Exit 9 (A Project Eden Thriller) Read online

  She felt like a fool, like she had no worth at all. How could he have done this to her? She had been a good girlfriend—never fighting with him, always agreeing to do whatever he wanted to do. She had even let him put his hand up her shirt once, though when he’d tried for her skirt, she had quickly put a stop to that.

  Was that Maria’s attraction? Did she let him touch her down there?

  No. It’s not Maria’s fault, she told herself. It’s Sergio’s.

  He was the one to blame.

  Unable to focus on her homework in the days that followed, she had started walking through the city again, trying to work through the hurt and anger that had initially consumed her. On this particular afternoon, she had wandered into the old neighborhood where her family once lived. It was odd and yet comforting to be on the streets where she had played as a kid. Though she didn’t recognize any of the people on the sidewalks, the buildings were all the same, as if time had not passed at all.

  Soon, she reached the corner of a dead-end street, and suddenly recalled with vivid detail the old abandoned building that used to be at the end of it. She decided to see if it was still there. It had apparently once been a small factory, but for as long as her family had been in the area, it had stood empty. She and her brother Rodrigo would play in it sometimes, pretending it was a secret fort full of hidden passages and buried treasure.

  When the building came into view, her heart sank a bit as she realized someone had reclaimed it. Though she could only see the top of the building, the roof over the front area had been replaced.

  She approached cautiously, assuming the building would be occupied, but the closer she got, the less likely that seemed. The layout of the old factory was such that there was a wide room in front where the work would have been done, and a row of rooms that had probably been used for offices with their own corridor in the back. The improvements she noticed appeared to be limited to only the roof over the front room. The brick walls looked just as rundown as before. The only other change she could see was the few windows that used to let sunlight into the front room had been sealed up.

  She scanned the area. No cars around and no sign that anyone was there.

  Partly out of curiosity, and partly because it was keeping her mind on something other than Sergio, she slipped into the narrow space between the end of the building and the property wall, and made her way to the area in back. There was another change here. Several large rocks had been placed in front of the hole she had used when she was younger to get into the building. This only made Patricia all the more curious about what was inside.

  She continued around the building, and smiled when she saw that the missing bricks at the top of the back corner had not been replaced. She climbed up the wall like she had before and lowered herself inside. The room she was in was tiny. She and Rodrigo had assumed it was once a closet. Long ago its door had been sealed up and separated from the rest of the building. That was probably why the people who’d blocked the other entrance had not felt it necessary to do anything about the hole at the top of the wall. But did that mean they hadn’t discovered the other way in?

  In the back corner of the room was a narrow wooden cabinet. One of its doors was jammed in place, but the other, a bit more resistant now than before, still opened. At the bottom, its presence mostly hidden by an empty shelf a foot above it, had been a hole in the wall. When Patricia knelt down to check, she saw that it was still there.

  She crawled through. The other side came out under an old metal desk that had piles of junk all around it. She and her brother had put the desk there and piled the scraps around it as part of concealing the secret back entrance to their fort. Even if other kids had found it in the years since, they had left it that way, no doubt thinking it added to the allure of the place.

  She moved out of the office and into the hallway. It was obvious the new owners had zero interest in the back part of the building. It was as ratty and dingy as ever. Each room she looked into seemed untouched from when she’d last been there.

  Halfway down the hall, there was a passageway that led into the large front room, or would have if a new wall of bricks hadn’t been erected in the middle of it.

  She frowned at it, thinking. There had to be another way into the front room. At least someplace where she could just get a peek. She was really curious now.

  Then she remembered the weapons room.

  It wasn’t really a weapons room, just what she and Rodrigo had called it. It was the old office where they stored anything that looked like a gun or a sword. It had a common wall with the main room, and as a result of one of Argentina’s many earthquakes, that wall had shifted slightly, creating a crack near the top. Though she’d never examined it closely, she thought she might be able to at least glimpse into the other room. The problem was that it was four feet above the top of her head.

  She scoured through the back half of the building for something she could use to boost herself up. In one of the offices, she found an old tabletop that she thought she could lean against the wall and use as a ladder. Not wanting the thing to slip out from under her, she piled several loose bricks along the bottom until she felt confident they would anchor the table in place.

  Once everything was set, she put her hands against the wall, and carefully inched her way up until she reached the top. The table was actually longer than she’d needed, so she ended up having to hunch down to both see through the crack and avoid knocking her head against the ceiling.

  She peered through the opening. It definitely went all the way through. The problem was, since there was very little light in the other room, she could barely see anything.

  She slipped her fingers into the crack. If she could widen it just a little and let more of the light from her room filter through, she’d be able to see better. She worked at one of the boards that didn’t seem to be holding on to anything, but it held stubbornly in place. Determined, she pulled harder.

  “Come on,” she said, trying to rock it back and forth.

  With a sudden snap, it broke free and her hand flew backward, shifting her weight away from the wall. Without even thinking, she grabbed the opening with her other hand and pulled herself back, but she yanked too hard and the change in momentum caused her to slam into the wall. Gasping for air, she held on as tightly as she could with both hands so she wouldn’t fall. After several seconds, her breathing started to return to normal. She glanced down, and saw that the table had slipped sideways to the ground. She would have to drop onto the uneven terrain.

  Just as she was psyching herself up to do this, she heard a snap, and then something in the wall groaned. Her gaze shot upward toward the break in the wall, but before she could even see it again, there was a crack, then another and another.

  A groan, this one loud and sustained. She pressed her cheek against the wall, knowing there was little else she could do. She felt a part of the wall begin to tilt away from her as the groan increased. Then, with a final ripping of wood, it crashed into the other room while leaving her still dangling above the ground.

  Dust billowed up and engulfed her, but it was thin enough for her to see that the wall below her chest level was gone. At first she couldn’t believe it, but it was right there in front of her—a good chunk of the wall was missing, and she’d done it.

  She searched the ground, chose a spot where she could avoid twisting an ankle, and leaped toward it. As she stood once more, the only thought on her mind was to get the hell out of there. But then she caught a glimpse through the new hole into the other room.

  What’s that?

  She walked over to the missing wall. There was something large on the other side, taking up a good portion of the room. The air was still filled with enough dust that it was hard to make out exactly what it was.

  Her curiosity returning, she stepped through the break. The item was about ten feet in, and went left and right like a wall. In the low light it was hard to tell for sure, but it seemed to be blue in color,
and appeared to be corrugated in wide strips. It didn’t go all the way to the ceiling, though. Earlier, when she’d been peering through the crack, she must have looked right over the top of it.

  She followed the wall to the left, because all the debris from the wall was to the right. The corrugated wall stopped about fifteen feet from the far end of the room. She turned the corner and saw that the new side was maybe only a fourth as wide as the long side had been. The moment she saw that a set of doors almost completely made up the short end, she knew what it was.

  A shipping container.

  In the middle of a walled-up, deserted building? That didn’t make any sense.

  The doors were locked by some kind of device that seemed to be mostly inside the container. There were also two red bands around each handle. If someone opened the doors, they would break. Weird, she initially thought, but then quickly revised that assessment. The bands were seals, weren’t they? A way to tell if the doors had been opened or not.

  She went all the way around, but found nothing else that could possibly explain what it was doing there.

  Maybe her brother could figure it out. He was good at puzzles like this.

  Carefully, she worked her way back out of the building. As she headed home, she didn’t even give Sergio a thought. Her mind was completely on the shipping container, and on the millions of possible reasons it was inside the deserted building.

  Their old fort really did have a treasure in it now.

  12

  THERE WERE TWO Suburbans waiting for the flight from the Ranch when it landed at the private airfield just west of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

  The men quickly transferred their gear—both lethal and medical—into the vehicles, then headed for the Bluff. Driving as fast as they could on the dark, winding roads, they cut what should have been at least an hour-long trip down to forty minutes.

  In the event of an attack on the Bluff, protocol was to drive to a point half a mile away, then travel the rest of the way on foot via a subtly marked, seldom used path through the woods. Ideally, they would have had another team on the other side using a similar trail so they could come at the Bluff from both sides. But it would have taken at least another thirty minutes to send one of the Suburbans around that way, and Pax decided that was a delay they couldn’t afford.

  After everyone donned their comm gear, Pat Solomon took point and led them through the forest with Michael right behind him, pointing out the trail indicators. When they were within one hundred yards of the fence, they stopped and gathered in a tight circle.

  Pax pulled an iPad out of his bag, and opened one of the custom applications that had been developed at the Ranch. He had explained to Ash on the flight out that he should be able to tap into the Bluff’s security cameras once they were close enough.

  Now his finger moved quickly over the screen, touching different points. Suddenly he froze.

  “Holy shit,” he whispered.

  “What?” Michael asked, panic threatening to overtake him again.

  “Two down in the front room. Another in the kitchen.” Pax started tapping the screen again.

  “What about Janice? Can you check our room?”

  “There’s no camera in there. You know that.”

  “There’s one in the hall,” Michael said, moving around so he could see the screen, too. “If the door’s open, you should be able to see part of the way in.”

  Pax frowned, and tapped the screen. “This one?”

  “No. The next one down.”

  Another tap.

  “Yes. That’s it,” Michael said. He leaned in. “What is that…?”

  Pax seemed to hesitate. “A leg. Looks male, though.”

  “Oh, God.”

  Even in the darkness, Ash could see Michael pale.

  “Doesn’t mean she’s in there,” Pax said. “The only way we’re going to know is to check.”

  He looked back at the screen, accessed a few more cameras, and sucked in a quick breath.

  “What is it?” Ash asked.

  Pax turned the tablet so they could all see.

  On the screen was a view of the detention level deep below the house. The angle was from above the elevator door toward the Plexiglas wall that separated the arrival area from the detention block. Remnants of smoke hung in the air on the arrival side, and on the ground close to the elevators, obscured but not hidden by the smoke, was a body. There was no way to tell for sure if the person was dead or alive, but based on the five bloody figures sprawled on the ground on the other side of the see-through partition, it was a fair guess that no one in either half would ever take a breath again.

  Pax switched to a view of the control room—bodies slumped over terminals, unmoving, with another two or three on the floor.

  “We need to treat this as a poisonous gas situation,” Pax said.

  “But the guards in the detention block look like they were shot,” Ash pointed out.

  Pax grimaced. “Yeah. That bothers me, but I didn’t see any blood in the control room, and with that smoke, we’ve got to assume the worst.”

  One of the men Ash hadn’t met until that night pulled his backpack off, and zipped it all the way open. Inside were enough gas masks for everyone, plus a few extras in case they found survivors. He passed them out.

  “No one makes a move onto the detention floor until we run a check,” Pax said. “I want to know what we’re walking into first.”

  There was a chorus of “Yes, sir”s.

  “Any signs of who did this?” Ash asked.

  Pax shook his head. “Checked cameras throughout the house and all the way to the front gate and back. Nothing. But we should proceed as if they’re still there. They have to know we’d come, so they could be waiting for us.”

  More nods.

  Pax pointed at four of the men. “Do a sweep all the way up to the front gate and back. We’ll wait at alpha position until you return.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The men immediately headed out. Pax took a moment to report in to Matt at the Ranch, then he and the rest continued on toward the house.

  Alpha position turned out to be a dense cluster of trees about a hundred and fifty yards from the house. Ash could sense Michael’s growing anxiety as they hunkered down and waited for the others to return. Each minute would be an eternity to him. Ash had been in that position himself once, and he knew there was nothing any of them could do to lessen the stress.

  Finally, the others reappeared.

  “Seven bodies,” one of the men reported. “All ours. Three back near the side fence. The other four near the front gate. No one else around.”

  Pax closed his eyes a moment, his worst fears no doubt realized.

  “All right,” he said. “You four cut through the woods and come at the house from the other side. Browne, Solomon, Ash, and I will close in from this side.”

  “What about me?” Michael said.

  “You stay here with Billy.”

  “No way.”

  “You will, or we’ll stop what we’re doing and take you out of here right now.”

  Michael took several quick breaths. “She’s my wife, Pax.”

  “Exactly why you’re staying here. You’re too wound up and you know it. You make a mistake in there and you could get the rest of us killed. So what’ll it be?”

  He stared at Michael.

  “I’ll…I’ll wait here.”

  “Good.” Pax looked over at Billy. “Shoot him if he tries to leave.”

  The doctor nodded. “You got it.”

  Hippocratic oath or not, Ash knew he would do it.

  The two teams headed out in different directions. Ash and his group caught sight of the building in less than a minute. Despite the fact that lights were on in many of the rooms, there was a definite stillness blanketing the entire site.

  Pax led them to within fifty feet of the porch then stopped. The front door was open, but there were no signs of movement inside.

  �
�In position,” one of the men on the other team reported over the comm.

  “All right. We’re moving in. You cover us,” Pax said.

  Staying low, Pax, Ash, Browne, and Solomon rushed the porch, their guns raised in front of them. Browne and Solomon passed through the door first, each pointing their weapon in a different direction.

  “Clear,” Browne announced.

  “Clear,” Solomon echoed.

  Pax and Ash moved in.

  The two men lying in the front room had multiple gunshot wounds, including one each to the back of their heads.

  Pax said nothing, but the anger in his face was more than telling.

  “Up or down?” Browne asked.

  “The house first, then we’ll go down,” Pax ordered.

  A sweep of the first floor revealed no one else, so they called in the other four men before heading upstairs, where they split up. Pax and Ash were the first to arrive outside Michael and Janice’s room. The body they’d seen earlier on the floor inside was another one of the guards. They checked the closet and the en suite bath, but both were empty.

  “Where the hell is she?” Ash asked.

  Pax shook his head, just as confused.

  They returned to the first floor and met up with the others. Since there was no sign of anyone else, Pax sent one of the men to go bring Billy and Michael in. “Make sure Michael knows she wasn’t in the room, and we haven’t found her yet.”

  __________

  JANICE HUDDLED AGAINST the roof of the house. She had no idea how long she’d been there. Weakened by her illness, she’d passed out at some point and woken to find that night had fully descended.

  Her whole body shook from the cold. It was as if she could feel it all the way down to her bones. She needed to get back inside. She needed to get into the heat. Nighttime temperatures had been routinely dropping into the low twenties, and even occasionally the teens. If she stayed where she was, she’d die of exposure for sure.

  But could she risk trying to go back inside yet? Were the others still there? She had no doubt the intruders were from the Project. Perhaps they were even attacking multiple locations, attempting to cripple the only organized opposition they faced.