Page 39 of Hot Intent

Alex replied, “The operative words being ‘during the storm.’ Two-hundred-mile per hour winds would sweep away any deadly chemicals so fast they’d have little or no time to affect anyone in the area. If a poison gas was released, we would see a wide scatter pattern of deaths, not this tight little cluster in a single village.”

“What’s going on out here, Alex?”

“That’s what we’re here to find out. I’m praying the storm caused a slow leak and that a cloud of something innocent, like chlorine fumes from bleach explains what we’ve seen.”

They trudged onward in silence.

She spotted them first. Dead, bloated lumps in a pasture littered with tree branches. “Oh my God, Alex. Cows.”

He glanced where she pointed and swore quietly. If there had been a fence containing the beasts at some point, it was long gone. Alex swerved into the pasture to examine the creatures. Katie had no desire to get up close and personal and stayed on the road. She watched Alex pull out his cell phone and take pictures of the dead animals.

Alex returned, announcing, “Same pathology as the people.”

Katie shuddered. They walked a little farther and spotted a child walking alone toward them. Katie ran forward to kneel before the boy, who was maybe ten years old. He said his name was Oscar. He had cuts and abrasions and seemed mildly in shock. She gave him a bottle of water and a protein bar, which Oscar wolfed down.

While Alex finished checking him for injuries, the boy described his home being destroyed in the hurricane. He’d apparently been swept inland on the storm surge and was only now trying to find his way back to his family’s farm, which was somewhere nearby.

A quick conversation with the child, a look at the map, and a check of the GPS placed the boy’s family near where they were headed. Katie took Oscar’s hand and held it as they continued their hike back in the direction the child had come from. She feared for what they would find when they reached this boy’s house.

An iron gate came into view, and Oscar ran to it eagerly. Beyond it, only a bare concrete slab remained beyond where the child’s home had apparently stood. He burst into tears and Katie’s heart broke for him. She put her arm around his shoulder as he sobbed and cried with him.

Alex stepped away from Katie and the child. He felt bad for the kid, but as quickly as sympathy reared its ugly head, he slammed the emotion shut in a drawer in his mind.

While Katie calmed the boy, he mentally reviewed his college chemistry for chemicals and combinations of chemicals that could be lethal. He desperately hoped Katie was right and thecleaning supply factory was the source of the deaths in the area. But his gut told him he wasn’t looking at something that simple.

Eventually, Katie extracted information from the boy that Oscar’s grandmother lived in Baracoa. He wasn’t surprised when Katie offered to take Oscar to the city to find her, but he really didn’t have time to play fairy godfather to some kid, right now. He remembered vividly how hard it had been to keep newborn Dawn alive and safe in Zaghastan last year.

Before he could voice his objection to a Baracoa road trip, however, the boy ran toward some sort of shed behind where the house had stood and Katie followed along behind the child. The structure looked largely intact.

Alex started when his cell phone vibrated in his pocket and pulled it out cautiously. He swore and answered in Russian, keeping his voice low. “What do you want, Roman? I’m a little busy at the moment.”

“Have you found anything?” his father asked without preamble.

“Like what?” he responded cautiously.

“You tell me.”

“What do you think I’m going to find out here?”

“Dead people,” Roman answered promptly.

“Good guess.”

A pause drew out between them. Alex finally murmured, “You’re draining my battery. I’m going to hang up now?—“

“Wait,” Roman said sharply.

“What?”

“Have you found any…unusual deaths?”

Alex’s skin crawled as if a million tiny insects were clawing across his flesh. “Why do you ask?” he asked sharply.

“If you should happen to run across anything…out of the ordinary…it would behoove all of us if you…removed…anyevidence of such a thing, It would be a tragedy if something…contagious…were to be loosed upon unsuspecting people.”

Just which unsuspecting people was Roman talking about? Was he threatening Americans with a chemical attack if the presence of such chemicals here was revealed? Or was he merely talking about the Cuban government silencing the locals by whatever means necessary? Not that a localized massacre was a great alternative to an attack on the States.

“You’re going to have to speak plainly to me, Roman. You already seem to know what I’ve seen out here.”

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