lab. After pushing through the first of the pressurized doors, she touched the intercom button beside the second. “Out, please.”
She’d long ago learned not to bother making small talk with the guards—it only made them suspicious. Nowadays, she stuck to her routine and they stuck to theirs, little suspecting that she was studying them and waiting for her chance to escape. Or maybe they’d suspected all along, and she was doomed before she even began.
The door unlocked with a click. Sydney held her breath as it swung open automatically, then exhaled in relief when she saw the hallway was empty. If they’d sent an escort she would’ve had to scrap her plan, but the armed escorts had gotten fewer and further between with every week and month she behaved herself, as she’d pretended to cooperate with Tiberius and his mad plan.
Forcing herself to breathe evenly, she stepped out into the hallway and headed for her quarters, trying to look like all she had on her mind was a few hours of sleep. When she reached the gray, featureless door leading to her two-room suite, she pressed another intercom button. “In, please.”
The door clicked and opened, but instead of entering, she reached around the corner and fumbled for the thin wire she’d installed in the wall panel earlier that day, in the ten minutes she’d bought by “accidentally” blocking the view of the single camera in the main room of her suite by hanging a towel over the lens. By the time one of the guards had buzzed himself in without knocking, removed the offending item and groused at her for her continued sloppiness—which she’d carefully cultivated over the past few months—she’d done what needed to be done with the circuitry.
Concealed alongside the molding, the wire led to a simple gadget she’d Mickey Moused out of parts filched from the lab, using the diagram Celeste had sent via Jenny Marie. A sharp tug would form a bridge between the two main power lines in the wall beside the door, creating an obvious short and giving Tiberius’s engineers no reason to look further for the source of the electrical failure.
At least that was the theory.
“Here goes nothing,” she whispered, heart pounding. She checked her watch. Nine minutes fifty-five since she’d fed the kill program into the network. Fifty-six. Fifty-seven. As the door to her room started to close on its soundless mechanism, she yanked on the wire and jumped back.
There was a sizzle and a blinding flash in her room. Two seconds later the lights went out in the hallway, plunging her into utter blackness.
Sydney didn’t think. She ran.
She heard muffled shouts and pounding feet as she bolted along the hallway and slammed through the door at the end, where she’d jimmied the lock earlier that day.
She was out!
The night was cold and rainy, which she hadn’t anticipated. Sucking in a lungful of the wet, cutting air of springtime off the Atlantic coast, she plunged down a short cement staircase and bolted past a tarped-over swimming pool. Taking the direct route she’d mapped out during her daily guard-escorted walks around the compound, she headed for the dock at the bottom of the hill. The boats were little more than a collection of shadows against a misty backdrop of rain, dark against darker in the moonless, drizzly night.
She was halfway there when the backup generators kicked in, circumventing the primary network she’d crashed. Emergency lights flared to life and alarms whooped, the noise seeming to come from nowhere and everywhere at once.
Heart pounding, legs shaking with fear and adrenaline, Sydney ran for her life.
The drizzle had slicked everything with a thin layer of water, making the cement walkway slippery beneath her sneakers. The sharp wind cut through the jeans and light turtleneck shirt she’d worn in the climate-controlled lab. She hadn’t dared trigger the guards’ suspicions by dressing more heavily than that, and she paid for it as she pounded down a short incline to the water. Her teeth were chattering by the time she reached the first boat.
“Stop!” a voice shouted from behind her. Booted footsteps approached from the side at a run as the guards surrounded her. Gunfire chattered, kicking up stinging pellets of concrete directly ahead and to both sides of her.
They weren’t aiming to kill. Not yet, anyway.
Ignoring the warning shots, Sydney took two running steps across the dock and flung herself toward the nearest motorboat, which was one of the small, fast two-seaters the guards used for shoreline patrols. She untied the craft from the dock and clambered aboard, ducking with a terrified scream as bullets smacked into the side of the boat and peppered the interior of the craft.
Her heart rocketed in her chest and for a split second she wanted to give up, wanted to put her hands up and say, “You win, I was just kidding. Take me back to the lab.”
But she didn’t. She couldn’t. Still, her fingers shook as she punched the ignition button—her complacence had made the guards sloppy enough to leave the console unlocked, thank God—and the engine roared to life.
Coming from the other side of the island, past the cliff-side mansion, she heard the rotor thumps of Tiberius’s helicopter preparing to lift off. She wasn’t sure if he was evacuating or coming after her, but the sound added to the chaos of siren whoops and shouts as a dozen guards hit the dock, running flat out toward the other boats. The gunfire was silent for the moment, though, indicating that the security detail had orders to recapture her, not kill her.
She’d figured Tiberius would consider her far more of an asset than a liability…at least until it looked like she was going to succeed in escaping. Then he’d have his men start shooting for real.
Thank God for the rain. It would give her a layer of covering fog, and hopefully spoil their aim. The idea of being shot at—of being shot—terrified her, but she couldn’t turn back now.
She slapped the throttle forward, blessing the summer she and Celeste had spent with a foster family on Moose-head Lake, where they’d learned the basics of boating. The motorboat leapt forward, spraying the dock with a plume of water that made the guards shout and curse, sounds that were quickly lost beneath the roar of the motorboat engine and the growing thump of the helicopter.
Sydney glanced back, to where the mansion rose high on the crest of the island, a dark, hulking shadow that was barely visible in the fog. Then the chopper swung up and over the building. Its searchlights cut through the mist, and the bumps of rockets were clearly visible on either skid.
That gave Sydney her answer: Tiberius wasn’t fleeing. The bastard was coming after her.
Trembling with terror and adrenaline, breath sobbing in her lungs, she sent the little boat west, toward where the shoreline of northern Massachusetts ought to be. She couldn’t see any town lights through the wind-driven rain, which was coming down harder by the moment. The pellets stung her face and throat, quickly soaking through her light clothing and plastering the fabric to her skin.
“Come on,” she chanted. “You can do it. You can beat him.” She wasn’t sure if she was talking to herself or the boat, but the mantra made her feel a little better.
She almost couldn’t believe that she’d gotten this far. The Sydney Westlake of a year earlier hadn’t been able to fight for her university job or her project funding, hadn’t been able to stand up for herself in the face of her ex’s smear campaign, which had been the lowest of low academic politics.
But somehow, somewhere, she’d become the sort of woman who could plan an escape and make it happen.
Unfortunately, she’d also become a criminal, because whether or not Tiberius had coerced her—and he sure as hell had—she’d been the one to create the DNA code he considered his ultimate retail offering. Now it was up to her to make sure he never got to sell or use the engineered virus.
As she sent the boat into the gloom and the sounds of pursuit faded, hope guttered in her chest, pressing tears into her throat. She began to believe—when she hadn’t really believed before, no matter what she’d told herself—that she was really going to get out of this mess, that she and Celeste were