State of Emergency Read Online Free

“I can’t believe it leaked! It was double bagged, one condom inside another. I went straight from the airport to the address like the guy told me to.”
    â€œThis guy,” Dr. Clayton said. “Can you call him and see what kind of drug it was?”
    Bancroft wiggled her jaw back and forth, looking hollow as if she was going to be sick. “No, I mean . . . I just met him at a club in Helsinki.” She licked her lips as the nausea passed. “He’s Spanish, I think.... There was something wrong with his lip he tried to hide with a beard.”
    â€œWhere did you go from the airport?” Clayton prodded, more to keep the girl talking than to gather any information. A blood test would show what drug she’d ingested well before they could contact the smuggler who had put her up to this.
    Bancroft swallowed hard, squinting at the pain in her head. “Some warehouse down by the pier. It was a place where they stored a bunch of bank machines—you know, like ATMs.” Her body began to shake with sobs. “He told me it was safe. I mean, I just wanted to get a little extra—”
    The girl’s eyes sagged in midsentence and the heart monitor went flat.
    ER staff swarmed in with the crash cart, pushing medication and attempting to shock her heart back into rhythm. Nothing worked.
    â€œNote time of death at 6:05 p.m.” Dr. Clayton sighed. Less than fifteen minutes after she’d entered the hospital, Taylor Bancroft was dead. In twenty-six years of practicing medicine, she’d never seen anyone without a gaping wound go from ambulatory to flatline that fast.
    â€œPoor kid,” the charge nurse said, pursing her lips. “Wonder what she was doing in Helsinki?”
    â€œWho knows?” Clayton moved to cover the girl’s face with the sheet, and was startled to find wads of blond hair that had fallen out on the pillow.
    The charge nurse leaned over the body helping, her hospital ID dangling from her pink scrub top. A series of black dots traveled up the badge next to it.
    â€œEveryone move away now!” Clayton snapped, snatching the dosimeter badge from her own lab coat.
    â€œShit!” She took another step back without thinking. This was no reaction to drugs leaking from a swallowed condom. In the short minutes she’d been around Taylor Bancroft, four of the small circles were now darker than their corresponding backgrounds, indicating over twenty-five rads of exposure.
    Clayton rushed to the door of the trauma room, eyes frantically scanning the waiting area, where a college-age orderly worked on the mess Taylor Bancroft had made on the floor.
    â€œJeremy,” she snapped. “Leave it alone!”
    The orderly looked up, mop in hand. He wore protective gloves, slippers, and a face mask—unlikely to protect him from the real danger. A blank look crossed his face.
    â€œLeave it be!” Clayton said again, terror edging into her normally calm voice.
    An elderly couple and a haggard mother with her small sleeping toddler sat along the far wall of the waiting room. Two fishermen types in wool sweaters and rubber boots occupied the center seats, staring up at the wall-mounted flat screen above the child’s head.
    â€œEveryone outside,” Clayton yelled, summoning all the bravado she could muster. “The ER is closed.”
    Taylor Bancroft’s insides had been cooked from radiation poisoning—and every drop of fluid that had escaped her body had turned the ER into a hot zone. If the deadly stuff wasn’t still inside her, then it was floating around somewhere out there—in the hands of someone sick enough to smuggle it into the U.S. inside a college student’s gut.

DIRTY
    In the absence of orders, go find something and kill it.
    â€”E RWIN R OMMEL

C HAPTER 1
    December 16
1110 Hours
Arlington, Virginia
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    J ericho Quinn twisted the throttle on his gunmetal-gray BMW R 1200 GS Adventure, feeling