Once Bitten, Twice Dead - By Bianca D'Arc Page 0,99
best she could in the darkness before dawn. It had been one hell of a night.
“…eighteen, nineteen and twenty,” Xavier counted off as he dropped the last transmitter near the house.
“Negative contact on the boat, sir,” Reno said over the radio. “There are a few small pleasure craft out here. I saw something a lot bigger and faster leaving earlier. It took off down the coast at a rapid pace a little while ago. I marked the coordinates as far as I could.”
Xavier had given Sarah one of the small tactical headsets in the chopper, so she heard Reno’s report.
“Come back and land for now, Reno,” Xavier ordered. “You can do a wider sweep as soon as we’re through clearing the house.” He switched off the mic and turned to her. “Ready?”
Sarah took a deep breath and nodded. “As I’ll ever be.”
Together, they entered through the broken glass door. Xavier paused to flip on the lights as they went through the rooms. He’d put on thin latex gloves, as she had, before they set foot in the house. It was now a crime scene.
They went through the place room by room. Though there were signs of life on the ground level, the rooms upstairs were completely empty and looked like nobody had lived in them for a long time. They went back downstairs to the great room, where Xavier took a few minutes to go through papers that had been left lying on a coffee table while Sarah looked at a small collection of entertainment DVDs near the floor-to-ceiling television screen. Nothing jumped out at her as being important.
Xavier finished with the papers, leaving them just where he’d found them. There was nothing of use there, either. “When I found you, you were in the kitchen. Where was Sellars keeping you before you got free?”
“The basement. He’s got a laboratory down there, plus an office.” She jerked her chin toward the stairs. “The door locks from the outside. Sellars didn’t take time to secure it as he was leaving. He had a duffel bag over one shoulder, a handgun in his left hand and a cooler bag in his right. I believe he had my blood samples in that bag.”
“So he was traveling light,” Xavier mused. He popped the hinges off the door leading to the basement and set it aside. “This way nobody can lock us down there,” he explained. “Reno, we’re going below,” he said over the radio. They’d both heard the helicopter come in for a landing outside the house. “Stay in the cockpit and stay sharp. Alert us to any problems you might see coming our way.”
“Roger that, Captain,” came the pilot’s ready reply.
He started down the stairs, Sarah on his heels. He flicked the lights on and the basement was fully illuminated.
“He was on the phone in here,” she said as they neared the door to the office.
“Looks like he left some of his paperwork behind.”
There were open notebooks on the desk and printouts that looked like they might’ve come from the monitors that had been attached to Sarah earlier. Other than the odd bits of scientific data Sellars had left in his rush to get away, there wasn’t anything else of interest in the small room. They moved on down the hall.
There was another small office. This one was completely empty. The third door led to a walk-in closet filled with scientific instruments, supplies and protective gear. They closed that door after a cursory search and headed for the large laboratory. Xavier whistled through his teeth when he got his first good look at the large space.
“He kept you in here?” Xavier seemed to be looking around for a likely spot, but couldn’t locate one.
“In back.” She had to clear her throat before she could continue. “There’s a room in back. He had me in there.”
Xavier made his way toward the back of the huge lab and stopped short. She stopped as well when she saw what was in front of him. It was a bank of windows that looked in on the room where she’d been tied down. Now that the lights were on she realized the room was more than just an examination room. It was a full-fledged operating suite. Complete with the observation area in which they now stood.
“Son of a bitch.” Xavier strode forward, stopping in the doorway to the room where she’d been held. “He had you strapped down to the table?”