looked at each other.
“What in the wide blue fuck?” I murmured.
Before he could even venture an answer there was a flash way off to our right. The vehicles were coming. Miles out, but coming fast.
We rose and turned and ran toward the house.
If we had time we’d pick the lock, go in quietly, listen, and learn. That ship had sailed. Bunny, Top, and I all pulled flash-bangs, picked windows where the drone thermals told us the inhabitants were grouped. We threw.
The grenades flashed and banged.
And we stormed in.
6.
THE LAB
TéNéRé
SOUTH-CENTRAL SAHARA
We kicked in the doors and rushed through a lobby and a kitchen and into a big room that had to be a kind of rec room or lounge.
All eight of the inhabitants of the Lab were rolling around on the floor, hands pressed to their ears, eyes squeezed shut, screaming in pain and confusion. I saw the Xhosa woman, Bongani Jiba, and the Sotho guy, Thabo Mahao, right off. They were the only two black people. The other six were a mix of Asian faces—one Japanese, one mixed, and a variety of whites, one of whom had a distinctly French nose. They were all about the same age—mid-to-late twenties. All dressed in casual clothes, jeans, T-shirts. White lab coats were hung on hooks or draped over chairs. Only one of them had a gun—a small-frame 9mm in a Kydex belt holster. The plastic grips were a happy powder-blue color. There were no visible backup magazines, and the woman who wore it hadn’t reached for the weapon. I know a lot of cops and soldiers who would have found a way to draw their guns even during the pain of a flash-bang.
Bunny took the pistol away and then gave cover, and Top and I searched everyone else. No guns. The only weapon—if you could call it that—was a Swiss Army knife. The one with the spoon. No locking blades.
Top cut me a look and I shook my head.
I knelt by Mahao because he was closest. I grabbed his shirt—his fucking Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles T-shirt—and pulled him roughly to a sitting position. He was fighting through the pain to try to see me, to make sense of what was happening. I put the barrel of my Sig Sauer against the bridge of his nose.
“Thabo Mahao,” I said, “listen to me. Tell me what this place is and what you’re doing here. Lie to me and I will kill you.”
He stared at me as if I’d stepped through a hole in the dimension. His mouth worked and took on about forty different word shapes before he managed to force out a reply.
“Who . . . who are you . . . ?” he gasped.
I tapped him with the gun. Hard. “That’s not an answer to my question. Answer right now or I’ll shoot you and ask someone else.”
“This is our field lab,” Mahao said quickly, his voice almost a yelp.
“For developing bioweapons?” I prompted, mindful of the cars on their way here.
Mahao’s face took on the strangest expression. It’s the kind of look someone gives you if you ask the weirdest or stupidest question ever. He said, “Bio . . . ? Wait . . . what?”
On the floor near him, Jiba was waving her hand back and forth as if trying to chase my words out of the air. “No . . . no . . .” she kept saying. “Are you crazy people? Bioweapons? Us? Are you mad?”
Despite being in pain and clearly terrified, Mahao gave me a crooked half smile. “Oh my god,” he said, “you think we’re them!”
As crazy as it sounds, he laughed. So did Jiba.
“No,” she said, her streaming eyes going wide. “That’s crazy. Them? You think we’re them? You think we’re those people who are trying to kill the world?”
“A lot of Toubou families are dead around here,” I said. “Your jet’s been spotted spraying something. Tell me what we’re supposed to think.”
Several of the people gasped, and two cried out in horror. Not