“Not good, we leave, yes?” asked Huaras.
“Damn,” Evi said. “Drag him out of here. Wait back at the vans.”
They picked up Hofstadter, who had lost consciousness. As they left, Nohar looked back over his shoulder. “Isham?”
“Move!” she yelled back at them. She headed for the elevators.
Hofstadter said they had ten minutes. She was confident she could disarm any explosive that Hofstadter could have rigged. The problem was getting there and finding it.
“Price,” she called over the mike as she waited for an elevator to reach her. “Give me the access codes for the sublevels.”
Price gave her two sets of six numbers, one for the elevator and one for the air lock on sublevel four. “I don’t know if they’ll work. They’re my codes and I—”
“They’d better work, Price.”
An elevator dinged into place. The door slid aside, stopped as the lights in the lobby flickered, and resumed opening the rest of the way. “Price, before I drop out of radio contact, where would you hide a bomb around that methane jet?”
“What?”
The doors started closing.
“Never mind,” she said as she slipped inside the elevator. The voice of the elevator was repeating the phrase, “. . . stairs in case of fire. Elevators should only be used by emergency personnel . . .”
The voice pickup was dead, so she keyed in her destination manually, along with the six-digit security code. The elevator descended.
She passed the third sublevel and the lights flickered again and went out. Emergency lights came on. Apparently the fire in the administration building, probably Hofstadter’s work, had finally nuked the power grid for the complex.
If Hofstadter had been right, she had all of eight minutes left.
She wedged her fingers between the doors to the elevator and pushed them apart. Her left shoulder felt it, even under the anesthetic. With the door open, she could hear gunfire on the third sublevel. The lower halves of the elevator doors leading to that sublevel were riddled with bullet holes.
She kneeled and tried to separate what she could see of the doors for the fourth sublevel. They came apart reluctantly. The ceiling of the fourth sublevel only cleared the floor of her elevator by a meter. She rolled out.
Emergency lights cast a stark white light on the bare concrete corridor. To her right the corridor shot a straight twenty meters to an airlock door. Above the airlock a red light was flashing some kind of warning.
She looked to the left. Ten meters away she saw a canine coming out of the door to the fire stairs.
Evi rolled back to take cover in the shaft. She grabbed one of the elevator doors and swung inside. The bottom of the elevator brushed her hair. She didn’t hear any shooting. The dog might not have seen her.
She hugged the wall of the shaft, one hand holding on to the door for dear life, her left hand clutching the Mitsubishi. Her feet were half-hanging off of the girder that ran across the shaft, level with the corridor’s floor. She looked down the shaft behind her and saw three more sublevels before it ended in a flat slab of concrete.
She was breathing hard and beginning to sweat. Her pulse throbbed in her neck, and the copper taste of panic soured her mouth.
This dog could be point for a recon team, looking for another way in to the aliens. There could be as many as five of them if her original estimate was correct.
The smell began to drift toward her. She could distinguish two separate canines before she heard the fire door swing shut.
Six minutes left.
She could hear a dog talking on the radio, in Arabic. “. . . similar air lock design, no defenders. We’re going to—”
Her eavesdropping was interrupted by the abrupt return of power. The elevator began to descend.
She began crouching as she lost clearance. Her footing began to slip.
With a meter and a half left, she bolted. She leaped back into the corridor, turning to swing the Mitsubishi with her bad arm. She sprayed the corridor and prayed that she hit something.
The silenced Mitsubishi made a sound like someone jackhammering mud. Both dogs were taken by surprise. She managed to get one in the abdomen. Then she landed on her ass, and as she slid on the concrete floor, her remaining shots hit the ground at the other’s feet. One canine folded, collapsing in a heap, while the other took cover behind a large pipe that ran floor to ceiling. That one crouched and snapped off a burst.
She still slid across the floor. As the dog shot at her, she felt something like a sledgehammer hit her left arm. The impact tore the gun from her hand and rolled her over. She came to rest by the wall opposite the elevator in a slick of her own blood.
The elevator dinged and its doors closed.
The wound was a burning pressure in her bicep. Most of it hid under the effects of the painkillers that already doped her arm. But she knew it was a bad hit, because she couldn’t move her arm anymore.
The canine was getting out from behind the pipe he was using for cover. He pointed the Mitsubishi at her as he crept over to his partner. She supposed she looked dead.
He turned to look at his downed comrade.
Evi used that break in the dog’s attention to draw the Smith and Wesson from her shoulder holster and pump three shots. Two hit the canine in the face. The dog hit the ground before the cannon shot echoes died.
Five minutes.
She didn’t have time to look at her arm. She got to her feet and ran for the airlock door. She had to holster her automatic to operate the keypad. “The code better work. Price.” Price didn’t hear her; the few tons of concrete above her had killed her radio.
After she entered the code, it took the computer an inordinate time to respond. After a short eternity, the door slid aside, revealing a square chamber beyond, with a smaller door on the opposite wall. Red lights flashed at her from the corners of the air lock. She stepped inside and the door started sliding shut.
It stopped when the power died again.
“Shit,” she whispered.
Next to the opposite door was a glass-covered recess. Beyond lie glass was a red lever. The writing on the glass said “emergency release.” She punched in the glass and pulled the lever.
The door cracked open, filling the air with a high-pitched whistling. Wind razored by her, trying to scour her skin with windblown sand. She had to hang on to the lever to remain upright as the door continued to slide away. She closed her eyes and turned away.
The air that blew by her, trying to force her down, was hot and moist. It would have been saunalike if not for the smells that seared her nose. Bile, ammonia, sulfur, brimstone, lava. Molten smells, diseased smells.
She hung on to that lever for thirty seconds as the pressure equalized between the two environments. When she could face into the chamber beyond, she had only three minutes to find Hofstadter’s bomb.
The chamber beyond the air lock was cylindrical. The ceiling sloped upward into an irregular concrete cone. At the apex of the cone was a roughly circular hole about two meters in diameter, beyond which shone red-green light. A massive network of pipes snaked upward in the center of the room, terminating in a flared nozzle that stopped about a meter short of the hole in the top of the cone. The methane jet.
No fire shot out the top of the nozzle though. Instead, Evi heard a steady low hiss. The wind from the pressure equalizing must have blown it out. The nozzle was now pumping methane into the room.
Where did he stick it?
When she didn’t see it immediately, she had a fear that Hofstadter had planted it on the floor below, where the pipes seemed to originate. She told herself that if she didn’t find it in sixty seconds, she’d run and take cover in the stairwell.
When she circled the base of the pipes, she saw it. A small brick of plastic explosive and a small electronic timer/detonator. The timer said that Hofstadter had overestimated the amount of time they had.
The display had already rolled over to under a minute. She had forty-eight seconds to turn the thing off. She ran up to the pipe and instantly realized that Hofstadter was taller than she was. The bomb was out of her reach.
She could see it clearly, nestled between a thin pipe that seemed to be part of the ignition system and one of the big gas pipes. She grabbed the smaller pipe and pulled herself up to within reach.
It was a standard timing element. An idiot-proof detonator mass-produced for the defense department. Nothing exotic, but she had expected as much from Hofstadter. If Hofstadter had been an operative and not an economist, she wouldn’t be down here risking this.
The trigger didn’t even have a motion sensor. The extent of its booby-trapping capability was the ability to send a triggering spark into the explosive block if the wires were pulled out prematurely.
The little timer window rolled over into the thirties.
She tried to find footing, but her feet kept slipping on the base of the pipes. Damn it, all she had to do was hit the reset button on the thing. It wasn’t brain surgery. All she needed was to get her hand free.
The timer hit twenty-nine.
She looked down at her wounded left arm. The jumpsuit was wet with her blood from the shoulder down. She tried to move it.
The painkillers lost their effectiveness. Not only her shoulder burned, but there was a white-hot poker twisting in her bicep. Sweat stung her eyes, but she saw her arm move. She raised her shaking arm as lightning flashes of pain shot up her arm to settle into her gut. Every pulse of her heart ground a branding iron into her upper arm.
It seemed to take much longer than twenty seconds to raise her arm to the bomb. However, when her hand reached it, the timer still had nine seconds to go.
She blinked the sweat from her eyes and saw that Hofstadter had broken off the reset button.
“You BASTARD!”
Six seconds. Evi wrapped her hand around the detonator and hoped that Hofstadter’s primitive method of protecting his device meant that he wasn’t technically adept.
Five seconds. She knew she was going to die. She could taste it in her mouth, feel it breathing on the back of her neck.
Four seconds. “If this doesn’t work, at least I’m the one who did it.”
Evi ripped the detonator from the block of explosive. When she did so, her grip slipped and she fell backward. Even as she was in the air, she knew that it had worked.
To booby-trap the detonator the operator had to crack the case and wire a jumper inside. Hofstadter didn’t have the time or the technical inclination to attempt that.
The detonator beeped at her as she hit the ground and blacked out.
• • •
The first thing she became aware of was the pain. It felt as if someone were squeezing her arm, and every squeeze sent a wave of fire across her shoulder.
It took a second to realize that someone was squeezing her arm. Her eyes shot open. The first thing she saw was the peeper. She tried to reach for her automatic. Her right arm didn’t move.
There were three canines on her. One held down her right arm, one her legs, and one seemed to be doing first aid on her wounded arm. The peeper was leaning against the piping, holding the detonator.
“Evi Isham,” he said. “Finally.”
She looked with alarm at the dog who was tending her arm.
“Don’t worry, Sharif is an excellent combat medic.”
The dog jabbed something into the wound. Fire exploded inside her arm, burning out the inside of her skull. Her back arched, and when the pain receded, she could feel the ache of stressed muscles from her neck all the way down her spine.
The peeper gave her a lopsided smile. “I thought you’d like to experience the full effect of that wound.” The peeper pulled the collar of his khaki shirt away to reveal a puckered red scar in his neck, under the adam’s apple. “Like I did.”
The world had finally fallen in on her.
“Ironic,” the peeper said as he hefted the detonator. “You probably saved my life. I doubt the Race’s little beasties could patch me up after an explosion. It’s one of the ways you kill them.”
Sharif silently ripped what felt like a meter of barbed wire out of her arm. She turned to look at him tossing aside a few dozen strands of carbon fiber from her jumpsuit.
“What are you going to do with me?” She asked. She was ashamed of how weak her voice sounded.
“If it was up to me,” he said, looking down at her and his smile disappearing, “I’d cut out your eyes and toss you naked into the Bronx.”
Sharif finally finished his job. Evi felt the pressure of an airhypo injecting something into her arm. Then Sharif wrapped her arm in a dressing.
The peeper went on. “Unfortunately, for both of us, the Race has an interest in you, beyond the retrieval of their—” He hesitated and said the last word with distaste, “people.”
Sharif backed off of her arm and the peeper told her, “Get up.”
The canines retreated, letting her stand. The world felt oddly disjointed, as if she were watching events from a distance. She wondered if it was an effect of the pain, or hitting her head, or what they’d doped her with. They’d shot her up with something, and it wasn’t painkiller. The fire in her arm was a razor-sharp sensation, while the rest of the world seemed fuzzy and indistinct.
“Who are you?” The words came out in slow motion, as if they had to fight her tongue to get out. “NLF?”
“Move first. We’ve outstayed our welcome.”
He prodded her and she started walking. She walked through air that felt like molasses, and she couldn’t bring herself to resist the peeper’s commands.
The three dogs escorted her out the air lock and down the corridor, the peeper in the lead. The power had died, and they walked under the periodic spotlights of the emergency lights. The peeper kept talking, his voice a small rattle in a gray-cotton silence. “Dimitri’s what they call me. NLF was Hioko’s little boondoggle, before his brain had an argument with a bullet . . .”
When they reached the fire stairs, she had a brief fear that she had forgotten how to climb them. She stopped short, confused, as the peeper’s, Dimitri’s, voice faded in her awareness. Someone pushed her from behind and she had to struggle to move. It took an inordinate amount of concentration, and Dimitri’s voice kept fading in and out of her awareness.
“. . . never trusted the Race, smart move though it killed him . . .”
“. . . don’t kill you is because what the Race’ll do instead . . .”
“. . . need folks like you. What they give is almost worth it . . .”
Somehow she made it to the ground level. She was briefly curious about how long she’d been in the bowels of the UABT complex, but her time sense had left her. All she knew was that it was still dark outside, and the cargo hauler was gone.
Where was her backup? Gurgueia, Huaras, Nohar, and Fernando with his video camera who was supposed to document the aliens and the conspiracy. She remembered that she’d told the jaguar to follow wherever the aliens went; she must be following the truck.
The administration building still burned. The roar of the fires seemed to heighten in volume in time to her pulse. For some reason she couldn’t focus on the fire; her eyes kept darting after random motions, following smoke around in circles.
Someone prodded her, and she realized she had stopped moving. Dimitri’s voice faded into her awareness. “. . . not get distracted. Once you’re in the van, your attention can wander all you want.”
She nodded. It made a lot of sense at the time.
Once she settled into the seat in the van, she allowed her gaze to drift again. It took too much effort to focus her attention on any one thing. She cradled her arm and looked out the windshield. Dimitri talked on in the background, but she couldn’t keep a grip on what he said. As she faced the windshield, the van shook. That was briefly of interest, since no one had started the engine.
Glass fell from the windows of the main building, looking like black ice. Blue-green fire rolled out from the lobby, upward. It struck Evi that something had ignited all the methane that had been pumping out of that jet. She turned her head to the rear window, where, in the distance, she saw red and blue flashing lights. Police, she thought. NYPD or Agency impersonators? She didn’t know, or care.
Dimitri climbed over her and into the driver’s seat. She followed him with her eyes and her gaze rested on the back of his neck as he turned on the van and slammed on the accelerator.
As the van rocketed forward, she recorded a brief amazement at the fresh red scar under the edge of his close-cropped hair. It was obviously the exit wound from the bullet she’d placed in his neck less than seventy-two hours ago. Nothing healed that fast.
The van hit a bump and her head rolled aside. There were four Afghanis in back here with her. She wondered what these shaggy dogs thought about her. She was responsible for the death of a lot of their fellows. This breed of moreau was the least “human.” The Afghani dogs were pack oriented and had little concept of individuality. They were so well engineered for combat that they couldn’t adapt to any other environment. No room in their psyches for personal vendettas. They took orders, killed people, and usually died violently.
As the van shot through the gate and a space that used to hold a parked limousine, she closed her eyes and wondered if she should try to force her thinking into a more coherent pattern.