Page 95 of Special Ops Seduction

He still waited at the threshold, thinking that the opening of the door could be the signal Carter was waiting for to launch his attack. But nothing happened.

Jonas eased himself inside, like the shadow he was. The door opened into a reasonably sized living area, with a kitchen on one end and a dining area tucked off on the other. Jonas checked it all in a quick sweep as Bethan moved around the island in the kitchen to weed out any lurking threats.

Everything was clear. Jonas pointed down the small hallway off the main living space.

With a nod, Bethan went first, moving with equal parts power and grace. First she checked out the bathroom to the left, but it was empty. She glanced back at Jonas before pointing to the left of the two doors that waited at the end of the hallway. He nodded, and she did the same thing he’d done at the front door of the apartment. Waiting, testing, and then quietly pushing the door open.

But the room inside was completely bare. Hardwoodfloor, two windows at the far end overlooking a courtyard filled with green, and nothing else save a lightbulb in an open light fixture in the ceiling.

There was nothing about this Jonas liked. He backed up, jerking his chin to indicate that Bethan should come back out into the small hallway and then repeat the same steps on the last remaining door.

He noticed everything. He always did, but he’d become so good at shutting off the parts he didn’t wish to acknowledge. Like the assured way she did her job, as if she were made of butter and steel.

She bent her head to the thick wooden door. She listened. Then carefully, soundlessly, tried the doorknob. It gave the same way all the others had.

When she pushed it open gently, carefully, Jonas expected another empty room.

But as the door widened, both he and Bethan froze.

Because the room wasn’t empty.

Tayo Sowande was tied to a high-backed chair in the center of the otherwise completely empty room. His mouth was taped shut with an abundance of duct tape. His wrists and ankles were similarly restrained, taped to the chair he sat on.

There were unpleasant-looking sores—lesions, Jonas corrected himself, if he correctly remembered the anthrax informational packet the containment crew had given them—on almost every part of the man’s skin.

Jonas did not need a medical degree to understand that he was looking at his own future. At exactly how he—and, more incomprehensibly, Bethan—would die. And soon.

He was so focused on that he almost missed the cherry on top of this sick, staged scene.

There was a piece of paper on the floor at Sowande’s feet. Written on it, in block capital letters, it read:TOO LATE.

Twenty-three

Bethan instinctively moved toward the poor scientist, who was so still she couldn’t tell whether he was alive or not—

But Jonas held her back with a hand on her elbow.

“Careful,” he warned her. “SuperThrax isn’t contagious, as far as we know, but all bets are off with an open wound.”

Bethan tugged her elbow away from him. “What do you think he’s going to do? Give memore?”

She moved across the room, going to her knees next to the chair. She pulled out one of the knives she’d taken from the safe house and sliced through the duct tape but didn’t pull it off Sowande’s wrists, afraid there were more sores beneath the adhesive. It was as she was trying to ease the tape off his mouth that the man blinked, then moaned.

“You’re alive,” Bethan said as evenly as possible. “That’s the good news. The bad news is that I expect you’re in a lot of pain.”

“You must not touch me,” Sowande said, sounding panicked. “You must not—”

“It’s okay.” Bethan tried to sound soothing. “We’ve already been exposed. We’re in the same boat.”

Sowande moaned again then, and this time it sounded deep. Broken. As if his pain were internal.

“It’s too late,” he said, tears gathering in the corners of his eyes. “It’s all over now.”

Bethan glanced back over her shoulder. Jonas was talking quietly into his comm unit, and she knew that he was summoning medical help. And notifying the others that they’d found their scientist, at the very least.

“I don’t know if it’s too late or not,” Bethan said matter-of-factly when she turned back to Sowande. “Help is on the way. I assure you they will do all that they can. But you would know better than anyone. What’s the likelihood of survival once you’ve reached this stage?”

“You don’t understand,” Sowande said. Then he swallowed in a painful manner that produced a deep, horrified kind of shudder move inside of her. Because she understood that the lesions she could see on his skin were inside him, too.

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