Piranha (Oregon Files 10)

Juan heard Horne shut the office door behind him. The assassin saw Juan staring down at him and waved with a wicked grin on his face. He held a small black object in his hand for Juan to see, his thumb poised over a red button. With a deliberate finality, his thumb stabbed down.

Juan dived over the lobby desk and tackled Jill before she could register what was happening, covering her body with his. The instant they hit the floor, a deafening blast blew apart Greg Horne’s office, showering the cubicles with glass shards and chunks of the thick wooden door.

/>

Juan shook off the stars circling his head and jumped to his feet to go to Horne’s aid, but there was nothing he could do. Smoke billowed across the room as an inferno raged in Horne’s office. The explosion was so powerful that it had damaged the sprinkler system, which sprayed haphazardly around the space.

Jill was cowering in the fetal position and screaming uncontrollably. Juan picked her up in his arms and carried her to the stairs, which was now crammed with the building’s other tenants escaping the fire. She was able to walk down the stairs, so he put his arm around her shoulder and kept his head on a swivel, looking for signs of the assassin.

By the time he got outside, emergency vehicles were already arriving. He handed Jill off to a paramedic and jogged across the street.

The Urban Jungle van was gone.

Eric ran through the crowd of onlookers.

“Chairman! Are you all right?”

Juan nodded. “It was the Haitians again. They knew we were coming.”

“How? We disabled our trackers.”

“I don’t know. Their surveillance system must be even more powerful than we thought. They must have cracked our communication encryption.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

Juan looked up at the flames licking from the fifth floor above him. “I think your evidence is on fire.”

“You weren’t able to get a copy of the diary?”

“It existed, but he wouldn’t show it to me. Now it’s up in smoke, and so is the only remaining person to read it besides Kensit.”

Police were now screeching to a stop in packs.

“Come on,” Eric said, “I’ve got the car stopped on the next block.”

“I did get one piece of information,” Juan said as they walked and rubbed the smoke from his eyes.

“What’s that?”

“Lutzen’s journal never mentioned that he was a doctor.”

Eric thought for a second, then his eyes went wide. “Mr. Perlmutter’s book said his postdoctoral research was continuing the work he did at Berlin University.”

Juan nodded. “His doctoral thesis might still be in the library. We need to know what he was working on.”

“And because his doctorate wasn’t mentioned in the diary, Kensit might not know the thesis exists. I can do an online search to make sure it’s still in the library.”

“No. We don’t know how far Kensit has penetrated our network or how his system works. If he knows we’re looking for the thesis, his men might get there before we do and destroy it like he did Horne’s copy of the journal.”

“So we can’t even tell the guys on the Oregon that it exists?”

Juan shook his head. “We’ll tell them what happened here and that they might have company in Martinique, but our destination is between the two of us. I’m not even going to call Tiny. He isn’t going to know until we get to La Guardia that we’re flying to Berlin.”

Saint-Pierre, Martinique

At the turn of the twentieth century, a dozen or more cargo ships would have been anchored where the Oregon now sat motionless, the only large vessel in sight. Although Saint-Pierre’s harbor teemed with pleasure craft and sailboats, her days as a commercial and cultural jewel of the Caribbean ended the day Mt. Pelée erupted. The bustling city of thirty thousand had been rebuilt over the following decades with charming red-roofed cottages and stone churches, but its population had never topped five thousand since that fateful day.

Max Hanley couldn’t blame residents for being reluctant to return. Not only did the now dormant volcano still loom over the town but Saint-Pierre had suffered catastrophe before the eruption. During the high-speed cruise from the Dominican Republic, Max found out that Saint-Pierre had been destroyed more than a century earlier by the twenty-five-foot storm surge of the Great Hurricane of 1780, the deadliest in Atlantic history. Over nine thousand citizens died in that disaster.