“Right.” He walked on as he considered the ramifications. It would be very bad if those men had gotten ahold of certain ice cores. Because what they contained…well, their actions pretty much confirmed that it was dangerous.
But if after all of this effort, they’d taken off with the wrong cores… His flashlight shone on a pile of heavy-looking white bags, hanging over the shelf like big, fat lolling tongues trying to lick the floor.
Angel crouched. He bent beside her, focused the light, and let out a long, slow breath.
“Still there,” she breathed. “I switched the date stickers but never got to one.”
He pulled them out, eyeing them one at a time until he got to the one that still had its sticker on it. “I know what their payload was.”
“What is it? What’s worth all these lives?”
“I found something in a core a few weeks back. It looked like…” He shook his head, sure now. “Cortez has…had a colleague back in the UK. He sent her images and she confirmed that it’s—”
Something heavy and dark rose up from his chest, stopped his air and cut off his voice.
“What?” The word was less than a whisper.
“Shit. It has to be linked. She died. House fire. Cortez was devastated when he found out.”
Angel let out a sound—low and pained. Her eyes were massive in the dark. He couldn’t look away from them. Didn’t even try.
“It’s a virus, Angel. A very old virus, buried deep in the ice.”
“A virus? What do they want with that?”
“I don’t know.” Even as he said the words, an idea occurred to him—the kind of worst-case scenario that couldn’t possibly be real and yet clicked right into place. All the deaths. The military precision. The warning scrawled in blood. “Maybe…maybe a bioweapon?” Shit. This was bad. Worse than bad. If his gut instinct was right, it was potentially catastrophic.
“What can we do?”
The tubes sat beside them, gleaming innocently in the dim light.
He had an idea of what they could do—what they had to do—but he wasn’t quite ready to share it yet.
“We’ll uh…figure it out.” He stood, heavy from the sudden weight of what lay ahead. He swallowed and shined the light up the long length of the arch. “Where did they—” There was too much crap in his throat. He tried again. “Alex. Where’d they kill him?”
“Up there.” Her usually musical voice was no better off than his. “By the rest of the tubes.”
He squinted. There was nothing there now.
“You sure?”
“Yes.” Ah, there was the voice he knew. “Of course I’m—” She turned to look at the spot where he shone his flashlight. “Where is he?” She spun. “I swear he was—”
He reached into his pocket, then grabbed her hand and slapped the 9mm bullet case he’d found into her gloved palm. “I believe you.” He leaned down, caught her eye, and held it. “Even without this, I’d believe you, Angel.”
She stared at the object in her hand before looking up at him. “Okay. Okay, then.”
He opened his mouth and closed it again, then headed toward the door.
“What? What are you not saying?” She ran to keep up.
“The ice cores.” He didn’t pause until they were back outside, on the bright, clean ice. “When they open up the dummies, it won’t take long for them to figure out that they’ve got the wrong ones.”
Her hand flew to her mouth. “You think they’ll come back?”
“Yeah.” He nodded without hesitation. “They’ll be back.”
“What do we do?”
