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Ethan Cross

SPECTRUM

A Thriller

»be« by BASTEI ENTERTAINMENT

Digital original edition

»be« by Bastei Entertainment is an imprint of Bastei Lübbe AG

Published in agreement with the author, c/o BAROR INTERNATIONAL, INC., Armonk, New York, U.S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. This book is written in U.S. American English.

Copyright © 2017 Aaron Brown

Copyright © 2017 by Bastei Lübbe AG, Schanzenstraße 6-20, 51063 Köln, Germany

Written by Ethan Cross

Edited by Lou Aronica

Project editor, English: Lori Herber-Griffin

Cover design, English: Massimo Peter

Cover Illustrations: © shutterstock: ZRyzner | ostill | Lia Koltyrina | talseN | ilolab

eBook production: Urban SatzKonzept

ISBN 978-3-7325-4752-4

www.be-ebooks.com

PART ONE

Chapter 1

Isabel Price stumbled through the rusty door of the small corrugated metal shack and, ignoring the pain, ran as fast as her strong South African legs would carry her.

Words like nightmare and why kept floating through the maelstrom of thoughts inside her mind. She felt light-headed and nauseated. She stumbled over the barren terrain between each clapboard shack of the squatter camp. She had to know if they were all dead. She had to know if her boy was dead.

Dingani shouted her name from somewhere behind, but she ignored him. She had to know. And her desire to know was so strong that no other thought could possibly enter her mind until she knew Tyler’s fate. All she could think about was her boy.

Her father’s shouts joined with Dingani’s. Elliot Price had always possessed a booming and powerful voice. It had served him well as a budding politician back in the days when the white minority ran the government.

Isabel ignored her father’s calls. All she could think about was her boy.

She jumped a fence and landed inside Mrs. Eberle’s herb garden. Isabel didn’t give a second thought to the destruction of the kind old lady’s property. If her fears were justified, then Mrs. Eberle wouldn’t mind. Because Mrs. Eberle was already dead. Along with all the other residents of the squatter camp.

She kept moving, jumped the next fence, and came to a dirt trail beaten into a roadway by the feet of the camp’s poverty-stricken inhabitants. She ran north and east and across two rows of the thrown-together shacks, each one of them slightly different depending on what was available when they were constructed. Most had dirt floors with the residents sleeping on mattresses sprawled over the ground. No furniture. No running water.

Ahead, Isabel saw her destination. A shoddy blue and white shack made of corrugated metal and one-by-fours. She ran up to the tiny home’s front door and knocked with enough force that she feared she may have damaged the clapboard building’s structural integrity.