A pair of robotic arms hung from the room’s ceiling, and Burke saw the controls mounted beside Nic. The arms appeared to be all plastic and non-conductive.

But there was something more important inside the long metal chamber. He pushed Nic out of the way and rushed toward a vacuum-sealed, insulated door separating the lab from the testing chamber. He engaged the electronic locking mechanism, and the door came alive with a gentle whirring of electric motors.

“Be careful,” Carter said. “We don’t know what—”

But Burke ignored him. He knew there were no dangerous pathogens to be found inside this lab.

When the door opened, he stepped into the room and cursed at the shattered mess of aluminum casings, green computer wafer boards, memory chips, disk platters, and read/write arms. Burke recognized the components as a destroyed mess of solid state and traditional hard drives.

“What is all that?” Nic asked from beyond the door.

“They pulled the hard drives from all of the computer terminals, probably a central server too, and smashed them to pieces.”

Carter joined Burke inside the testing chamber and surveyed the damaged pieces. “They seemed to be damn thorough with it. Looks like he started with the shotgun and then beat whatever else was left to pieces. I thought they could just zap these with an industrial magnet or something.”

Burke shook his head. “Magnets can work part of the time if you’re in a big hurry, but the only way to be sure that the data can’t be recovered is to physically destroy the components. Melting them down would be best, but this is pretty effective.”

“Do you hear that?” Nic asked.

Burke and Carter walked back to the main room, and Burke strained to hear something beyond the hum of the fluorescent lighting and air scrubbers. Then he knew what had drawn Nic’s attention. There was a door at one end of the lab, not far from where they stood, leading to what he presumed to be additional rooms that they had yet to see. The echoes of voices and footsteps coming from that direction was unmistakable.

Chapter 72

Kruger lay still and quiet in the darkness. The space around him was constricting and coffin-like, but it didn’t bother him. He had laid in wait in much less comfortable positions and harsher environments than this. Zarina had picked them up in a minivan at the house that concealed the lab’s exit point. He could still smell the blood on her skin. Their prize hummed beside him, and Zarina lay on top of him. Her blonde hair tickled his neck as she rubbed against him. He knew that his wife burned with desire at that moment. She always did after she killed someone. This had never disturbed him before, but since the village, he had looked back on all those times she had been turned on by death and found something about it disgusting and unnatural.

He wasn’t sure whether he should be more frightened by the humming of the device to his left or the small blonde woman on top of him. Both, equally, he supposed. Zarina had always scared him as much as she excited him. Even when they were children, he knew that her scars cut much deeper than the ones she had received from the lions the night his mother died. The scars on Zarina’s neck were nothing compared to the black gashes on the fabric of her soul.