kiDNApped (A Tara Shores Thriller) Read Online Free Page B

young girl. Their car had plunged into a Florida canal one evening during heavy rains. Her father had been able to push Tara to safety, but could not free himself and Tara’s mother in time. The accident had also given Tara a severe case of hydrophobia. She had finally managed to control her fear of water sufficiently to be an effective agent in and around the ocean, but the move to the islands had brought some of her old fears to the surface.
    It also didn’t help that Tara found it a bit lonely in Hawaii—not overwhelmingly so, but she had discovered living so far from the mainland on a small, oceanic island where she had no acquaintances outside of work to be isolating. She had been seeing an FBI diver back home, as she thought of L.A., but it wasn’t a serious enough relationship to survive the long distance her transfer demanded. She maintained contact with her friends on the mainland via the Internet, but it was not the same. How lucky she was to live in Hawaii, they exclaimed, but she found it difficult to convey that it was much different than being here on vacation. Then there was the local culture, a hodgepodge of Asian and Pacific island countries where no single race constituted a majority. Almost like living in a foreign land, Tara thought.
    With a sigh, Tara averted her glance from the calendar, whose pages had patiently ticked off another year off her life, to the stack of case files on her desk. She picked up a folder festooned with Post-it notes, the most prominent of which read: “6/16 PENDING.”
    Frowning, Tara uncapped a marker and drew a line through PENDING. She picked up a rubber stamp which would print the word INDETERMINATE, but paused, holding the stamp over the folder.
    In FBI speak, “indeterminate” was the designation for cases that were unsolved. This case was the most interesting Tara had come across since relocating to the islands, and yet it was set to go officially unsolved in two more days. As ice-cold as the case had become, she was not expecting any breakthroughs.
    Tara flipped open the case folder even though she knew there was nothing in it she had not already seen. She was glad to have something to take her mind off the Asian man. A missing person case where the individual was both wealthy and well known, if not exactly famous. Furthermore, the missing subject was to be declared legally dead in two more days, official cause of death: “Unknown, presumed lost at sea.” She and a small platoon of agents under her command had been working on this case over the past three months, yet nothing had come of it. Tara spread the contents of the folder over her desk, reflecting on the case. Three months earlier,
Dr. William Archer, a highly successful biotechnology researcher and businessman,
had gone missing aboard his mega-yacht. More specifically, Tara noted with distaste, the entire yacht and crew had simply vanished as if it had been plucked from the ocean by an invisible hand. Perhaps it had sunk, but the weather and sea conditions were calm around the time of the disappearance, so why not a single radio call, emergency beacon or some kind of S.O.S.? Coast Guard searches had turned up nothing.
Harbor master alerts had been issued in case the yacht should turn up with a new name and paint job in a marina somewhere, but these too had produced nothing.
    The case had landed in FBI jurisdiction because Dr. Archer’s business partners had suspected a kidnapping, and because Archer was an international businessman with technology that posed potential security risks to the United States, including weaponization of microbes, though that was not known to be the main focus of his work.
    Operating under heightened security, with industrial espionage always a concern, Archer had purportedly engineered an aerial microbe—a microscopic organism that lives in the atmosphere, drifting with the freezing winds miles above the ground—that traps greenhouse gases through metabolic processes. This