Chapter 40 - The Zero Hour Breach
My heart stopped.
"What did you do?" I roared, hauling Sterling off the desk by his silk necktie, lifting him until his feet dangled six inches off the Persian rug. "WHAT DID YOU DO TO CLARA?!"
"The thermite plate was a decoy, Maya!" Sterling wheezed, his eyes bulging with triumphant malice. "The real payload wasn't mechanical! It was a synthetic biological vector... an engineered hemorrhagic pathogen suspended inside the microscopic ceramic dust particles that entered her bloodstream when you smashed that plate out of her arm!"
The room seemed to dissolve into a tunnel of blinding, terrifying cold.
*When I drove the blade in... when I popped the plate... the black synthetic coolant...*
It wasn't coolant. It was the delivery medium.
"She has less than six hours before the cellular envelope ruptures," Sterling whispered, blood foaming on his lips. "And there is only one dose of the neutralizing enzyme in existence. It’s aboard the Russian stealth transport *Volga-One*, currently hovering at thirty thousand feet over international waters off the Delaware coast."
The monitor on the desk suddenly began beeping a frantic, high-frequency alarm.
The screen turned pitch black, replaced by a live satellite feed.
A massive, radar-deflecting stealth aircraft, unmarked and painted matte black, was descending through the cloud cover directly toward the Washington airspace, completely invisible to civilian air traffic control.
Simultaneously, my radio cracked with static. It was Master Sergeant Hicks down in the Georgetown courtyard, his voice laced with frantic urgency:
*"Colonel! We’ve got multiple fast-movers descending on our position! Unidentified aircraft deploying high-altitude low-opening parachutes directly over the safehouse on M Street! They’re going after Clara and your mother!"*
Down on the street, the air was suddenly torn apart by the sonic boom of twin low-altitude interceptor craft.
Through the shattered balcony doors, a blinding laser-guidance beam painted the center of Sterling’s chest with a pulsing red dot.
"They’re not here to rescue me, Maya," Sterling whispered, his face turning entirely gray as he looked down at the red dot on his shirt. "They’re here to sanitize the entire block."
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A heavy-caliber missile whistled through the night sky, cutting through the Georgetown fog, heading directly for the window of the room where we stood.
I threw myself backward over the desk toward the hallway just as the glass exploded in a catastrophic wall of fire and shattered concrete.
