. “That stuff Moose found is very, very strange.”

“Strange how?” I asked.

“All these weird compounds, some highly toxic. The arsenic content is off the charts. That’s why I called Melissa. That’s her thing, you know? Searching for life forms that use arsenic instead of phosphorus. But she’s been focusing on microbes so she didn’t believe it at first. But the more we looked at it, the more convinced she was that there was something important here.”

Carrick held up his hand. “Wait, why is she looking for life forms based on arsenic instead of phosphorus?”

Tubbs shrugged. “There’s a theory that some of the life on this planet might not have originated here, a ‘shadow biosphere.’ And if it originated somewhere else, one theory is that its metabolism might use arsenic instead of phosphorus, which this stuff seems to do.”

“So what are you saying?”

Tubbs put up his hands. “Well, she was saying it might be of extraterrestrial origin. I’m not saying that. In fact, now I’m pretty sure she’s wrong.”

Carrick snorted. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure, too.”

I ignored him. “Why’s that?”

“After they left, I compared the DNA to regular tiger cress DNA. It’s identical except for three chunks that are totally different.”

“You mean like, mutations?” I asked.

“Or do you mean like splices?” Carrick said.

Tubbs pointed at Carrick and said, “Bingo. There’s a company called Xenexgen, maybe ten minutes from here, that specializes in bioremediation using engineered microbes to pull contaminants out of polluted soil. One of the biggest sequences spliced into the tiger cress genome is almost identical to one they use for their arsenic remediation products. The weird thing is, most bioremediation products sequester the arsenic so it is less bioavailable. Melissa specifically said this arsenic is highly bioavailable.”

I shook my head. “It’s genetically engineered? Who would engineer a toxic version of a wild plant?”

Tubbs bit his lip. “Melissa’s theory is that it might not be toxic to everyone, or everything.”

Carrick snorted. “So, what, you think it’s genetically modified Purina Alien Chow?”

Tubbs didn’t smile. “Sounds crazy when you say it out loud, but I’d love to take another look at it.”

“What happened to your samples?” I asked.

“Moose and Melissa only left me a little bit. It turned into green goo overnight.”

As soon as we got outside, Carrick said, “You don’t believe that stuff, do you? The extraterrestrial stuff?”

I shrugged. “I’m just trying to find Moose and Melissa.”

“Right.” He rolled his eyes and shook his head. “So, next stop Xenexgen?”

I nodded and called Junie to see if she’d heard from Melissa.

“No.” Her voice sounded tight. “No one has seen her since last night. That presentation was a big deal for her. She wouldn’t have blown it off. Have you found out anything?”

“The last person she talked to was a guy named Moose Scott, a friend of a friend who found some weird plants out in the forest. He gave samples to Melissa to look at. Does that mean anything to you?”

“She’s an astrobiologist. Weird plants are kind of her thing.”

I told her what Tubbs had said.

“Arsenic? Hmm. Maybe that was her big thing she was on to. Did you talk to this Moose person?”

I paused. I didn’t want her to freak out, but I didn’t like keeping things from her — especially not things I knew she’d find out later. “Moose is missing, too.”

She gasped. “Joe, are you serious?”

“It doesn’t mean anything. They could have hit it off and gone somewhere together.” Although they wouldn’t have left their phones behind. “But I’m comparing notes with a friend of Scott’s, a Philly cop named Carrick. We’ll find them.”

I could hear her voice getting thick and wet. “Okay. Keep me posted.”

As I put down the phone, Carrick looked at me. “She’s worried?”

I nodded.

“You too?”

I shrugged. If I wasn’t worried, I wouldn’t be looking for her. “I don’t know Melissa well, but she didn’t seem the type to flake off.”

We drove in silence for a minute or two, then Carrick asked, “So what do we know about Xenexgen?”

It was a good question. I picked up my phone and called my pal Bug.

“Hey, Joe. How’s it going?” he said. “You and Junie having fun with all the saucer heads?”

I smiled. “Having fun being away from you guys, that’s for sure.”

Bug laughed. “I’d be deeply hurt if I didn’t know that was a lie. I know you miss me — why else would you be calling me?”

The conversation chilled the tiniest bit. I wouldn’t be calling him without a good reason, and good reasons were never good news. I was calling him because he ran MindReader, the DMS’s supersecret, superpowerful computer system.

“What can I do for you?”

“I’m here with a new friend,” I said, letting Bug know I was not speaking freely. “Philadelphia detective Doyle Carrick and I are looking into a couple of missing friends.”

Bug typed for a second. “Carrick looks legit… a bit of a loose cannon, makes some enemies, but he’s a righteous dude who makes a lot of busts and has been on the right side of some nasty fights.”

“Great. We’re looking for a Bruce ‘Moose’ Scott and a Melissa Brant, both went missing sometime last night.”

“Want me to track ’em? Credit cards, cell phones, the usual?”

“They left their phones and wallets behind, but see if anything pops up. Also, Brand left behind a prescription drug called Tapazole. She’s missed a couple doses, so anything you can find on that would be great. First, though, I need you to look into a company called Xenexgen.” I spelled it.

Bug typed some more, then said, “Headquarters in Oslo, Norway, and Monroe County, Pennsylvania.”

“What the hell are they doing out here?”

“Looks like the company was originally involved in coal. Acquired three years ago by current CEO Cecil Bortman. Very closely held, very quiet.… There’s some very heavy-duty encryption protecting their systems.”

“Apparently they have a line of bioengineered products used for hazardous waste remediation?”

“Let’s see… yes, Clean Sweep, a line of microbial products that sequesters heavy metals and other pollutants in soil. It seems to be one of their main product lines. I don’t see much in the way of sales, but they seem sound financially.”

“What’s their communications like?”

“Not as secure as their servers, but they’re pretty quiet.”

“Okay. Keep an eye on that. We’re about to visit their Monroe County location.”

“You thinking they might get chatty after you leave?”

“Exactly.”

“You got it.”

We drove through fields and farms and wooded hills, rounded a bend, and there was Xenexgen. The front was all high-tech global HQ office chic with the chrome double-helix X logo. As we pulled into the vast and almost empty parking lot, we could see production facilities in the back. Along one side, there was a long row of shipping containers with the blue Xenexgen logo being loaded with pallets of blue-and-white sacks.

Carrick parked in front of the main entrance, a curved overhang of mirrored glass sheltering a row of green glass doors. Inside, the lobby was more mirrored glass and chrome, a very modern impression that was seriously undermined by the cardboard boxes stacked two deep, at least three or four high, against the marble walls. The old guy at the desk eyed us for employee badges, then sat up straighter, surprised that we didn’t have any.

“Can I help you?”

I held up my badge. “We’re looking into a possible link between a couple of missing persons and one of your products.”

He stared at us for a second, then picked up a phone, spoke quietly into it, and told us, “Someone will be with you shortly.”

Half a minute later, a short, odd-looking man in an expensive suit appeared behind us. His face was pale and disconcertingly placid, his eyes drooped, and his skin was smooth but saggy, like bad cosmetic work.

“How may I help you gentlemen?” he said. He had an odd hitch in his voice, like a faint but unfamiliar accent. He extended his hand. Shaking it felt like grasping a wisp of smoke.

“How do you do, Mr.…?”

“Bortman,” he said. “I’m the CEO here at Xenexgen.”

I looked over Bortman’s shoulder at the security guy behind the desk. He shrugged and nodded.

“Unusual for a CEO to respond in person to a request for information,” I said.

Bortman smiled again, weirdly. “We take our support for law enforcement very seriously. So what can we do for you?”

“We’re looking into the disappearance of a young woman named Melissa Brant and a young man named Moose Scott.”

He paused, as if thinking about it, then shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t know them. Are they employees here?”

“No, but they recently discovered a plant growing in this area that seemed to match some of the genetic characteristics of your Clean Sweep soil remediation microbes.”

Bortman let out a hiccup that was probably intended to be a laugh. “As you said, Clean Sweep is a microbe, not a plant.”

Carrick said, “So you’re not developing green plants with similar characteristics?”

Bortman shook his head.

“Any chance the gene splice could have jumped species?” Carrick said.

Bortman hiccuped again. “No, but we’d be happy to look at a sample, if you have one.”

“We don’t, unfortunately,” I said, handing him a card. “If you have any other thoughts, please let us know.”

Bortman did his smilelike thing and said, “Certainly.” He palmed the card and slipped it into his pocket, reminding me of one of those old-fashioned toy banks with the hand that comes out and swipes the coin.

As we turned to go, Carrick pointed at the stacks against the wall. “What’s with the boxes? Are you moving?”

“Minor restructuring.”

Back in the car, Carrick said, “That was one strange little man.”

I nodded. “Seriously strange.”

My phone buzzed. It was Bug. I put him on speaker. “What have you got for us?”

“First, that Tapazole is heavy-duty stuff, used to treat hyperthyroidism. Missing a dose can be extremely dangerous. Second, we just monitored two bursts of transmissions from Xenexgen, both seriously encrypted, one routed back to Oslo, and one to a cell phone a few miles away from you. The coordinates don’t match anything on file, but I’ll send them to you.”

Carrick watched as I opened the coordinates in my GPS. The map revealed a solid expanse of green.

“Zoom out,” he said, and when I did, Schoolhouse Road appeared to the south.

“That’s it,” Carrick said. “That’s where Moose found the tiger cress.”

I pressed the navigate button and Carrick turned the car around.

Twenty minutes later, we were stumbling through the woods, holding out our phones. Me with my GPS, Carrick with a compass app.

“This looks familiar,” he said.

“GPS says we should be almost there.”

He pointed at a rocky incline twenty feet high. “Right over there.”

As we climbed up, I smelled something different from the rest of the woods, but it wasn’t weird or chemical or alien. It smelled natural. When we reached the top, I recognized the smell of soil. Exposed earth.

Below us, the entire valley was stripped clean, scoured of vegetation. It wasn’t level, as if it were ready for builders, it was just a raw, open wound.

Carrick said, “Huh,” as he tramped down into the middle of the glen and turned in a slow circle.

“Not how you remembered?” I called down to him.

He shook his head. “Weird. There’s no sign of heavy equipment.”

“You’re sure it’s the same place?”

He nodded, then something caught his eye, a little scrap of white and blue in the middle of all that brown. He picked it up and looked at it, recoiling as he sniffed it.

“What is it?” I asked, coming over to where he was.

He held up a scrap of white plastic with the blue Xenexgen logo. “Clean Sweep,” he said, holding it up in front of my face.

I caught a faint whiff of that strange mixture of sulfur and menthol.

Just then my phone buzzed. “Bug. What have you got?”

“Shit’s going down.”

“Talk to us,” I said, putting him on speaker.

“I’m breaking into Xenexgen’s files and they’re being wiped clean even as I’m doing it. The place is bustling, too. Lots of data coming in and out, ever since you guys left. We got satellite thermal scans. I’ll send you one. But here’s the thing, people are scrambling all over the place, all except for two figures lying horizontal in a room on the third floor and two other figures standing outside the room, like they’re guarding it. I think your friends might be in there, and it looks like whoever is keeping them there is packing up and getting ready to go.”

By the time the scan came through, we were already crashing through the woods so fast, I was worried one of us would break a leg or get impaled on a broken branch. Miraculously, we burst out of the woods right next to the car, unharmed.

Carrick pulled the car in a tight, loud circle, and we sped back toward Xenexgen.

Almost immediately, Bug called back. I put him on speaker.

“Xenexgen just closed down their operations in Oslo,” he said. “Today. Announced the sale of their assets to a German chemical company, and the transfer of their patents to a trust in the Cayman Islands.”

Carrick whistled.

“Anything else?” I said.

“I’m working on it. I’ll call you when I get anything.”

“If I don’t answer, text.”

“Got it.”

“Do we have anyone in a fifty-mile radius?”

“I’m in Trenton.”

I was quiet. Bug was a badass with a computer, but not so much in the conventional sense.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “I hear you. I can assemble a team, but they won’t be our guys.”

“Do it.”

“Probably take them a half hour.”

“Then tell them to bring bail money and Band-Aids.”

I thumbed off the phone and Carrick said, “Jesus, big day at Xenexgen. What’s that about?”

“Let’s find out.”

Even in the bright sunshine the Xenexgen compound looked dark. Armed guards patrolled the lawn, and Carrick eased up on the accelerator so we could get a look at them. The place disappeared behind a bend in the road and Carrick pulled off the road, rumbling thirty feet down a slight incline.

As we came to a stop, I turned to him. “You’re armed, right?”

He nodded. “One on my hip and one on my ankle. Are we here to ask questions or are we just going in to get our friends?”

I shrugged. “What did you think of the answers we got last time?”

“Point taken.” He rubbed his chin, an expression on his face as if he were chewing something awful that was going to be even worse to swallow. “We sure we don’t want to involve local law enforcement?”

“Do you even know what jurisdiction we’re in?” I could have asked Bug and found out in three seconds, but that wasn’t the point. I did not want to involve local law enforcement. “Technically, Melissa and Moose are still hours away from being officially designated missing persons.”

He nodded, looking relieved. “No, I hear you. I’m trying to make it a habit to at least ask. Nice to hear someone else saying it.”

“You want to wait for backup?”

Carrick shook his head. “I hate waiting.” He paused. “I’m not really crazy about backup, either, but…”

My phone buzzed again with an updated thermal scan, recent enough that it showed our car parked off the road. “There’s seven guards out front plus two in the back,” I said, counting. “Another dozen inside the main building.”

Carrick pointed at one of the two horizontal figures. “This one’s suddenly brighter than the others.”

He was right.

Melissa’s phone buzzed in my pocket and I took it out. Another medication reminder, only this one said, URGENT WARNING: FAILURE TO TAKE TAPAZOLE AS DIRECTED MAY RESULT IN SERIOUS COMPLICATIONS INCLUDING DEATH.

“Jesus,” Carrick said, squinting over at the Xenexgen complex, as if he were trying to see if they were in there.

I called Dr. Rudy Sanchez, chief medical officer at DMS and my best friend.

“Hey, Joe—”

I cut him off. “Sorry, Rudy. Urgent medical question: What are the symptoms if someone taking Tapazole misses a couple of doses?”

“Um…” He thought for a second. “Let’s see, that’s hyperthyroidism, very dangerous. There’s a high fever—”

“Great. Thanks. Gotta go.” I ended the call and pointed at the bright figure on the thermal scan. “That’s Melissa Brand,” I told Carrick. “She’s lighting up because of a fever. She’s in danger and we need to get her out.”

He nodded. “Let’s go.”

We checked our weapons, then got out and slipped through the woods.

From the tree line, the glass façade lay to our right, across forty yards of rolling lawn. To our left was a sprawl of industrial buildings, warehouses, and cargo containers. As we watched, a door at the rear of the main building opened and two guards with rifles emerged. They walked around to the front while the heavy, reinforced door closed slowly behind them. It took forever, especially the last six inches.

When it finally clicked shut, Carrick said, “Nine seconds.”

“Are you fast?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “If I’m motivated. You’re thinking next time we try to catch it before it closes?”

“Without getting shot, yeah.”

“Right. Without getting shot.” He eyed the door, then the two guards disappearing around the front of the complex. “Yeah, I’m fast.”

We hunkered down, waiting.

Thirty seconds later, Carrick tapped my arm and pointed to two guards approaching from the left.

We watched as they opened the door and slipped inside, then we dashed across the grass. I was reaching for the edge of the slowly closing door when it swung out toward us. Two new guards were coming toward us, speaking in Swedish or Norwegian. They had the same saggy skin and drooping eyes as Bortman. I didn’t have time to think about it because they raised their guns and we went in punching. They were bigger up close, but surprisingly fragile. I planted a right on my guy’s chin and he dropped before I could follow up.

Same thing with Carrick — a thunderous right to the other guy’s nose and he was down.

We exchanged a shrug, then dragged them inside, catching our breath as the door slowly closed. The latest scan showed the room next to us empty. We dragged the guards inside, cuffed them to a radiator, and took their ID cards and rifles.

As we headed to the stairway thirty feet away, we heard voices approaching, that same lilting Norswitzdenavian or whatever. We slipped through the door and into the stairwell, hugging the wall behind the door, in case they were headed our way.

They were. The door swung open and two huge Norswitzdenavians came through, looking just like the others. They raised their rifles, but we were already on them: one to shut them up, one to knock them back, then they were crumpled on the floor, leaving us with that weird feeling that we should still be fighting.

A flicker of doubt ran through my mind. They had big guns and they were quick to point them, but maybe they were glorified suburban office park security staff instead of paramilitary goons. Maybe Moose and Melissa weren’t here and nothing nefarious was going on.

That’s what was going through my mind as we rounded the steps and another one entered the stairwell.

“Police!” I said, holding up my DMS badge.

For an instant we all froze, Carrick behind me, the guard six steps up from us, staring down with a blank expression. In a flash, he raised his rifle in an arc headed right up my middle.

I heard two explosions, almost simultaneous, one behind me and one in front, excruciatingly loud in the cinder-block stairway.

Firing around my head, Carrick managed to clip the guard’s shoulder. The rifle went off as he fell, peppering us with hot concrete chips as the bullet slammed into the steps.

I grabbed the rifle before he hit the ground and Carrick patted him down for other weapons, then he stopped and put a hand on the guard’s neck. He looked up at me, bewildered. “He’s dead.…”

I felt the guy’s wrist. Nothing.

It didn’t make sense. Not in the “killing is senseless” way, although maybe that was true. But shooting around me, Carrick had barely tagged the guy. He should be rolling around in pain and calling us assholes.

Carrick shook his head. “He shouldn’t be dead.”

He was right. But we didn’t have time to discuss it. I clapped my hand on Carrick’s shoulder. “Maybe he hit his head or had a heart attack. Who knows? But he was pointing that thing at me, so thanks. Now, we’ve got to get Moose and Melinda and get out of here.”

He nodded and we continued up the steps, pausing at the top while I peered through the door. The scan showed Moose and Melissa — if that’s who it was — in a room with two guards down the corridor to the left of the one I was looking out onto.

As we crept toward the next corridor, Carrick tapped my elbow and motioned that he would go low. I nodded, and took out my badge and held it with my gun. Carrick counted down with his fingers — three, two, one — then I stepped out from behind the wall as Carrick slid across the floor with his gun two-handed in front of him.

“Police!” I said. “Don’t move!”

For an awkward moment, they didn’t. There were two of them in front of the door, staring at us out of faces remarkably similar to the others. I felt bad for Carrick, down on the floor, ready for action that it seemed wasn’t going to happen.

Then, without a word or a glance at each other, they raised their guns at us. “Don’t Move!” I thundered, but they did. And we shot them.

When someone’s ready to shoot a clearly identified cop, you don’t mess around.

Carrick rolled to his feet and we approached them fast but cautious. They were already dead.

“What the hell?” Carrick asked. “Are they even human?”

I was thinking the same thing. It gave me the creeps, but there wasn’t time to discuss it.

The door was unlocked. We burst through it, Carrick first, me covering, ready to shoot the first easy-to-kill whatever-they-were that made a move. But the room was empty except for two sofas, Melissa on one, Moose on the other, just waking up.

Moose looked disoriented but otherwise fine. Melissa was flushed red and shivering, her hair plastered to her face with sweat.

“Joe…?” she said. “What’s going on?”

“Doyle?” Moose said. “What the hell?”

They seemed relieved to see us, but increasingly alarmed, especially when they saw our weapons.

“We’re not sure,” I told them. “Are you okay?”

“Where are we?” Melissa asked. She seemed about to swoon, then her eyes went wide and she hugged herself. “What time is it?”

“It’s two in the afternoon,” Carrick told them. “You’re at Xenexgen headquarters. How did you get here?”

Moose shook his head and said, “I have no idea.”

At the same time, Melissa said, “Two PM?! No wonder I feel like crap. I need my medicine.”

“We have it right here,” I told her, and shook a pill out of the bottle.

She dry swallowed it and said, “I think I need a doctor.”

“Sure thing,” I said. “But first we need to get you out of here.” I squeezed her shoulder reassuringly. “There’s been some violence outside. People have been killed.” Her eyes went wide. So did Moose’s. “We had to fight our way to get you, and we’re probably going to have to fight our way out. So you’ve got to keep it together and try to keep up, okay?”

Carrick tried to give Moose his backup piece, but he didn’t try too hard, as though maybe they’d had this conversation before. Melissa was in no shape to handle one, even if she wanted to.

“Okay,” I said, “you two just stay behind us.” I told them the route we’d be taking. “Stay close and be ready to run like hell when we do.”

Moose put his arm under Melissa’s to steady her. But when I opened the door, there was no sign of the two dead guards, no blood on the floor, nothing. Carrick and I stopped so abruptly that Moose and Melissa stumbled into us from behind.

“What is it?” Moose whispered loudly.

Carrick and I looked at each other, but I didn’t have any answers and apparently neither did he.

He turned to Moose and put a finger to his lips. As good a response as any.

We walked around the spot where the two dead guards had been, then crept along the opposite side. Carrick took the lead. He didn’t bother taking out his badge. We were done with that for now.

The next hallway was clear and so was the stairway. No bodies, no blood, just a divot in one of the steps and a sprinkling of concrete chips that ground under our feet.

Melissa seemed oblivious, just trying to keep up, but Moose studied the looks passing between Carrick and me. We kept moving because we had to, but frankly I would have liked to stop right there and talk it out.

The first floor was empty, too. I was mostly relieved, but something weird was going on and it was getting weirder. Carrick slowed, so I took the lead. The exit was twenty feet away. The car sixty yards farther. I just wanted to get us the hell out of there. But as I was about to open the door, I heard another door open behind me. I looked back to see Carrick checking the room where we had cuffed the first two guards.

He shook his head — it was empty — then joined us at the exit.

Just then my phone let out a long buzz, startling me, a string of texts from Bug, as if service had been cut off and now it was back. The texts asked what was going on, then were we okay, then said backup was on its way. The last one was another thermal scan, showing just four figures — us — approaching the back door. No one else was in the building. No one was patrolling the lawn. The accompanying text said, Is that you? What’s going on in there?

“What is it?” Melissa whispered.

“Yeah,” Moose said. “What’s going on?”

“We’ll talk about it later.” Carrick shook his head. “Let’s get out of here.”

Stepping outside, I would have known even without the scan that no one was out there. It was absolutely quiet except for a soft breeze. As we crossed the lawn toward the tree line, I heard the distant thump of rotor blades approaching.

Moose and Melissa looked to the sky as the helicopter appeared over the trees. Carrick tensed, still holding his gun.

Another text came in saying, We have your visual.

“They’re with me,” I said.

He relaxed slightly and Moose stepped up next to him, raising his voice over the throb of the helicopter blades.

“Thanks for getting us out of there,” he said. “Now, can you tell us what the hell’s going on?”

As we waited for the chopper, Carrick filled them in on most of what had happened, and what little we knew about why. By the time he was finished, they both looked dazed again. Then he looked over Moose’s head and said, “The containers are gone.”

I turned and saw he was right. In the ten minutes we’d been inside, the entire row of containers had disappeared. After that it was too loud to hear any of us speak, and I was relieved. The chopper dropped fast but landed softly. Four SEALs in tactical gear hit the ground just before the chopper did, followed closely by a pair of medics.

I held up my badge and three of the SEALs fanned out past us, alert, lethal, ready for anything, and surprised to find nothing. The leader came up to me, looking around as he did. “Ledger?”

I nodded. “Pretty sure the place is deserted. Just secure it until my team can evaluate it. And don’t touch anything.”

He nodded and trotted off, speaking into his throat-mic. I grabbed one of the medics and pointed toward Moose and Melissa. “She’s missed two or three doses of this. We just gave her one, but she’s in bad shape. And they both seem like they were doped, so check them for signs of chloroform, Rohypnol, anything like that, okay?”

The medics nodded and then guided Moose and Melissa over to the chopper. The blades had stopped spinning. As they passed, Moose leaned toward Carrick and said, “Might be a while before I go foraging again.”

Carrick slapped him on the shoulder. “You’ll be fine.”

That’s when Bug jumped out of the chopper and ran over, looking around to see if things were hot.

“They’re gone,” he said just as Carrick came up beside me and said:

“We need to figure out what the hell that was all about.”

I introduced them and they shook hands, then Carrick continued. “Seriously. Apart from whatever happened out in the woods, they kidnapped two people, drugged them, did who-knows-what,” earning an alarmed look from Moose. “We need to find them and arrest them. Get to the bottom of all this.”

Bug shook his head. “They’re gone,” he repeated. He held up a tablet computer with a thermal scan showing the entire complex empty except for the four of us crossing the grass.

“Then we need to find out where they went,” Carrick said.

I nodded and turned to Bug. “We’ll find Bortman. And we’ll send a team to their offices in Oslo.”

Bug shook his head again. “Joe, you don’t understand, they’re all gone. According to Mind—” He glanced at Carrick and caught himself. “According to our electronic surveillance, Xenexgen’s computers don’t even exist anymore. The company has been dissolved. As of an hour ago. The assets were liquidated. Everything. The leases on Bortman’s penthouse apartment in Oslo and his mansion in Waverly expired today. Even this whole complex,” he said, waving his arm. “Some holding company bought it at a steal. I don’t know how long the deal’s been in the works, but it’s done.”

“That’s crazy,” Carrick said. “You can’t make an entire multinational corporation disappear in a matter of hours.”

Bug shook his head. “I wouldn’t have thought so, either, but apparently these guys did. They’re gone completely.”

Melissa broke away from the medics and came over. “They can’t be gone,” she said. “Why would they go to the trouble of engineering a terrestrial plant with a totally alien nutritional profile if they weren’t planning on staying?”

“An alien nutritional profile?” Carrick said, laughing. He rolled his eyes and opened his mouth as if he were about to say something sarcastic. But then he stopped, as if suddenly things made sense. His face turned pale as he looked to the sky.

“Melissa’s right,” I said. “We need to scour this place for clues. Their Oslo facilities, too. And the spot out in the woods. We need to find out as much as we can about these guys. They might be gone for now, but I’m pretty sure they’re coming back.”

Jon McGoran is the author of the Doyle Carrick thrillers Drift, Deadout, Down to Zero, and most recently Dust Up, from Tor/Forge Books. His YA science fiction thriller Spliced will be published November 2017 by Holiday House Books. Writing as D. H. Dublin, he is the author of the forensic thrillers Body Trace, Blood Poison, and Freezer Burn. His short fiction includes the novella After Effects, from Amazon StoryFront; the short story “Bad Debt,” which received an honorable mention in The Best American Mystery Stories 2014; and stories in a variety of anthologies and publications in multiple genres, including the X-Files anthology The Truth Is Out There and the Zombies vs Robots anthology No Man’s Land, from IDW. When not writing fiction, he works as a freelance writer, editor, and story consultant. He is a member of the International Thriller Writers and the Mystery Writers of America and a founding member of the Philadelphia Liars Club. Find him on Twitter @JonMcGoran, on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jonmcgoran, or at www.jonmcgoran.com.