Page 8 of Red Dragon’s Heart

Madeleine Fox wasn’t planning on going through with the exchange—she wouldn’t need anything like this elaborate a setup for that.

She was planning on walking away with the data and the money, after taking out Chisholm and his team—but not with another explosion.

She was a chemist, and this was going to be chemical warfare.

She truly was evil.

Chapter 5

Maddie stepped off the bus near the warehouse she’d commandeered, shivering as the wind snaked between the buildings and sent a scatter of raindrops into her face. She must be the only criminal in the world to arrive at a million-dollar extortion rendezvous on a city bus.

Her messenger bag pulled at her shoulder, heavy with her laptop, tools, and everything else she could imagine needing, including an emergency stash of cash. She could go on the run with what was in that bag.

Hell, she had gone on the run with what was in that bag.

But it was time to stop running. Troy needed her, and Eric needed to get what was coming to him. She had to expose him for the liar he was, and then use her research to do good instead of Eric using it for evil.

The industrial area she’d picked was eerie now, at dusk, the security lights on the various buildings barely making dent in the gloom. There were no other pedestrians around. There never were—it was one of the reasons she’d chosen this location.

Far away she heard the grind of a semi-truck’s gears as it pulled up to a loading dock. Farther off still there was a hum of traffic, but the local silence settled around her.

She stopped outside the truck repair shop and checked out ‘her’ warehouse. She saw nothing out of the ordinary—no vehicles in the lot, no lights inside. Probably no ambush, then, but the weight of the gun in her coat pocket was reassuring anyway.

Easing the bag on her shoulder, she circled the long way around to the back of her warehouse. She’d searched long and hard to find it, though she wasn’t doing anything as respectable as renting it. She didn’t need to—the company that owned it was tied up in receivership mid-construction, so it wasn’t usable for business.

She’d only needed it for a few weeks. Enough time to set up her trap and lure the monsters in.

The back entrance had been arranged to look inaccessible, so no one would be watching this side of the building. But there was one route inside—under tarps and between stacks of construction materials.

She opened the padlock with her key and pushed the squeaky door open. Inside, she stood quietly and shut her eyes, listening, feeling the place out.

There was no danger here—not yet, anyway. She couldn’t explain how she knew, but she did—and in the last few months, she’d learned to trust her instincts. They were the only thing that had kept her alive.

Hopefully, they’d keep her alive just a little bit longer.

Maddie flipped one switch in the panel by the door, illuminating just enough of the overhead lights to see her way upstairs. The open metal staircase hummed under her feet, leading to a kind of balcony that had held the company’s offices.

Everything was just the way she’d left it. The under-construction office with the bulletproof, two-way mirror looking into the conference room, and its bits and pieces of broken furniture; the conference room itself, with her trap.

She took the fake Belvedere hard drives out of her bag and put them into one side of the trap, then slid the door across and locked it in place, leaving the other half open.

Then she went back into the office and set up her laptop in its mobile case. If she had to leave in a hurry, all she had to do was slam the case closed and go.

Once that was up and running, she tested the microphones and speakers in both rooms, along with the hidden cameras in the conference room.

Everything was perfect—it had to be. She would only get one shot at this.

As she worked she began to get an odd sensation, as if there were a presence in the room with her. Not a dangerous one—in fact, the sensation was oddly comforting. A couple of times she found herself stopping work to listen—and then felt ridiculous. There was no one there.

When everything was set she went into the office to wait, clicking the remote app on her phone to bolt the reinforced metal door. The boarded-up windows were secure, except for the one that contained the debris chute. Below the window level, Maddie could hear the chute flapping in the rising wind.

She sat down in an old dusty office chair to wait. She sipped water from her bag and nibbled on a sandwich from the café, but her stomach was too knotted for her to eat more than a few bites.

She was really doing this. Maddie Fox, the chemistry nerd who’d spent over half her life sequestered in one lab or another, who used to never stand up to anyone unless their scientific theories were clearly wrong, was sitting here in an abandoned building waiting to meet with a gang of criminals.

Also known as her former coworkers.

She should have gotten out a year ago, after the last place she worked, Grenadier Labs, was attacked by extremists. But she’d been so excited about the cutting-edge DNA and gene research they were doing, that when Eric had invited her to Belvedere Labs to continue her research in secret, she’d gone right along with him.