The In Death Collection Books 21-25 - J. D. Robb [140]
“Buggering hell. Gotten sweaty, bloody, too. Won’t read.” He dug out a handkerchief and began to polish it off while under his breath he cursed in Gaelic.
Hooked in her arm, the baby screamed as if she were pounding it with a hammer.
Red line plus sixty seconds. This facility will terminate in three minutes.
He swiped the card a third time, and they leaped inside. “Street level,” he shouted, then cursed again when Eve pushed the baby at him. “What? You’ve got her.”
“No, you’ve got her. I’m in charge of this op.”
“Screw that. I’m a bloody civilian.”
Eve tapped a hand on her weapon. “You even try to give it back to me, I’m stunning you. Self-defense.”
Red line plus ninety seconds. All personnel should be at maximum safe distance.
“Cutting it close,” Eve mumbled as sweat rolled down her back.
“Is there any other way?”
“This thing could go faster. This son-of-a-bitching thing could really go faster.” She gritted her teeth when the warning announced red line plus two minutes. “We’re still in this when it blows, it’ll take us out, too, right?”
“Likely.”
She stared at the controls as if her wrath could speed things up. “We couldn’t have gotten them out. No matter what we’d done.”
“We couldn’t, no.” He rested his free hand on her shoulder.
“You brought that one so I’d have to leave the rest. So I’d have to go, get her out. So I’d have something tangible to make me move my ass.”
“I also figured you’d be the one holding her on the way out, while she’s screaming my eardrums ragged.”
Terminate in thirty seconds.
“If we don’t make it, I love you and blah, blah, blah.”
He laughed, and shifted so his arm wrapped around her shoulders. “I’ll say the same. It’s been a hell of a ride so far.”
When the final countdown commenced, she reached up, gripped his hand.
Terminate in ten seconds, nine, eight, seven . . .
The doors opened. They flew through them together. She heard the count go down to three as the doors secured behind them.
She snatched her coat from where she’d tossed it, and bolted through the room with him.
There was a rumble under her feet, a wave of vibration. She thought of what was below her, in tanks, in hives. Then pushed it away, shoved it back. Her nightmares would begin soon enough to go back there now.
She shrugged back into her coat. If her hands shook, he was the only one who knew it. “This is going to take me a while.”
He glanced toward the line of cops.
“Take your time. I’ll be outside.”
“You can pass that one onto one of the uniforms. We’ll have CP here shortly to deal with the minors.”
“I’ll be outside,” he repeated.
“Go get treated,” she called after him.
“In this place? I don’t think so.”
“Got a point,” she replied, then moved forward to do the job.
Outside, Roarke went directly to his car. Only more relief washed over him when he saw Diana lying on the backseat with the younger girl curled against her.
He opened the door, crouched down when Diana’s eyes opened. “You kept your word,” he said.
“Deena’s dead. I know.”
“I’m very sorry. She died saving . . . saving your sister.” He held out the baby when Diana opened her arms. “She helped save the children.”
“Is Wilson dead?”
“Yes.”
“All of him.”
“All we found, yes. The facilities are gone. Destroyed. The equipment in them, the records, the technology.”
Her eyes were clear, level. “What are you going to do with us now?”
“I’ll take you to Avril.”
“No, you can’t. Then you’ll know where we are. She won’t stay if you know, and we need time before we go again.”
She was a child, he thought, with two other children. Yet in some ways, she was older than he. All of them, older than he. “Can you get to her, with them, on your own?”
“Yes. Will you let us go?”
“It was all your mother asked, the last thing she asked. She thought of you, of what would be best for you.” As his own mother had, he thought. His mother had died doing what she’d thought best for