Page 84 of Dead Drift

He unwound the duct tape around his legs and stood, slamming Joel with the chair as he attempted to scramble to his feet. The chair shattered, wood splintering around them. Joel still struggled, swiping at Griffin frantically with the blade.

Griffin punched him in his neck—not hard enough to break his windpipe and kill him, but enough that he was gasping for air.

Grabbing the knife from Joel’s shaking hand, Griffin moved to free Finley, who kept her gaze fixed on Joel to make sure he stayed down while Griffin freed her.

“He put our phones and your gun in the trough over there.” She indicated the wooden feedbox with a tilt of her head.

Anger surged as blood dripped on his hand from his wife’s neck. The desire to choke Joel was fierce, but vengeance was God’s.

“I’ll hold him with a knife,” he instructed Finley once she was free of her restraints, “while you get my gun.”

She nodded and retrieved his weapon, which he then held at the edge of Joel’s perspiring forehead while Finley dialed 9-1-1 and cuffed him.

Griffin read Joel his rights, and within fifteen minutes police swarmed the barn, hauling Joel to his feet.

Griffin wrapped his arms around his wife, kissing her quickly before the paramedics set to work.

He sat beside her on the back of the ambulance as a dive team arrived to search under the boathouse for Stacey’s remains. Not only did they find her remains fettered to the underwater portion of one of the pilings, but they found a rope leading to a metal, waterproof box that, when they lifted it from the water and busted it open, revealed eleven victims’ mementos.

Griffin swallowed, slid a pair of gloves on, and lifted Jenna’s heart-shaped locket, clutching it tightly in his hand.

We got him, honey. We finally got him.

35

The gang finally headed back to CCI in Declan’s Suburban—Lauren’s body having been removed from the scene by the ME while Malcolm was transported to shock trauma, and David surprisingly on his way back to Israel sooner than anticipated.

His boss called him home after a discussion with “a contact” in the Agency “looking to protect their asset from a possible terrorist attack on U.S. soil.” It had clearly been Malcolm’s, or possibly even Lauren’s, way of removing David from the picture before either arrived at the warehouse today. Whoever had made the call, it had worked, and David was on his way home.

A crew was still in place processing the warehouse, but their group needed to keep their focus on stopping Bedan and Ebeid. The weight of all that had occurred hung heavy and thick in the enclosed space of the car.

Luke glanced out the window, the sky overhead dim and gray. They passed warehouse grouping after grouping. He shifted in his seat. Could it be that simple? One way to find out. “There are a ton of warehouses in this area, and Ebeid and his crew had an awful lot to move before you raided the other warehouse. Something tells me they didn’t move far.”

“You really think Ebeid’s backup warehouse would be close?” Declan asked, clutching the wheel.

“It’s the last place we’d think to look.”

“True,” Declan said. “And they most certainly need to be using another warehouse just based on the space and storage they require. Most of the warehouses in this area are empty.”

“So let’s check the ones that aren’t,” Luke said, clasping the back of Declan’s seat. “Have a satellite pass over the area and note the warehouses in use.”

“Smart, Luke,” Declan said. “There can only be a handful.”

Declan called in the request, and well before they could make it back to CCI, they were rerouting back to three occupied warehouses in the same general vicinity as the first, just on the other side of the water.

Luke unfolded a copy of the page filled with scientific notations and Bedan’s shorthand they’d found at the first warehouse, smoothing it out to study it. Might as well do something useful while riding back to the warehouse district.

“Bedan was definitely working out the needed equations to stabilize anthrax into an aerosolized form,” Luke said. But the side notations—in a form of shorthand he’d matched to lecture notes of Bedan’s that were still available online via Hanover Medical School—frighteningly enough indicated that Bedan was dabbling with also mixing a few grams of plutonium dust in with the anthrax.

But to what purpose?

“Radiation,” he said suddenly.

“What?” Declan frowned in the rearview mirror.

Luke took a moment to explain his findings and went on to lay it out as he saw it happening. “Plutonium dust is heavier and wouldn’t travel as far as the anthrax spores, but think of the logistical nightmare it would cause when emergency response teams try to go in to treat the people exposed to anthrax. They would need proper radiation gear and it would delay response time and allow the anthrax to spread farther.” Luke went still. “We’ve got to find that warehouse.”

“Pulling up to the first one now,” Declan said.