The Tide (Tide Series Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

the thing let out a rasping scream that echoed throughout the laboratory. A short silence followed before a cacophony of raucous yells answered throughout the platform. The horrible chorus resonated in Jay’s bones.
    The humanoid creature before them opened and closed its mouth, gnashing a set of long, pointed teeth. It drew back a hand, and he saw that each finger ended in a sharp talon. Bony spikes sprouted from its joints. The thing looked like a person whose skeleton was trying to break out from beneath its flesh. A deep growl escaped its cracked lips.
    Then the creature sprinted straight at him.

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    Reston, Virginia
    M eredith Webb jumped back from her laptop. The screams and cries pierced her eardrums. She threw off her headphones, flinching from the unbearable sound, and focused on the low-quality video. She could make out only the misshapen silhouette of a person in Jay Perry’s video feed, but it was just enough to make her flinch. Acid churned in her stomach.
    The feed had gone dark. She tried the headphones, but the audio too had ceased transmission.
    Meredith stood and paced the studio apartment. A slew of electronic devices hummed and buzzed on the card table she’d set up in the center. Her suitcase lay open, clothes hanging out of it, near the inflatable air mattress. The first night she had slept on the mattress, she’d woken with her back aching. She was forty-five and in no place to venture off on a wild goose chase. But she’d had no choice.
    She knew something was going on and, she feared, this time it wasn’t Syria, North Korea, Russia, or China making the play. If her suspicions proved true, her own country was involved in producing some kind of chemical weapon. The development, production, and use of such weapons were prohibited by almost every single sovereign nation in the world—including, of course, the United States—stemming from the Biological Weapons convention of 1972 that supplemented the Geneva Protocol. Not to mention the United States had taken a strong stance against such weapons after passing the Bioweapons Anti-Terrorism Act in 1989.
    She often came across unusual and terrifying intel from around the world. Reports of previously undocumented genocides, assassinations, terrorists pursuing chemical weapons, foreign governments funding radical groups. She thought she’d seen it all.
    Never from her own government though. Never from the United States, the supposed leader of the free world. Yet the more she had dug into the IBSL case, the more she suspected her government was—or had been—investigating some kind of unsanctioned biological weapon.
    And Lawson might be covering up this mysterious project. The man, known for his stolidity, had told her everything she’d needed to know without saying a single word. His expression when she’d first shown him the telltale memo was more than enough.
    When he had found she’d discovered satellite imagery over the sight of the IBSL oil platform, Lawson had told her again to give it a rest, to stop chasing dragons. Nothing was going on that she needed to worry about.
    Fearing her apartment in Langley had been bugged, she rented out this neglected studio in nearby Reston to set up shop.
    She tried placing a satellite call to Jay Perry, desperate to reach him again.
    No answer.
    It appeared as though she’d lost contact with her first batch of covert contractors. She checked the encrypted messaging equipment she’d set up and then cursed. She knew what all these devices did, but she didn’t know how they did it. She was no techie, no electrical engineer. Meredith typed a couple of commands into the laptop, and the feed flickered back on. She’d done something right. At first, she thought it was just a picture, a still image. She tried to refresh the video, but it remained fixed on the tiled floor. Only the thin steel legs of a lab bench remained in the camera’s focus. Securing the headphones over her ears, she adjusted the volume,