Читать книгу Guarding Grace - Rebecca York - Страница 6

The assassin never left murder to chance.

Night was the best time for the mission he had taken on, which was lucky for the working stiffs who toiled at Bio Gens Labs.

Only one car was in the parking lot, a silver Mercedes occupying the choice reserved spot beside the employees’ entrance.

With his headlights off, he slid in beside it and cut the engine of his rental car.

He had stowed his luggage in the trunk and started the evening with a nice prime-rib dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steak House in downtown Bethesda, Maryland, only ten miles away. Soon he would leave his calling card in this long low building and speed away. Some men would have been too nervous to eat before a big job. He found a full belly added to his feeling of satisfaction.

This was his fourth carefully calculated hit—and the most important. Massachusetts, California and New Jersey had just been rehearsals. With the widely separate locations, nobody had connected the dots. No one knew who had struck a federal judge, a U.S. congressman and a movie producer. Nobody knew who was next. Or why.

Gym bag in hand, he walked through the misty evening to the lab’s delivery entrance. He had clocked the schedule of the security staff who patrolled the grounds of the industrial park. Nobody would be back along this route for twenty minutes.

The lab had a silent alarm, of course. But that didn’t mean squat. By the time the Montgomery County Police Department responded, the place would be history.

After setting down his bag, he got out his stainless-steel lock picks. “The Navy SEALs’ choice,” according to the catalog from which he’d purchased the set.

He’d put in hundreds of hours of practice with these implements.

One pin at a time. Apply force. Find the pin that is binding the post and push it up.

Once inside, he set his gym bag on the receptionist’s desk and removed the explosive device. It was a carefully constructed work of art. Too bad he was the only living person who would see it in such pristine form.

The exterior tubing was made of thick metal. The inside had a plastic liner, designed to hold the explosive mixture—a simple combination of ground aluminum and carbon tetrachloride that would reduce this room and the office beyond to a heap of debris.

He would have liked to use a military fuse. But he never bought his bomb-making materials from sources that could be traced. So he was using one designed for fireworks.

He lit the fuse and glided toward the executive suite at the end of the hall. In an elegantly furnished room fifty feet away, a small man wearing a wrinkled dress shirt bent over his computer keyboard. His dark hair was shot with gray now. His shoulders were slightly hunched. And he was unaware that he had only minutes to live.

Yet some sixth sense pulled the doctor’s attention away from the computer screen.

“Who’s there?”

Whirling in his chair, he turned to face the door—then froze when he saw the figure blocking the exit—bomb in hand.

“Who the hell are you? What are you doing here?” he demanded with the arrogance of a man who thinks he’s the one in charge.

“I’m one of your children, Dr. Cortez. Don’t you recognize me?”

A jolt of fear flashed in the doctor’s eyes as he reached for the telephone.

The assassin’s reflexes were excellent. He leaped across the room, kicking Cortez away from his desk, toppling his chair and spilling him onto the tile floor. The doctor lay stunned for a moment, then reached to clasp the back of his head. His palm came away covered with blood.

The intruder moved farther into the room, staying out of the man’s reach, the bomb held up like a football ready for a touchdown pass.

Cortez’s gaze flicked from his bloody hand to the intruder’s face, to the bomb with its fuse burning steadily down toward the payload.

“Don’t,” he whimpered.

A fierce explosion cut off his plea. Ending two lives—and thirty years of diabolical scientific research.