“What?”
“Need you to promise me something. If I give you his…uh,Turner’slocation, you’ve got to fly him out. Now. Before—”
“Fly? Now? I can’t fly like this.” Leo massaged her temple with one hand. “I can hardly see straight.”
“You’ve got to.” The woman looked out the window again, and Leo realized with a jolt that she wasn’t admiring the view. She was looking for something, searching the cloudless sky, anxiety in every deeply etched line of her body. “Today.” When their gazes met, the woman’s dark eyes were so desperate, Leo couldn’t look away. “Right now.”
“The last aircraft took off for Anchorage this morning, with my teammates on board,” Leo said, barely breathing. “No planes here.”
“Might have one you can use.” She leaned forward. So did Leo, caught up in this now—not just the excitement of finally catching a break, but the palpable apprehension that the woman exuded. Something was happening. Finally, a lead in their search for Campbell Turner and the virus. “Promise you’ll pull my godson out. Promise me.”
Leo pictured the fifty-three-year-old man she and her team were after, and wondered just how old this woman was. “Campbell Turner’s your godson?”
Amka met her eyes head-on and held them. “He’s the man you want.”
“Why now? Why this very minute? What happened?”
And then, as if conjured by the question, a sound reached Leo’s ears, so familiar and out of place in the wilds of Alaska that it sent shivers skittering across her overheated skin. She stopped abruptly, head tilted. “Hear that?”
Old Amka gave her a funny look before turning to eye the mountains in search of whatever it was she’d heard. A few seconds later, she nodded slowly. “Doesn’t sound like a plane.”
“It’s not. That’s a helicopter,” said Leo, her voice hard, sure. “Thought they weren’t allowed in the park.”
“It’s them.”
Another wave of chills racked her body. “Who? It’swho?”
“People comin’ for him.” Shaking her head, Old Amka stood and hobbled to the window, where her fingers gripped the sill so hard, her umber skin went white at the knuckles. “My cousin called me from Juneau. Now, Janet’s nosy, so she—”
“Cut to the chase.”
Her shoulders slumped. “We’re too late.”
“Too late for what?” Those were twin turboshaft engines approaching. Leo would know that sound anywhere, no matter how out of place. There weren’t all that many reasons for that type of equipment to visit these particular sticks. The only ones allowed were Search and Rescue aircraft, but she doubted that was what headed their way.
Only one entity would send this kind of airpower here right now: Chronos Corporation. One of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world.
Earlier in the year, she and her teammates had just barely survived a confrontation with a Chronos-funded team of scientists and mercenaries tasked with stealing and testing a deadly virus found under the ice in Antarctica. What they still didn’t know was what Chronos wanted with the virus, or why the clinical vaccine trials they’d planned to run had been kept secret.
Today, there were but two known samples of that virus—the one that she and her team had rescued from Antarctica and the one stolen a decade earlier by Campbell Turner.
The only certainty in this whole affair was that Chronos would stop at nothing to get ahold of the virus. Now, it was up to her team to get to Turner before the other guys.
“What happened, Amka? I want details.”
From the west, the twin engines droned closer, louder, overwhelming in their intensity, the rhythmic thump of rotors thrumming through Leo’s bones like the vibrating call of a tuning fork. It sent her blood pumping one way and her brain spinning another.
She knew helicopters the way she knew her family, complete with all the love and guilt and dread of those intimate relationships. Right now, her belly flipped with a confusing mix of craving and disquiet.
“A team stopped to refuel at the airfield in Juneau. Janet said they’re clearly paramilitary. Got top-level clearance to fly here. My cousin overheard them talking about coordinates. Exactly where El—” She snapped her mouth shut. “They’ll hunt him down.” Shaking her head, she sank back into the chair, shoulders bowed. “It’s too late. I got here too late.”
Never too late, Leo thought.Not while there’s breath in my body.She hadn’t come all the way to Alaska to give up her search the second the opposition arrived. Her team had worked too hard to stop now. They had a job to do—a virus to retrieve, a corporation to stop. People had already died for this. It had to end.
Leo wouldn’t admit defeat until she’d done everything in her power to keep Chronos Corp from getting its clutches on Campbell Turner and the virus.
But that aircraft sounded awfully close. “Wait. Is he here, in Schink’s Station?” Wouldn’t it be ironic if Turner had been hiding in town this whole time, right under their noses? Instead of wasting days looking for the guy, she and her teammates could be back at base, questioning the man and safeguarding the sample. Leo’s pulse picked up at the possibility.
“No. Why?”
