Chapter Fifteen
6:23 a.m.
“Dr. Lloyd?”
The man sounded close. Familiar. Not a threat. She rolled over, giving whoever it was bothering her her back.
“Ava!”
Wow, someone was grumpy.
Ava opened her eyes and looked over her shoulder to find Henry standing next to the cot, glaring at her.
She frowned back. “What?”
“Dr. Rodrigues has lifted the travel restrictions for EMS, CDC, police, and military. It’s time for you to get back to work and my turn to get a little sleep.”
Sleep? Memory of what she and River had done together rushed through her mind, scalding her with sensuous heat.
Ohmigod. They’d gotten each other off like two randy teenagers sneaking in some nooky. It should never have happened. She should be sorry and embarrassed. Instead, she felt…rested.
“Where’s River?” she asked as she untangled herself from the blanket and clambered out of the cot.
“Bathroom.”
“That sounds like a good idea.”
Henry lay down on his back and threw an arm over his eyes. “At least you two weren’t noisy.”
Ava stared at him. His security cameras.
Heat crawled up her neck and face, but she pretended she hadn’t heard and walked away. His chuckle was soft enough to only follow her for a few feet.
The bathroom was a wash truck used for widespread emergencies. It had bathrooms equipped with running hot water and showers. She cleaned herself up, then went in search of River. She found him in the clean tent, eating and reading on the phone he’d stolen off Geer.
She grabbed an MRE and sat down across from him, determined to lock their make-out session in a box in the back of her head. It would distract, disarm, and derail her thinking otherwise. Professional, calm, and intelligent—that was her mantra for today.
“Anything probative?” she asked, nodding at the phone.
He gave her a hot look, making her breath catch. So much for locking the damn box. His words, however, were all business. “It’s full of exactly the kind of stuff you’d expect in a college student’s phone. Text messages to friends, and he’s busy on social media, posting lots of pictures, but oddly, nothing at all for the last three days.”
“Nothing?” That wasn’t good.
“No pics, texts, or anything else outgoing. It’s like he shut his phone off or stopped talking to the whole world.”
“That is a little weird. Could he have a second phone?”
“Maybe. That would explain the lack of action on this one.”
She watched him scroll through the text history on the phone rapidly, and then he went back to read some more thoroughly. Those hands had been so tender yet strong on her.
Get your head in the game.
She cleaned up their food containers.
He glanced up when she returned to their small table. “I think I know where we need to look.”
“Okay,” she said, taking note of movement in the doorway. Walking into the structure were Toland and the two Homeland Security agents he’d been with earlier.
“Homeland is here,” she said quietly.
River put the phone away in a pocket, as if it were his own. “Let me do most of the talking.”
He must have a plan. At least this time he told her before he did something…creative.
The Homeland agents stopped a few feet away from the table, looking unhappy and angry.
“How’s Geer?” River asked. “We haven’t heard anything.”
“Dead,” Toland said.
Oh no. Finding out why the man had acted as he had was now going to be a lot harder.
“Fuck,” River said, and it sounded like he meant it.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Ava added. “Did he regain consciousness at all?”
“No.” Toland stared at River. The agent looked like he was barely holding his composure together. “Did he talk to you before he collapsed?”
“We mostly argued about his being there. He was in the apartment bathroom, looking at some test tubes and vials of…something. Nothing was labeled, and he seemed really worked up about it. I asked him if he’d found any evidence or explanation for the bathroom science experiment, but he said he hadn’t. He thought there was something important about all that goop, but the grenades were in the same room. I finally convinced him to leave, but he didn’t get far before he passed out.” River shrugged and glanced at Toland’s wingmen. “Did you get any information from that roommate of Roger Squires? Is he still in the wind?”
Toland relaxed slightly. “We haven’t found him yet. The little shit gave a convincing I don’t know nothing about nothing act, but he did let slip that there were several other students who seemed to spend a lot of time in that bathroom.”
“Could he have been lying?” Ava asked.
“Anything’s possible.” He looked at them pointedly. “Are you still investigating?”
“Yeah, despite getting raked over the coals for blowing up a building,” River said wryly. “The roommate’s name is Ethan Harris. He’s the only lead we’ve got, so we’re going to start at his home here in El Paso. It turns out his father is Senator Mark Harris.”
“I’ve met him,” Toland said, his shoulders relaxing even further. “Not the easiest guy to talk to.”
“Yeah? Do you know him well enough that he’d cooperate with you? Quickly?” River asked. “Time is not our friend.”
“I think we could handle that,” Toland said with an almost smile. “What are you and Dr. Lloyd going to do in the meantime?”
She didn’t like the suspicion in his voice. Was Toland trying to protect someone? “I thought we’d head to the university, go through his locker, maybe talk to a couple of his professors. See if anyone has noticed a change in young Mr. Harris’s behavior, find out who he hung out with.” River made eye contact with all three agents. “Contact us if you find out anything. We’ll do the same.”
“Of course,” Toland said in a slightly offended tone. The three agents grabbed some MREs and settled in to eat.
“Respirators or hazmat suits?” River asked her.
She shook her head. “Respirators.”
River sighed. “Thank God. I’m not a fan of hazmat suits. I was beginning to understand what a goldfish feels like.”
She tried to hide her smile as she asked, “Getting dishpan hands?”
He chuckled. “Yeah, that’s next.”
They left the clean tent, picked up their respirators, safety glasses, and gloves. River checked his weapons while Ava restocked her sample case. She added a few field tests for controlled substances as well. If they were investigating students, she wanted to be able to rule out narcotics like cocaine, meth, and ecstasy.
They took one of the CDC vans, one of the smaller ones, and River drove toward the university.
“Now that we’re alone,” Ava began, “are we really going to the university?”
“Yeah, but not to talk to any professors.”
When he didn’t say anything more, she sighed and said, “Okay, I’ll bite. Why are we going there?”
He grinned and glanced at her. “If you were trying to create a superbug and you wanted to hide what you were doing, where would you do it?”
The bottom fell out of Ava’s stomach, exited the vehicle, and bounced down the road. “In plain sight,” she breathed. “I’d hide it in a microbiology lab.”
“That’s what I’m thinking, too,” he said. “So, how would you hide it in a lab frequented by a lot of people? That’s the part I don’t have figured out.”
“Educational labs keep known bacteria alive in cultures so they can use them whenever they want for teaching purposes,” she told him, excited by the prospect of making real progress. “If there’s someone doing graduate work, they might be using specific bacteria to test a theory.” Excitement quickened her rate of speech. “Those samples would be labeled so no one else would accidently use them.”
“Could they test their superbug without attracting attention?”
“Sure. That’s what happens at university labs. Students and researchers manipulate bacteria, test new antibiotics, create new technology, whatever applies to their field of study.”
“So, no one would notice? No one checks?”
“If a graduate student is involved, their mentor should notice, be following the research, results, offering advice…” Her voice trailed off. “But Roger Squires wasn’t a grad student.”
“Could he have done it alone?”
“No, I don’t think so. Manipulating bacteria to achieve a new strain would take a great deal of knowledge and time. Dangerous organisms are controlled by the CDC. We’d know if someone was using a resistant strain in any research.”
“Has anyone checked?”
“One of the first things Dr. Rodrigues did after we got here.”
“So, we’re looking for someone who could provide the right kind of instructions and a place to conduct the appropriate work. A professor or a mentor,” River said with a ring of finality that was scary cold.
“Did you see any mention of a mentor on the phone?”
“No, but if this is a terrorist cell, they’d be careful to appear as friends or fellow students.”
“How many people are we talking about?”
“Probably eight or nine, including Roger Squires.”
“That many?”
“That’s typical for a terrorist cell. Usually no more than ten people. After that, it’s harder to control.”
“Who’s in control?”
River snorted. “That’s the sixty-four-billion-dollar question, isn’t it?”