Red Alert. Jessica Andersen

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СКАЧАТЬ later there was a brisk knock on the door. Jemma opened the panel without waiting for an invite, and raised her eyebrows when she saw that Meg was alone. “Where did Mrs. Phillips go?”

      “Let me guess. She’s not pregnant.” Meg scowled toward the elevators. “It was a setup. A fishing expedition. Who were they working for? TRL? Genticor?”

      Jemma shook her head, eyes worried. “I don’t know about that, but she’s definitely pregnant, and there’s a problem. You’ve got to get her back here, right now.”

      “You’ve already got results back on the baby?” Meg asked, confused. Impossible. Her technique was fast, but not that fast.

      “No, we haven’t even started separating out the cells. But Max needed an unknown sample for one of his test runs, so I gave him a small subsample of Raine Phillips’s blood.”

      Max Vasek was Meg’s second in command. With two degrees and a decade in research, he could easily have his own lab, but preferred the freedom of working for Meg. He kept the lab running smoothly and followed his own investigative directions on the side. These days, he was working on a panel of accelerated genetic tests for expecting mothers. So new he hadn’t yet reported it to the hospital or the university, Max’s technique could identify the presence of twenty-plus genetic abnormalities that could endanger the life of mother or child—all in the space of less than fifteen minutes.

      A sick pit opened up in Meg’s stomach. “Max’s technique hasn’t been fully validated, and I’m not ready to go public. If we know something, I can’t tell them how or why we know it.”

      He shouldn’t have performed the test on an unenrolled patient’s DNA. Though they had signed consent for Raine’s preliminary sample, the initial forms didn’t include blanket consent for all tests. They’d stumbled over into an ethical gray area.

      Damn it, Max.

      Jemma handed her the printout. “I don’t care how you do it, but get her back here. She’s heterozygous for both the Factor V Leiden and prothrombin 20210 mutations.”

      “Oh, hell.” Meg was out the door in an instant, headed for the elevators. Halfway there, she called, “Phone down to the front desk and see if they can grab her. She needs to be on supportive therapy, pronto!”

      The mutations were ticking time bombs. Separately, they increased the risk of blood clot disorders including strokes, heart attacks and pulmonary embolisms during pregnancy.

      Together, they virtually guaranteed a problem. Perhaps even a fatal one.

      Suspicions tabled for now, Meg hurried out of the elevator the moment the doors whooshed open on the ground floor. When the security guard shook his grizzled head, she jogged across the lobby and pushed through the revolving doors out onto Kneeland Street.

      Boston General perched at the intersection between the swanky theater district and the more eclectic environs of Chinatown. The busy street dividing the two teemed with vehicles and pedestrians, making Meg fear that she might have lost the couple.

      Worry flowed through her. If they’d been sent by one of the big companies, they’d probably given false names and contact information. She might be unable to find them, unable to warn Raine that—

      There! The pedestrian flow ebbed for a moment and Meg saw a man leaning on a cane as he walked a woman to a taxi.

      “Erik!” Meg called. A cement truck—part of the endless construction of Boston General’s new wing—revved its engine nearby, drowning out her next shout.

      She gritted her teeth and dodged into the sea of bodies on the sidewalk. Some of the pedestrians gave way at the sight of her white coat. Others glared and jostled her as she fought her way to the street.

      “Erik, Raine, wait!”

      But he didn’t climb into the cab with the pregnant woman. Instead he handed her in, shut the door and awkwardly stepped back onto the edge of the sidewalk near the construction zone. Nearby, construction workers directed a heavy stream of cement into a deeply excavated foundation form.

      She lunged across the last few feet separating them and grabbed his sleeve. “Erik!”

      He turned and his face blanked with surprise. “Dr. Corning. What are you—”

      Someone pushed her from behind and she tumbled against him. She felt hard muscle through the elegant suit, then another blow slammed into her, knocking her aside.

      She shrieked and stumbled back, arms windmilling. Her hip banged into a railing and wood splintered. The heel of one of her tall boots snagged on something.

      She screamed. Overbalanced.

      And plunged into the construction pit.

      The fall was short, but when she hit, the impact drove the breath from her lungs. Her landing pad was cold and wet. Too heavy to be water, too gritty to be mud.

      She’d fallen into the cement form.

      And she was sinking.

      Over the growing hubbub of screams and shouts from above, she heard a man’s voice shout, “Meg!”

      She looked up and saw Erik leaning over the lip of the cement form. He stretched his arm down and sunlight glinted off his cane. “Grab on!”

      Gasping and choking as the wet, heavy weight pressed on every fiber of her being, she reached up. She could just touch the cane with the edge of her fingertips. She stretched farther and heard a rushing roar, and a man’s shout.

      Above her, the cement truck sluiceway opened up and dumped heavy, clinging cement on top of her.

      “Help me!” she screamed. The cascade of wet cement filled the space quickly, covering her shoulders in seconds, then working its way up her neck.

      Why hadn’t they turned off the sluice? Couldn’t the cement truck operator tell there was a problem?

      Even as the thought formed in Meg’s brain, it was too late. The liquefied silt poured down around her, covering her neck and ears. She screamed, though she knew it would do no good.

      She was being buried alive.

      Safety was no more than ten feet away. Rescue had to be on its way. But it would be too late.

      She screamed again and arched her back against the sluggish give of the setting cement. She looked up to the edge of the cement form, toward the sidewalk, where the protective railing hung askew. Though she could hear nothing over the splatter of cement that continued to fall from above and her eyes were blurred with clinging clumps of grit, she saw the silhouette of a broad-shouldered man in an expensive suit.

      The image of blue eyes stayed with her when she sucked in her last breath.

      Chapter Two

      “Get that crane down here! And kill the flow, now!” Erik’s ears rang from the equipment noise and the force of his own shouts. “What is wrong with you people? There’s a woman in there!”

      He gripped the edge of the cement form so hard his fingers ached. СКАЧАТЬ