The Agent's Daughter (29 page)

“
Don’t move an inch,” the
man said, still shaking his head back and forth in an effort to
clear it.

Melina could see what was going on from
behind the cabinet. She looked over at David who gave her a shrug
as if he did not know what they were supposed to do.

Melina knew. She moved from behind the
cabinet and quietly crept along the walls of the room until she was
next to the door, right behind the man with the gun who was
standing in the doorway. He still had the gun pointed at her dad,
so she needed to disarm the man without the man shooting him.

Dozens of thoughts swirled around in
Melina’s head. How her dad was able to handle a man with a gun.
What Angela had said about always knowing your next move. But, the
harder she thought about what to do, the calmer and more focused
she became. This is what her dad had been talking about. In a
high-pressure situation, he found himself able to concentrate as if
his brain were a supercomputer. In an instant, she had the
solution.

Melina lunged forward and sliced her hand
down on the man’s wrist. He dropped the gun and turned around just
in time to see a fist headed for his face, and Melina connected
with his jaw. It sent the man flying out the door where he landed
on the ground at Evan’s feet. The man was out cold.

Evan looked at the man on the ground and
then at Melina. “Nice technique.”

“
No sweat,” Melina said as
she smiled and lowered her fists.

Evan grabbed the gun from the floor and
yelled into the room. “Come on out, David. They’re all down.”

David ran over from his hiding place and
joined them. “Okay. What do we do now?”

“
The others had to have
heard the gunshots. We need to get out of here fast,” Evan
said.

“
I see an
exit
sign this way,”
Melina said pointing down the hall.

“
That’s got to be a
stairwell,” Evan replied. “Let’s go.”

The three of them ran down the hallway
toward the sign. It was over a door at the end of the hall. Melina
reached the door first. She opened it and ran through the doorway
followed closely by David and then Evan. They ran across the stair
landing and started down the stairs when they heard a loud
voice.

“
They got out of the
room!” said a voice from further down the stairs. The sound echoed
throughout the stairwell.

Melina heard the voice and stopped running
down the stairs. David was not as quick. He ran into her back and
almost knocked her over. Evan stopped behind both of them and
looked further down the stairs. He could make out the shadows of
two men on the floor below. One of them raised his arm to point a
gun at Melina. Evan quickly reached over David and thrust his arm
in front of Melina, the watch on his wrist pointed toward the man
with the gun. The sound of gunfire erupted in the stairwell.

The bullet deflector altered the course of
the bullet just enough that it sailed harmlessly over their heads,
hitting the top of the wall behind them. David recoiled when he
heard the gunshots, and he bumped into Evan, causing him to fall to
the stairs and drop his gun. The gun cascaded end-over-end down
several stairs firing once into the ceiling on the way down before
coming to rest on the landing between the floors.

“
Get down,” the voice from
below said. “He’s got a gun.”

Evan jumped to his feet. “Up,” he said as he
pointed up the stairs. “Go to the roof.”

The three of them turned and began running
up the stairs. After climbing two flights of stairs, they reached
the door to the roof. David held it open as Melina and Evan ran
through the doorway. David paused for a moment as he heard the
gunmen a few floors below begin running up the stairs. Then he ran
through the door onto the roof and closed it behind him.

Evan scanned the area around the door. He
spotted an old board lying in gravel next to the bottom of the
door. He grabbed it and embedded one end in the gravel. He wedged
the other end under the doorknob, so the door could not be opened
outward. He could hear voices on the other side as they tried in
vain to turn the knob and open the door.

“
Come on,” Evan said,
starting to run. “We need to get to the edge of the building and
find a way down.”

Melina and David followed. The three of them
ran together to the nearest edge. At the edge, there was a
three-foot high retaining wall. They looked over the side, trying
to find a fire escape or something to jump onto. It was clear now
that they were on the roof of a four-story building. Seeing no way
down, they ran along the edge of the roof until they reached the
corner of the building. They looked over the side again. This time
they could see the street in front of the building.

“
Look over there,” Melina
said, pointing down the street. “There are some people walking away
on the other side of the street.”

“
Hey!” David yelled toward
them, waving his hands.

The people on the street were too far away
to hear him as they just kept walking without turning around. The
three of them stood in silence at the edge of the roof and
continued to watch the street for others when the silence was
broken by the sound of a voice behind them.

“
Out for a stroll on the
roof, are we?” the voice said. “Nice night for it.”

Evan turned around and saw William standing
in front of him, a safe ten feet away. He was flanked by two large
men, each with a gun drawn and pointed at them.

William turned to David. “Nice to see you
David. I didn’t get a chance to greet you earlier.”

David raised his arm and pointed a finger at
William. “Why didn’t you tell Evan the truth? That us being here
has something to do with Laura’s accident.”

“
I didn’t lie when I told
him that I was sending all of you to Malazistan,” William said. “I
just didn’t tell him that the Malaz never said that they would send
you back. The Malaz government is pretty peeved at you two for
blowing the cover off of their uranium enrichment operations. Evan
did not need to know that I was sending you to the Malaz as a
matter of personal convenience. To get you out of the way, so to
speak. I cannot have you three running to the police to tell them
what you have learned about the Laura’s accident. They would have
to investigate and then there would be a lot of …
questions.”

“
About how you caused the
accident in the first place,” Evan said, stepping forward toward
William. “I saw the red-light camera photo. She wasn’t even awake
when she crashed.”

The two men on either side of William eyed
Evan and cocked their weapons. Melina and David moved to Evan’s
side and grabbed his shoulders to stop him from going any
further.

“
I wouldn’t say that I
caused the accident,” William said coyly. “If there is any blame, I
would say it was the FCAN in the car with her.”

“
You put an FCAN in
Laura’s car?” Evan said as he raised a fist. “Why would you do
that? What did she do to you?”

William paused for a moment, looked up and
began to walk toward Evan. “Think back to the night she had her
accident. It was a Saturday. Where had she gone that night?”

“
Laura went into work that
night,” Evan said, thinking aloud. “But she wasn’t going to do any
work. She just drove down to the agency because she had forgotten
an instrument that she needed for some testing she was doing at
home on a new gadget.”

“
That’s right,” William
said. “And when she walked into the nuclear lab that night, she
found the entrance to the nuclear storage vault wide open. One of
my people had been a little careless.”

“
Wait a minute,” Evan
said. “That vault is where they store the uranium that the lab
uses.”

William smiled. “That’s right. The large
main vault is in New Mexico, but we have a substantial amount of
nuclear material on hand for tool development. It is all contained
in a room about the size of a small garage. So, when Laura saw the
open vault, she called security from one of the lab phones to
report it. Security knew I was in the building that night, so they
called me up in my office. I told them that it was nothing and that
some of my men were in there. Laura was not satisfied with
security’s lack of response, so she went into the vault herself to
investigate. There was nobody in there, but she would have easily
seen that there were several canisters of uranium missing.”

“
And there are only two
people that have access to that vault,” David said. “You and
her.”

“
When I got down there,”
William continued. “I tried to convince her that the door being
open was an accident and that she was mistaken about the missing
uranium, but Laura wasn’t buying it. Then she walked over to the
corner of the lab, unlocked her document safe and got out her
personal lab notebook. She said that her notebook and the uranium
inventory did not match her records and that she was updating her
notebook to highlight both the discrepancy and the fact that the
vault door had been left open. I watched as she closed the notebook
and locked it back in her document safe. Then she pushed past me to
the door, and said that she was going to share her findings with
Arthur in the morning.”

“
So that’s when you
decided to kill her?” Melina yelled, surprising herself by saying
it aloud.

William walked over toward Melina. “That
notebook has detailed records that would prove that the uranium was
missing. And I couldn’t get to it. I couldn’t let her show it to
Arthur, but the last thing I wanted to do was kill her.”

“
That makes no sense,”
David said.

“
Sure it does,” William
said. “It has been a while since anyone from the agency has died,
but surely you remember the agency’s death procedure.”

“
Death procedure?” Melina
asked.

Evan turned to Melina. “Because of the
nature of our work, when a member of the agency dies, no matter how
innocent it looks, all of their papers and their computer are
turned over to a special group of agency employees that examine it
for clues as to whether their death was foul play.”

“
As you can imagine,”
William said. “That notebook would have been a giant red flag. But
as long as she is alive, the death procedure protocol is not
enforced, so there is no need for an investigation.”

“
I don’t understand,” Evan
said, shaking his head. “You didn’t want her to die and yet you
caused her to get into an accident. Well, whatever your reasoning,
you got what you wanted. She is in a coma, and that notebook is
still in her safe.”

William walked up to Evan and put his hand
on Evan’s shoulder. “This is the best part of the story. She isn’t
really in a coma.”

…………………………
.

“
Turn left at that stop
sign,” Alex said, pointing ahead through the windshield.

Alex had the computer with the GPS receiver
on his lap, and he was keeping an eye on the red dot in the middle
of the screen that showed the location of the watch. He was sitting
in the passenger seat giving Angela directions while she drove, and
now they were in the area just east of downtown. Travis had been
sitting quietly in the backseat while they drove. Usually a
chatterbox in the car, he spent the entire drive downtown looking
out the window as he seldom took a car trip this far.

“
We should be getting
close,” Angela said. “What does the dot look like?”

Alex looked over at Angela, gave her a funny
look, and then looked back at the screen. “It looks the same as it
has since we left the house. It’s a small red solid… wait a minute,
it has gotten bigger and is now a red ring with a line through the
middle. And there is a number in each half of the circle. What do
these numbers mean?”

“
The dot changes to a ring
when you get about a quarter-mile away from the watch. The number
on top of the ring is the distance we are from the watch,” Angela
said. “And the bottom number is the altitude of the watch. Both
numbers are in meters.”

“
Okay then,” Alex said
looking down at the ring on the screen. “This thing says that we
are 497 meters away, and the watch is at 18 meters altitude. Turn
right at the next stop sign and we will be on the street that the
receiver says the watch is on.”

Angela rolled to a stop at the stop sign and
looked down the street. There was some moonlight, so the street was
not entirely dark, and there were a few ancient streetlights, but
they provided scant illumination to the street around them. Angela
knew this street. She used to drive down it on her way home from
the agency when she lived east of town. It was filled with three
and four story industrial buildings built in the 1920’s, and most
of them were empty and crumbling.

As Angela turned onto the street, she turned
off the car’s lights and drove slowly down the street. She looked
back in the rearview mirror to check on Travis. He was sliding
side-to-side, looking out each of the windows as if he were on a
field trip.

Angela turned to Alex. “Let me know when we
get within 100 meters.”

While some of the streets east of downtown
had become a home to artists and musicians looking for somewhere
cheap to work and play, it was clear as they drove down this street
that this was not one of them. The sidewalks were empty of people,
and there were no cars lining the street.

“
It’s weird,” Travis said,
still looking out the window. “It doesn’t appear as though anybody
works in these buildings. They are all dark and broken down. And
they have wood for windows.”