The Chronos Plague (Book 1): No Time Left Read online

  A few minutes past seven, I got a knock on the door. I waited a minute then heard the sound of a truck driving away. I opened the door and found car keys hanging on a string on the doorknob.

  Outside was a late model Crown Victoria. It looked like it had spent most of its life as a police car, and then it was bought at auction. But I knew it would run; they wouldn’t have sent me anything else. I just needed it to take me from one place to another. I didn’t care if it was a Porsche or a Ford. It needed to just go.

  I retrieved Conner and we headed out, finding our way with the coordinates we had retrieved. Satellite images told us there was something there, we just couldn’t tell what. Not even Google maps could tell us what it was.

  The road out of town was as depressing as the town itself. There was nothing around for miles. There was scattered snow all over the place, and it just added to the depression. If I wanted to make a fortune, I would just open up a bar and rake in the cash from the sad sacks living in this middle of nowhere. For the life of me, I could not imagine the state of mind of the person who looked around here and thought this was a good place to put a town.

  “How far?” I asked Conner.

  “We gotta cross the river, and the only spot to do so is south,” he said.

  “And then?”

  “And then we have to go back up the river and literally retrace our steps,” Conner said.

  “So we’re heading south to go north, when we could have been better off swimming the damn river and then walking,” I said, not bothering to hide my annoyance.

  “Pretty much.” Conner was as annoyed as I was.

  “I hate Canada.”

  The drive south took us an hour, and we finally found a stupid bridge. We crossed the river and then headed back north. Our path took us close enough to the town of Churchill that we could see it on the other side of the water. That didn’t help our mood. The other thing that didn’t help my mood was the fact that Edmund Firch would be right on our heels and we lost two goddamn hours thanks to the goddamn river having one stupid bridge.

  We turned inland and drove for another half an hour. Conner stayed glued to the GPS, making sure we were going the right way. He called out directions and I tried my best to stay on what passed for roads. We left the main road and were following a small gravel road.

  The gravel road turned into a dirt road, and we passed a small post near the road. It looked like an old fence post, and further up the hill were several others. But something caught my eye and I stopped the car and went back.

  “What’s up?” Conner asked.

  “Nothing, something, I don’t know. I thought I saw something,” I said. I pulled up next to the post and got out of the car. From the point of view of a car on the dirt road, the post was a post. But from the opposite side, there was a small grey box. It had a black glass front, and was pointed down the dirt road we were traveling.

  “Huh. That’s something at least,” I said.

  I got back in the car and told Conner what I found.

  “That’s not normal. Think they know we’re coming?” Conner asked.

  “If anyone’s there, they know now,” I said.

  We followed the dirt road into the large foothills, and kept our eyes open for anything that looked like it might be a lab. The only thing we came across was a dilapidated barn. I pulled up outside of it and stopped. It was a sorry excuse for a building. Half the roof had caved in and the siding was gone in several places. One of the doors was hanging off, twitching in the wind.

  “What are we doing here?” Conner asked.

  “If you had a place where you wanted to do freaky, illegal shit, how would you hide it?” I asked.

  Conner looked at the building. “You might have a point.”

  “Take a closer look. I have a feeling about this place,” I said.

  Conner walked around the building, and while he did, I inspected it myself. The door hanging off had actually been hung that way, and the rust was really paint. The old nails holding the boards in were stainless screws painted black.

  Conner came back with a small grin on his face and I knew he saw the same things I had.

  “Shall we take a look inside?” he asked.

  “After that drive? Even if it’s just to look at horse stalls, I’m in,” I said.

  We walked around to the other side of the building, and stepped in through a large hole in the side of the barn. The interior was exactly as you would expect: old, smelly, and completely faked. I had to give whoever did this a lot of credit. They must have been raised in a barn to get this many details right. Anyone who came looking for anything in here would give a glance and be gone.

  “So now what?” Conner asked.

  “Now we look at the floor,” I said. “If there was a lot of activity, we can follow the wear lines and at least get ourselves to the right location.”

  Sure enough, there was a faint trail on the floor heading toward one of the stalls. We went over to it and stood there for a short time. I looked on the two walls nearest me while Conner looked on his.

  “Anything?” I asked.

  “Maybe. Hold on.” Conner reached down pulled up a plank. It rose easily, along with several others, revealing a stairwell heading down.

  “Okay, here we go,” I said, putting a hand on my gun. I didn’t know what we were going to find, but going down a dark stairwell in a supposedly abandoned place was how every horror movie happened. If I encountered a serial killer down there, it wasn’t going to be happy.

  I went down the stairs, and there was a small room, no bigger than the floor for the barn. There was a bank of screens on one wall, a desk, and a chair. On the other side was a small couch, a door that led to another room, and Conner checked that out.

  “Just a small bedroom and kitchen. Shower in the bathroom, so this might have been a long-term proposition,” he said.

  “Somebody went to a lot of trouble to hide a security checkpoint,” I said. “Wonder what they did for the facility?”

  “One way to find out,” Conner said.

  “Yeah, before Edmund finds us,” I said.

  We went back to the car and moved further up the road, keeping an eye out for anything that would tell us there was something here. The lengths that this corporation went to hide just a security checkpoint, anything could be seen as the front door.

  “No parking lot, so they couldn’t park here, had to have been bussed in,” Conner said, looking out his window.

  “Probably had apartments as well. Maybe they came out for the weekend,” I said.

  “Likely. Lot of trouble to go to and then just walk away.”

  “So put your thinking cap on. This place is shut down, the people who worked here gone, scattered to the wind, getting on with their lives,” I said, rounding a small hill.

  “Okay, so why is Jester killing them?”

  “That, is the question I hope we can answer,” I said.

  I stopped the car at what looked like a farmhouse. It was a small, two-story affair with white paint and black shutters, complete with a small porch.

  “Are we here?” Conner asked.

  “Road stops here, and it looks like there have been a lot of cars stopping here, judging by the tire tracks.” I pointed to the two strips of earth in front of the house. “Humans are creatures of habit. Makes our job easier.”

  I got out of the car and looked around. By anyone’s imagination, this was just a farmhouse. Abandoned and left to the elements. Its remote location made it unlikely that teenagers would discover it and make it into some party house. What was more likely was antique hunters would find it and loot it. They did that with abandoned buildings all over the place. Anything they could sell they took. Doorknobs, you name it. Not much different than locusts, if you ask me.

  “I’ll check the front. You give it a quick circle and see if there’s another way in,” I said. Conner walked off and I stepped up to the porch. The door was locked with a simple deadbolt, but there were ad
ditional deadbolts on the top of the door and the bottom. There was also a small magnetic reader on the door frame. I looked at the windows and I could see that they were not average windows, just made to look like them.

  “What were you making in here?” I asked myself. “More importantly, how can we get in?”

  Conner came back around and he just shrugged his shoulders at me.

  “Well, there’s always the direct method,” I said. I went over to one of the landscape rocks and picked it up out of the ground. It was about the size of a football, and weighed at least twenty pounds. I took it back to the door and hit the frame near where the hinges would be on the other side. Two hard hits each and I gave the door a kick. It opened a little on the hinge side, so I gave it a couple more whacks each. The door crashed open when I kicked it a second time.

  “How did you know that would work?” Conner asked.

  “I’m old for a reason, junior,” I said. “Let’s go take a look.”

  “Oh shit,” Conner said.

  “What? I don’t see…oh, shit.”

  The object of our fecal declaration was working its way up the dirt track, sliding a bit here and there as it navigated the turns. It seemed that Edmund Firch had found us after all. I motioned Conner to move to the other end of the porch.

  “Call the DCS. Tell him where we are and have him get on the horn to the Canadian Intelligence. We’re working on a possible, but not likely, matter of national security for both the U.S. and Canada, and while we have an officer on the scene, we just want to make sure we share and share alike when we know what we have,” I said. “Do it now.”

  Conner dialed like a pro and stepped to the end of the porch, talking in low tones.

  Firch drove around a corner too hard, skidded out, and wound up facing the wrong way. He tried a three-point turn, but the hill said no. After several false starts, he righted himself then came speeding down the drive. I could literally see him screaming to himself. He missed the next turn, and totally lost control. At this point, I think he went from driver to observer. His little Honda finally slid to a stop, blocking our car in the driveway. Firch popped out as if the clown car was too full and before he could yell, he promptly started slipping in the mud. His legs and arms went in every direction except the cardinal ones and by some miracle of gravity and physics, he never actually fell down. His gyrating carried him to the porch railing and catching it with his elbows. He clung to it like a homeless lady grabbing a grocery cart.

  I could have played this a couple of ways, but I decided to go on offense.

  “Hey, Firch. What took you so long? We told the desk clerk to tell you when we left,” I said accusingly.

  Several emotions played across Edmund’s face. Indignation warred with contrite, prudence wasn’t speaking to arrogance, and anger just slammed the door on polite’s fingers. Firch gained control and sent them all into time out.

  “I…am calling my boss. I do not know what will happen to you but I can guarantee you will not like it,” Firch said stoically.

  I decided to take the high road. “Probably for the best. We are after all foreign intelligence officers on your sovereign land, all treaties and such set aside for a moment.” I sat down on the top step of the porch stairs. “I’ll wait.” I looked at Conner and he nodded, setting his phone back into his pocket.

  Firch spoke into his phone and stepped off toward a small outbuilding. He wasn’t going there specifically; he was just headed in that direction. I watched him go, and then I realized something. There were a lot of tracks leading to that building.

  “I’ll be damned.” I waved to Conner. “Come on!”

  We walked across the lawn and followed Firch. He was still talking furiously on the phone.

  “No! They just busted down a door! I don’t know what they’re looking for! What? Sir, you can’t be serious! Yes, sir. Yes, sir. No, sir, I understand.” He put the phone away to find me standing right behind him.

  “Whoa! Jeez, you’re silent.” Firch took a step back. “Looks like your superior and mine talked and apparently you need support. So here I am.”

  “Well, great. And by the way, you found what we were looking for,” I said. “Conner, you want to do the honors?”

  “Not really,” Conner said.

  “I didn’t see a chicken coop, so why do I hear clucking?” I wondered aloud.

  “Asshole.”

  “Mind your betters, boy.” I chuckled good-naturedly, bumping Firch with my elbow.

  “I’m younger than he is,” Firch said, curiously.

  “I said betters, not elders.” I had to shake my head. No one listened these days.

  Conner stepped up to the building, which was slightly larger than a two-car garage. He opened the grey wood door and then smiled back at us.

  “Come on, you pansies,” he said.

  Firch looked at me. “Why are we flowers, again?”

  “Damned if I know. Let’s get up there before he gets lost.”

  We stepped through the door and it was like we had crossed a magical threshold. There was a small security desk, a sitting area, and three elevators. On the wall was a small company logo. It said the word HORD, and the O was a globe.

  “We ever come across that one before?” I asked Conner.

  Conner poked his head up from the security desk. “Yeah, we have. Reason why we’re here. Figure out what the hell they were working on.”

  “Any sign anyone else had been here?” Firch asked.

  “Doesn’t look like it,” Conner said.

  “Do we have power, at least?” I asked, pressing a button on the elevator.

  The button lit up and one of the doors opened with a small ding.

  “I can take yes for an answer,” I said.

  “You sure you want to do that?” Firch asked

  “What could be down there?” I countered. “It was a lab, right?”

  “And labs have all kinds of weird diseases in them, especially one that went to such lengths to be hidden,” Edmund said.

  “Good point,” I said, holding the elevator. “But we can take a look. Nothing lives long in the air, seventy-two hours at most, and this place has been out of business for at least two years.”

  “Counter-point. Let’s go,” Firch said.

  Conner shrugged. “Anything of use will be down there anyway, and we didn’t come all this way just to stop at the front door.”

  “Let’s get going, then,” I said. We entered the elevator and I saw that there were four floors. I pressed one and waited for the door to close and the drop to start. It happened immediately, and I was grateful we were able to get something moving.

  We went to the first floor down and it was nothing more than a bunch of cubicles and meeting rooms. It was a lot larger than I expected, and it was all underground. The weird things were the windows, and they were just covered with curtains. Conner found a computer server room that had been cleaned out, so there was nothing useful there. The desks had nothing we could use, so we went down to the next floor. It was the same as the first floor, only instead of a large server room, there was a small cafeteria. It, too, had been cleaned out.

  The third floor was a large laboratory, and we spent a good deal of time wandering around there. I found a flash drive in a drawer, and quietly pocketed it without Firch seeing. I had no doubt he had grabbed something as well. There were several monitors around, but nothing hooked up to a computer or laptop. The coolers and freezers were empty, too.

  The fourth floor was another lab, but this one was a little different. There were large specimen tables in one corner, and one wall was covered in cages. I wasn’t an expert, but I’d say we’d found some animal testing part of the lab.

  “I hate to say it but, I’m not so sure there’s anything here,” Firch said, wiping his hands on a paper towel.

  “Sounds about right,” I said. “Looks like whatever they were doing here they cleaned out pretty well.”

  Conner was walking around the lab and h
e stopped near a vent.

  “You hear that?” he asked us.

  “Hear what?” Firch asked back.

  “Sounds like there’s something moving in the vent,” Conner said.

  Firch and I wandered over and we stood by the air vent. Sure enough, there were some sounds like someone was moving, and then a clattering noise like someone had knocked something over or had tossed something to the ground.

  “Where would this be happening?” Conner asked. “We’ve been to all the floors the elevator went to.”

  “And that leads us to the next question,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Are there floors the elevators don’t go to?”

  “Guess we need to find out,” Firch said.

  We searched the fourth floor but there was no sign of any path to another room. A second search came up empty, but we definitely heard some things in the vent.

  “I think we’re doing this wrong,” Firch finally said.

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Think about it. Everything we’ve seen has been about misdirection. So if there were additional areas or subfloors, then we’d have to assume they wouldn’t be right below the one we’re on,” Firch said.

  “That’s reasonable,” I said, slightly impressed. “All right, we have three floors left, let’s take ten minutes for each with all of us taking a floor, and we’ll see if we find anything. For all we know, it’s just a family of raccoons in the vents.”

  It was on the second floor we found it. Rather, Firch found it, since he was the one that took the second floor. There was a door in the cafeteria, hidden behind an overly large motivational poster. The door had a major encryption lock on it, hand scanner, and even a retinal scanner. Everything about it said, “Unless you have a reason to be standing there, go away.” There were areas at Langley that were protected like this, usually encryption rooms, command centers, or liquor cabinets.

  “Well, I think this is as far as we go,” Conner said. Firch nodded his agreement while I looked at the lock.