Fugitive Spy Read online

  Ashley had gone into the back kitchen area. Intermittently, there was metallic banging as pots dropped onto the floor. Glass ruptured.

  “Are you okay?” Casper called to her.

  “I think I found something interesting. I’ll bring it to you.”

  Casper turned his attention back to the newspaper stack and flipped through the pages. A black four-door sedan drove down the street. Casper held his breath as it passed.

  Keep going...keep going.

  Another metal pot clanged to the floor. Casper hunched his shoulders. He didn’t see the car stop. He left the counter and stepped out onto the street.

  The car continued. No brake lights.

  His hackles rose. Should he grab Ashley and leave? The town was deserted but the road was maybe one of the few paved ones around. They needed to stay. They needed to find the next step.

  Casper watched. The car continued until it was out of sight.

  With raw nerves, he returned to the counter and the stack of news stories.

  It didn’t take long to find the first story pertaining to the mysterious illness. Three teens were out after curfew when they’d been entranced by two larger-than-normal red balloons floating toward town. They were hopeful for treasure of some kind as a nearby larger town often did such things during their annual balloon festivals—leaving raffle tickets inside to claim prizes with. The teens remarked on how the balloons looked different, and were smaller in number, and that it had still been early for the annual release. Also, the balloons the festival used were always white.

  According to the story, they followed the objects until one popped, dropping an item from the sky not far from where they were standing. They described it as an oversize jingle bell.

  Casper’s blood ran cold. Never did he think he’d see anything like this on United States soil, but there it was, right in front of his face in black-and-white.

  A whoosh of air tickled the back of his neck and Ashley popped through the door. The first thing Casper registered in his mind was the dirty yellow color—a caution signal erupted in his mind. She laid the suit on the counter and plopped a respirator on top of it.

  An old biohazard suit. Casper noted the tears in the fabric—definitely wouldn’t be functional now.

  “There are three of these stored in the back.” And then, ever so gently, she laid a grenade on top of the suit, as if to prevent its detonation by cushioning it on something soft.

  The pin was still in place.

  Casper’s fingers tingled. “How many of those did you find?”

  “Just the one,” Ashley said. “But I stopped digging once I stumbled onto it.”

  Casper took it and placed it in the pocket of his jacket. Why would there be grenades here? What could they have been used for? Who left all these things behind and why?

  Pushing the thoughts aside, he pointed to the picture he’d found in the newspaper. “This is a bomblet. It’s used to deliver weapons-grade pathogens. The cracks release the contents.”

  “Like the video of the anthrax dispersal on Gruinard Island. A missile without any explosion—I hope I never experience anything like that.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Where was this one found?” Ashley asked.

  “Here.”

  “This town?”

  Casper nodded. Ashley leaned against the counter.

  “Someone hit this town with a missile containing a bioweapon?” Ashley asked.

  “No, not a missile. I think balloons.”

  Ashley stood up, eyeing him disbelievingly. “Now you’re getting into fantasy. That’s pure fiction.”

  Casper leaned his hip against the counter and crossed his arms over his chest. “Yet, you found a collection of biohazard suits in the back of a diner.”

  Ashley smirked.

  Casper placed a finger on the news article. “It’s actually not that far-fetched. During World War II, Japan was also interested in the use of biological weapons. Their facility was called Unit 731. There is documentation of a planned attack on the US code-named Cherry Blossoms at Night, and a permutation of that plan was to have balloons carry the agent to the Western US.”

  Absentmindedly, Ashley smoothed her hand over the suit. Casper prayed nothing residual remained on it, like anthrax spores.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t touch that anymore,” Casper said.

  She yanked her hand away, brushing them quickly against one another. Even though the action likely made her feel better mentally, it would do little to keep from getting contaminated. In fact, if it was something like anthrax, she was kicking spores into the air.

  He placed his hands over hers. “It’s okay. You’re probably fine. Just keep your hands down. Don’t touch your face or anything.”

  She sighed but relented. “Maybe you should pass me some of those papers. Let me help you sort through them to see if we can find anything else.”

  He did as she asked. He kept the first month and handed her the rest. Casper flipped through his pages more quickly. Something was causing the hair on his arms to stand on end. It didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for. His heartbeat ticked up a notch. He nudged Ashley’s side with his elbow, laid the paper out in front of her and pointed to the article. It appeared in the third week of the first month.

  “‘Mysterious Illness Infects Three Local Teens,’” Ashley read.

  “The story is a couple of weeks after they found the bomblet.”

  “What were their symptoms?”

  “It doesn’t specify anything other than a flu-like illness. At this reporting, one of them had already died. It lists the name of the hospital—Black Falls Medical Center.”

  Casper continued onto the next edition. “Just found notices of death for all three teens.”

  Ashley gasped as she unfolded one of her papers. “Black Falls Medical Center Closed after Fire Related to Gas Leak.”

  Definitely suspicious. “When did that happen?”

  “Let me see the date on the paper that had the obituaries.”

  Casper slid his paper over and Ashley compared the two dates. “Looks like shortly after the boys’ deaths. Hard to figure out an exact timeline. Could have been just days.”

  “The hospital closing could explain the demise of this town. Even a small hospital was likely this place’s largest employer. That’s our next stop.”

  “Did you see the old pay phone over there? I think there’s still a yellow pages tucked in the shelf underneath.” She left him and came back within a few minutes, the dust-covered relic in her hands.

  She flipped it open. “Found it. An address for the hospital.”

  Casper looked around the diner. There was a turnstile rack that held maps. He went to it and pulled one out that seemed to highlight the area.

  Another clang of pots came from the back of the diner. Casper’s nerves fired. Ashley and Casper locked eyes. Through the opening of the kitchen pass-through, he saw the flash of a man clad in black clothes raise a weapon. Casper ran to the counter, grabbed Ashley by the shoulders, pulled her over the top of it and to the ground on the other side. He covered her body with his just as the bullets went flying. Whatever glass had been intact shattered around in a violent storm of shards. The noise was deafening, and Casper’s ears started to ring.

  The bullets stopped. The clicking of new clips being loaded.

  “Isn’t it time the two of you gave up?”

  Jared and his goons had found them. How?

  Neither of them spoke in response to his question.

  Casper should have trusted his gut upon seeing the car. They’d merely persuaded him that they’d left town in order to circle back and set up a sneak attack. Casper lifted his head, gritting his teeth to keep from coughing from the dust, and eyed the distance to their car.

  No chance they would make it
without getting shot from behind. He heard footsteps—the whine of the hinges of the double doors opening. The air charged with his apprehension. He reached into his pocket and grabbed the grenade.

  He eased off Ashley and pushed her closer to the diner’s counter. Before he could convince himself not to, he pulled the pin on the grenade, counted to two, stood, hurled the explosive through the kitchen pass-through and then shielded Ashley with his body.

  The shock wave of the explosion shoved their bodies toward the front of the diner. The counter splintered open. Casper sat up and brushed debris from his face. Ashley was on her elbows, her face covered in a fine spray of dust.

  Do I go check to see if Jared and his men are still alive or do we just run?

  Casper stood, his legs shaky, and saw the wall behind the counter had ruptured open. A pile of rubble shifted indicating movement.

  He held his hand out to Ashley. “We need to go...right now.”

  * * *

  Within thirty minutes they arrived at Black Falls Medical Center, which seemed to be a glorified two-story clinic, half of it burned down. Had it truly been a gas leak? Or had a perfectly placed explosive caused the fire?

  The sense of foreboding that overcame Ashley caused her blood to pour an icy wave through her body. She shuddered and pulled her jacket tighter around her body. The hospital sat at the top of a modest hill. The black pavement of the curving road was like a shed snakeskin—no longer perfect with its pocked holes and broken lines.

  They’d parked off the road, hidden behind a fallen road sign, to see if they were being followed. Nothing moved for another ten minutes, and Casper seemingly deemed that it was safe enough to check out the facility.

  “We can’t stay here long. If Jared’s alive, it won’t take much for him to guess we’d come here.”

  Casper parked at the back entrance under the old ambulance bay. The cement block stopgaps were broken and rusted rebar poked through like singular broken teeth in an otherwise vacant gum line. They both got out of the car, but stood and looked at the structure countless minutes. Common sense was begging Ashley to run, but if they didn’t figure out who they could entrust this information to then they would always be hunted because of what was on that drive. Even though it was risky, gathering this information, particularly if it involved Jared Fleming, could ensure their safety in the end.

  And what was their working theory anyway? She and Casper hadn’t really verbalized it to one another. Her father had a lot of information on a new bioweapon and a cure for it. Jared seemed interested in that information and Casper, and yet her father had told her never to trust Jared. Which meant, if her father was on the run from him, then any additional incriminating evidence about Jared could only help her father get his life back.

  Casper’s voice broke into her thoughts. “I think we need to look for evidence that could incriminate Jared.”

  “I was just thinking the same thing,” Ashley said. “Even though much of your memory is back, you haven’t shared much about him. Do you think these insinuations my dad always made about Jared are true?”

  Casper eased the car door closed behind him. The wind rustled his hair gently. “I would trust your father over Jared. In all the time I was with your father, he never did anything that would make me question his honesty. He was tasked with exposing the bioweapons programs of other countries. He was very good at his work.”

  “Do you know of any motive that would explain why Jared would want to hurt my father?”

  “Jared has had a lot of training in presenting everything but his authentic self. Who knows who the real Jared Fleming is and what his interests are? Part of the problem with being a spy is that you can lose yourself in these other identities you’ve created. You can begin to believe counterarguments against your government. You can get a lot of money for selling your secrets if you can finesse a deal before you’re caught and killed for being a double agent.”

  “Do you find it strange that the cemetery is right over there?” Ashley pointed to her right.

  “Few things surprise me anymore. Shall we venture in?”

  Ashley’s hands cooled. “You think it’s safe?”

  “It’s stood this long so probably. But also safer than what we’ve already been through.”

  The glass to the sliding ambulance doors into the ER were broken and so they merely walked through it. It wasn’t simply that the floor was dirty. It was as if a tsunami of dust had rolled in and erased what had been present before. As they walked, the filth was deep enough that it felt like they were walking on a beach. The first sign they came to pointed to the right for the medical records department.

  The very direction of the burned-out portion of the structure. Nervous waves poured through Ashley’s body. Mice scampered about visibly, unafraid. She gritted her teeth so she wouldn’t scream.

  “Interesting, right?” Ashley asked.

  “That the medical records department is likely gone? A little too convenient for my tastes.”

  “If the explosion happened shortly after these boys died, it’s possible their records wouldn’t be there. They could still be on the floor. Depends on how organized the records department was.”

  Casper took a few steps away from the wall. There was an elevator to their left. “Door to the staircase is right here. Hopefully they’ll be sturdy enough to hold us.”

  They weren’t as crumbled as the road that led them here. It took three good tries before the rusty hinges allowed Casper to shoulder through the door. The medical unit was an open room. Remnants of curtains hung from the ceiling and a few beds, though knocked over, remained. What Ashley guessed was the nurses’ station was located at one end of the room. A turnstile held the characteristic plastic folders that used to house patient charts. Now everything was moving toward electronic records, but the transition had been hard for smaller hospitals to undertake.

  Ashley walked to the counter and pulled the first chart. She pointed to the top and it listed one of the teen’s names on the end. Her breath quickened. When she popped up the front cover, there were no papers. “We know he was here.”

  “Don’t you find it strange that the chart would be here, without the papers?” Casper asked.

  “Seems smart actually, that we wouldn’t find anything.” She tapped her fingers against the top of the chart. “Where would you hide something in a hospital if you were a medical person and wanted the truth to eventually come out about what happened here?”

  Casper shuffled his feet and looked around. “Or a bad guy trying to hide what happened. If it’s the second group, we’re not going to find anything, so let’s hope it’s the first.” He rounded the desk and Ashley followed. There weren’t any drawers left in the cabinet to hide anything in. “Guess that’s too obvious.” He glanced up. “No ceiling tiles.”

  “You’re thinking like an agent. You need to think like a nurse. Nurses were likely responsible for the care of these patients. We need to find the nurses’ locker rooms.”

  After hunting around the floor, Ashley found what she was looking for. Once inside, she faced a wall of very thin, metallic green lockers in different states of being open and closed. Walking closer, she could see some still had garments hanging inside. A nice pair of dress shoes, though the leather was cracked, were still poised perfectly in the bottom of one locker. One sink was present. The other had been torn from the wall—the pipes sticking out like veins from an amputated limb. Much of the tile was missing. In the next section were three stalls with closed shower curtains.

  Ashley’s skin prickled and she motioned Casper forward. “I just can’t be the one who slides those open.”

  Casper straightened his shoulders and yanked the liners aside like taking a Band-Aid off a wound. He didn’t jump back in fright and Ashley exhaled the breath she’d been holding. However, at the third one he paused, something catching his attention. Stepp
ing inside, he grabbed a moldy shower mat and threw it to the side. Then he turned and grabbed a stray pipe that littered the floor and began lightly tapping the base of the shower. Ashley stepped forward cautiously and peered around the curtain.

  With the pipe, he motioned around the tile. “I think that mat was hiding something. See how this is scored? It’s rough, like someone did it hastily. And at this corner is an opening big enough to fit this.”

  Casper shimmied the pipe into the gap and the section popped up, flopping to the side. Dust filtered into the air. Ashley stepped next to Casper and peered into the hole. There was enough light to see that there was a box tucked away down there.

  A box with “CDC” written across the top in bold black letters.

  It resembled her father’s handwriting.

  THIRTEEN

  Casper held his arm out in a warning as Ashley reached forward to grab the package.

  “Just a minute,” he said.

  He bent to his knees. Someone intended for the box to be picked up, as it had a rudimentary strap for a handle fashioned out of duct tape. Motioning Ashley back he picked it up, turned it and set it on the ground away from the shower.

  Ashley kneeled next to him, the box in between them. “Do you think it’s safe to open?”

  Casper shrugged. “It’s seemingly meant for government officials to find. I can’t guarantee it’s not risky, but this is apparently the next clue, so I’m in favor of opening it.”

  He took a small penknife he’d found in Russell’s cabin and sliced through the clear packaging tape that held down the side. The first thing in the box was a stack of papers. Cautiously, he picked them up and handed them to Ashley.

  Underneath the stack of papers was another carefully wrapped box with more large black lettering. This time, a few more instructions followed. “Blood Borne Pathogen. Do Not Open. Level IV containment. CDC.”