Free Cutting Edge by Allison Brennan Page B

closed, because this wasn’t the time or place. She said to Duncan, “There were no animals at all in the lab.”
    Melanie shook her head. “All our work. Years. Years. Turned to ash. I don’t know enough about DNA to see if we can get something from the ash, I really wanted blood, but maybe—”
    “I should have clarified. There are no remains. The room you described wasn’t damaged by fire. There were no birds, dead or alive.”
    Melanie paled.
    Nora knew exactly what happened to them. “Animal-rights groups usually release captive animals into the wild or take them to sympathetic rescue facilities.”
    “Oh no. No. Oh, God, we have to find them.”
    Nora froze. “Why?”
    “The avian flu! Half the birds were infected. We were using gene therapy on them to find a genetic cure to prevent virus carriers. But we’re still in the testing phase. They’ll infect any bird they come in contact with.
    “Worse,” she continued, “there’s no vaccine, no cure. The virus they have has been genetically altered to be particularly virulent. We were so successful with the weaker viruses, we needed to find a therapy that could attack any mutation of the virus.”
    “What are the chances the virus will spread to human populations?”
    “I don’t know. Whenever you’re dealing with viruses there is always the risk of mutation. There would need to be prolonged physical contact with the ducks, but the far greater risk is spreading the disease to other waterfowl. It’s the end of September. They’ll begin to migrate. We have to find them now.”
     
     
     

CHAPTER FIVE
     
     
    At his desk, Duke Rogan stared at the computer logs. What the hell was this? He examined the logs every which way he could, including evidence of earlier hacking attempts, but again and again he came to the same conclusion: Jonah had disabled the security system.
    It didn’t make sense. There were strict protocols set up in the security plan. The system was set 24/7 to record the exterior of the building, the lobby, the elevators, and inside every entrance, except when in test mode. But Jonah had put the security on test mode, which would have converted automatically to the armed mode in two hours even if he didn’t manually reset the codes … if there hadn’t been a fire.
    “You’re making assumptions, Duke,” he muttered to himself. Just because Jonah’s codes were used didn’t mean that Jonah himself had disabled the system. But why would Jonah give the codes to anyone? There was a fail-safe; if Jonah was threatened, he could put in false codes that would appear to disable the system, but alert both Duke and the sheriff’s department. Duke had successfully used such protocols with high-risk businesses where having a “panic” code worked exceptionally well. Several smaller banks used it as the last resort for their secure areas. There was also a panic button in the lab, in the lobby, in Jonah’s office, and in Jim’s office.
    But the system had been put in test mode at 12:48 a.m.
    Sheriff Sanger had told him the 911 call came in from a passing driver at 1:57 a.m., more than an hour later.
    There were no video files. They just weren’t there. All cameras fed into the main database, and it was replicated every hour to an external server. If the replication failed, the system administrator would be alerted.
    The digital files had to be here! Somewhere … he would re-create them if he had to.
    “Dammit.” He’d already left two messages for Russ Larkin, the I.T director for Butcher-Payne.
    Duke scanned the log, making notes on the pad beside him.
    Jonah — or someone with his personal codes — had entered the building at 12:15 a.m. He had turned off internal security, but the doors were still locked, cameras on, and to enter someone would need an employee card
and
a key to the building — and the entry code. It was a backup system — if the card, or the key, were lost or stolen, neither could be used alone to enter the