Radioactive (The Rayna Tan Action Thriller Series Book 4) Read online

  Radioactive

  A Rayna Tan Thriller

  Wes Lowe

  Contents

  Connect

  Connect

  1. Despair

  2. Holiday Shock

  3. Three Mile Island

  4. Another Victim

  5. Only a Nuke

  6. Death and Resurrection

  7. Gunpoint Medicine

  8. The Shantytown

  9. Back to School

  10. Death of a Dream

  11. The Pitch

  12. The Plan Hatches

  13. Pact Sealed

  14. Hirees

  15. The Insider

  16. Clandestine Tour

  17. Facing Reality

  18. Unexpected Announcement

  19. Released

  20. Frantic Preparation

  21. Operation Governor

  22. Melky will Die

  23. Rush Rush Rush

  24. The Road Trip Begins

  25. Return to Hell

  26. Tripped

  27. For My Brother

  28. The Jaws of Death

  29. Diagnosis

  30. Air Ambulance

  31. The Big Day

  32. The Chase

  33. Another Patient

  34. Grieving Husband

  35. The Geek Freaks

  36. A Father’s Wisdom

  37. Omigod!

  38. Homecoming Guile

  39. Jasmina

  40. Details

  41. Setting the Bait

  42. Caught!

  43. Lethal Attraction

  44. Hardball

  45. Another Trap Set

  46. The Endgame Begins

  47. One Down

  48. Arrival at Target

  49. Mission Accomplished

  50. Clock Ticking

  51. Seduction

  52. Decision

  Books by Wes Lowe

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  RADIOACTIVE

  Copyright © Wes Lowe 2021

  1st Edition All Rights Reserved.

  * * *

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  * * *

  All the characters are completely original, and any resemblance to real people, events or organizations is purely coincidental.

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  "The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking ... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker." Albert Einstein

  “It is my firm belief that the infinite and uncontrollable fury of nuclear weapons should never be held in the hands of any mere mortal ever again, for any reason.” Mikhail Gorbachev

  1

  Despair

  Three Months Ago

  * * *

  In one of the boys’ washrooms in the eighty-year-old former school that had been his home for two years, forty-eight-year-old Davy Adams dropped to his knees and vomited into the toilet. It was nothing unusual for the once-upon-a-time cancer specialist. He had been having attacks of nausea for over thirty years. Throwing up and bouts of diarrhea were about the only thing that made him feel better. In the first few years, the episodes had not been too common; sometimes once, or maybe twice a week.

  But lately, the episodes had become more frequent. During the past month, barely a day went by when the nausea was non-existent.

  He was always exhausted, and no amount of stretching relieved the aching or stiffness in his body. Were it not for the cocktail of drugs, legal and illegal, he consumed, he would have found it difficult to focus as well as stay awake.

  It was a good thing he wasn’t vain about his appearance. Otherwise, he would have been upset that he had gone completely bald by his mid-twenties. Being bald wasn’t so bad, but what he really hated were the stares that he got from those who saw the ugly sores and open ulcers on his dry, scaly, ichthyosis skin, not only on the crown of his head but on any exposed part of his body.

  But it wasn’t his debilitating physical conditions that sickened him the most.

  It was the realization of complete and utter failure. To say he was deflated would be the understatement of a lifetime.

  More like an avalanche of despair.

  There would be no Little Boy or Fat Man, the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki… There would be no nuclear disaster; there wouldn’t be a damn thing.

  Total bullshit. Not nuclear bombs but nuclear lemons.

  Waves of sweat broke onto his forehead as he recalled the ill-fated journey.

  Last month, he and his co-conspirator and best friend, lawyer Carter Johnson, went on a clandestine mission to the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, to seal the deal on a purchase of weapons-grade fissile material.

  Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

  The seller “Nikolai,” who claimed to be a former Major General in the Russian army, had cheated them out of more than a million bucks. Instead of the fifty pounds of radioactive material from Russian reactors and storehouses they had negotiated for, they were lucky to escape with their lives after Nikolai’s toadies attacked and robbed them in his warehouse along the so-called “nuclear highway” in Georgia.

  This meant there would be no nuke.

  No pushback on two-faced assholes like Senator Harold Johnson, Chair of the Environment and Public Works Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Safety, a man that Davy hated for his role in his parents’ death. While personal revenge was his primary motive, Davy had a minor altruistic motive. Without the destructive detonation of a nuclear weapon, there would be no awakening of the world to the dangers of unbridled, poorly secured and uninformed usage of nuclear power.

  Davy was running out of time. He and Carter had put all their eggs in this single basket. Both of them had used up all their funds on this failed mission. Since returning from the European fiasco, he felt his already frail health declining. With no time to put either his health or new funds together, Davy would become another faceless victim of radiation sickness, just like his father and mother were at Three Mile Island.

  No wonder he was sick.

  His descent to hell was complete, and his shrieks of agony pierced the darkness.

  2

  Holiday Shock

  8 Days Ago

  Rayna Tan was stunned.

  Traveling to Paris on one of Fidelitas’s corporate jets to bring back the remains of one of the covert organization’s leaders, Paulina Rossini, she had received two amazing and completely unexpected offers in the past two minutes, either one of which would radically transform her entire existence.

  One was from her boss, former Delta Force assaulter Barry Rogers, who asked her to be Paulina’s replacement on the Fidelitas leadership team. The other was from her almost brand new boyfriend, Dr. Steve Yang, who had just sprung four potentially life-changing four words to her.

  “Will you marry me?”

  Rayna gaped. Barry’s offer was immediately forgotten the moment Steve proposed.
This was about the last thing that she expected. She wanted to say yes. Steve was funny, caring, and athletic, but marriage?

  Seeing her anxiety skyrocketing, the emergency room physician defused the situation by chuckling, “Tell you what. How about ‘try before you buy?’ Barry and Dad told me you could do with some time off. Forget the marriage thing. Why don’t we go to the Dominican Republic for a week? I was there helping out during Hurricane Matthew with the Red Cross, and only got a glimpse of what I thought could be a beautiful place.”

  Holiday? Yeah, I can handle that. Relieved, Rayna answered cheekily, “Aren’t you worried about mosquitoes, malaria, Zika virus, dengue fever, not to mention some of the most savage criminals on earth?”

  Steve’s eyes shot back with a pixieish twinkle. “How could I worry? I’ve got you, a former JTF assaulter to protect me.”

  A grin covered Rayna’s face. “I can handle that. When are we going?”

  Barry cleared his throat. “We are having Paulina’s service right after we deplane. Nothing else is booked so you can take the company Falcon to Punta Cana.”

  Two people in a private luxury jet? Talk about a company perk.

  Dominican Republic

  For five days, Rayna and Steve forgot about cartels, criminals, incurable patients, and emergency rooms. They snorkeled with barracuda and stingrays; got sprayed with black ink by a Caribbean reef squid; explored the fauna and flora on a ‘Monkey Land Safari’ in the mountains of Anamuya. In the evening, they soaked in son, the slow, melodious Cuban grooves with acoustic guitars and percussion at a local club.

  Then it was time for their next destination. They rented a Jeep and headed down the Coral Highway to the undiscovered jewel of Barahona. However, an hour into the drive, the weather had transformed into a black dismal sky with wind wailing through the trees.

  Soon the threat of the lurking dark clouds overhead was fulfilled. The skies burst and it started to rain. And rain. And rain. It took an extra hour to reach their destination, the Casa Mia Tropical Lodge, a hidden gem of a resort graced with lush foliage, and clusters of swaying palm and mahogany trees. As darkness fell, they indulged themselves with a natural shower on their private balcony.

  Then in the moonlight, Rayna led Steve to the bed. As he began to take off his shirt, Rayna took his hands and lifted them to her face, then used them to stroke her body.

  His skilled hands and fingers dug into Rayna’s back, then shifted to her chest, massaging her flesh while exploring her mouth with his tongue.

  Steve whispered, “Feel the rhythms of your body against mine.”

  Rayna nodded and began to utter tiny little moans of pained delight. Her back, buttocks and thighs tingled and cringed, her flesh rippled on the bed…

  CRASH!

  The top of a huge palm tree smashed through their suite window, jolting Rayna and Steve out of their passion. Barely missing Rayna on her side of the bed, the treetop landed on her night table, crushing the bed-side lamp, and her sat phone. In addition to glass fragments showering over them, large furious pellets of inhospitable rain blew through the room. The two scrambled off the bed and fought the downpour to the window to see the palm trees swaying in the wailing draughts of air, the roof of the cabana that they planned to park themselves at flying across the resort, dark shadows moving ominously, and people shielding themselves in doorways.

  The resort’s landscape was soaked in three inches of water and rising fast.

  “I think our vacation is about to come to an end,” remarked Steve, prophetically.

  “We can always float away,” shivered Rayna. She clicked the television remote. The screen filled with the sight of a drenched intrepid reporter in the Plaza de la Bandera (Flag Square), trying to juggle an umbrella while keeping her handheld microphone from getting waterlogged.

  “The rains from yesterday evening have become Tropical Storm Ophelia with wind speeds of up to seventy miles per hour. More than eight inches of rain has fallen in the last five hours. Older homes and those in the villages are having their windows blown out and some are collapsing under the pummeling. There are power outages throughout Hispaniola island and cell phone reception is spotty. The biggest worry, especially on the coast, is of a potential storm surge and possible growth to a category three hurricane within hours.”

  Without warning, on the television behind the reporter, Rayna and Steve saw the wild storm’s winds uprooting a tall tree, launching it high into the sheets of rain. The towering stalk of timber with a seven-inch trunk crashed through a souvenir shop window sending shards of glass flying at the Latina reporter, slashing her arms and face. Horror crossed her face as pain pulsed through the jagged open wounds. Then, the television screen went black.

  “I was never good at vacations anyway,” remarked Rayna. “Shit always happens.”

  Steve frantically punched numbers into his cell. No signal.

  Hurrying over to the hotel phone, he perused the numbers on his cell, then punched in a number onto the landline.

  “Hello. Who’s this?” asked a harried male voice at the other end of the line.

  “Giorgio, it’s Steve Yang. I’m in Barahona, in southern Dominican Republic. How can I help?”

  Dr. Giorgio Battali and Steve had known each other since medical school. They studied together, partied together, even had a drunken fistfight over the same cute intern. While Steve went to practice in Asia, Giorgio joined the Red Cross, and it was Giorgio who arranged for Steve to join him during Hurricane Matthew. From that experience, Steve knew that health workers were going to have to put in twenty-fours a day, seven days a week, and that any assistance would be needed and appreciated.

  “Hey, Steve. Thanks. Didn’t recognize the number you called me from.”

  Steve made a sound that was somewhere between a grunt and a passionate moan as he used his free hand to massage Rayna’s coiled neck. “That’s because power’s down, internet’s down, Sat communication’s down, everything except this ancient hotel landline in Barahona.”

  Giorgio clucked his tongue pensively before getting serious. “Barahona? Hm. There’s an unnamed bidonville (slum) about two miles east from Malpasse, just inside Haiti, across from Jimani. It’s down a dirt road and not easy to get to but it has no health practitioners at all. Are you good for that?”

  “You know I am, but ‘two miles east of Malpasse’ is hardly directions,” replied Steve.

  But before Giorgio could answer, the hotel phone went dead.

  “What the…?” Steve furrowed his eyebrows as he tried to get the land line to respond.

  Eventually Steve gave up and put his arms around Rayna’s waist. “I’m sorry but I’ve got to go. You’ll be safe here.”

  Rayna frowned as her extraordinary hazel eyes locked on the physician. “Are you stupid? Do you think I’m going to twiddle my thumbs? Not to mention there’s no internet, no cable and worst of all, no you. No way. I’m going too. You need me.”

  “Rayna, this is not the time for disaster tourism.”

  “Listen,” Rayna retorted. “I’ve got emergency medicine training and on-the-field experience. I may not have the fancy letters ‘MD’ after my name but I’ve patched up more than my share of cowboys. And I’ve gotten to villages in the middle of nowhere with about the same vague directions Giorgio handed to us. And with that damn monsoon, we better go now.”

  3

  Three Mile Island

  41 Years Ago - March 18, 1979, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

  Twenty-eight-year-old Ken Adams, his still-cute-as-the-day-he-met-her-in ninth-grade wife Gail, and their nine-year-old son Davy sat in the middle of the ROXY movie theater along with Harold Johnson, his wife Melissa and their son Carter.

  Harold was one of the mucky-mucks in the front office at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station and normally wouldn’t associate with a maintenance worker like Ken, but his son Carter and Ken’s son Davy were best friends at Goldsboro Elementary. They did everything together and pleaded with the
ir parents so fervently to take them to see “The China Syndrome,” that the adults caved in.

  “The China Syndrome” was not the normal kind of film that the family would see but precocious Davy idolized his father, and when he found out it was about a nuclear power plant in California, he pleaded to go to one of the film’s screenings. Children were not allowed into TMI so this was about as close as Davy believed he could get to a real live nuclear power station.

  “This is going to be fantastic,” said young Davy as his face tilted up to his father.

  “Hope so,” smiled Ken as he tousled his son’s hair.

  But the movie was not at all what any of them hoped for.

  Melissa also worked at TMI in the secretarial pool and during the showing, she, Harold and Ken constantly turned to each other and muttered snide remarks about the story’s poor research on nuclear power and totally unrealistic storyline.