c.9

When J. L. and Sato arrived at the high airflow chamber, Lana was already there, waiting.

The chamber was half natural cave, half room dug out of solid stone by miners, and mostly filled with fans and ductwork. Powered by generators much deeper in Clover Compound, its machinery pumped air through several layers of the habitat. It didn’t pump air out; according to Mears, waste air exited from the lowest airflow chamber and was pumped out via ventilation shafts that emerged beside natural hot springs, making it unlikely that Skynet’s infrared scans would relate that heat source to a possible human habitat.

Lana’s eyes opened a little when she spotted Sato, but she said nothing. Sato, who had not met her before, gave her a quick look. She was a tall woman, only a couple of inches under six feet, with a round face and long brown hair—not as long as Jenna’s, but still at a length that indicated luxury rather than practicality. She wore an unmarked uniform in deep blue; though it was plain, Sato recognized that it was cotton, probably traded for at considerable expense from a distant habitat in Texas or points farther east. And she was pretty, having the sort of appealing but unmemorable looks that the surviving copies of men’s magazines Sato had seen referred to as “the girl next door.”

“I’m Lieutenant Sato.” He extended his hand. “Thanks for helping.”

“Lana Miertschin,” she said and shook his hand. “M-i-e-r-t-s-c-h-i-n. Please remember that.” She turned away and opened the thin metal door covering the oversized metal case behind her. Within were circuit breakers and gauges.

“I will,” Sato said. He turned a curious eye on J. L. The younger man gave him an “I’ll explain later” gesture.

Lana flipped three of the circuit breakers, then restored them in a different order. There was no change to the operating of the fans and blowers around her. Then she closed the door again and gripped the entire breaker box and pulled.

It rotated away from the stone wall, opening as if the whole box were a door, revealing a gap in the wall, a yard high by two feet wide, beyond. In the back of the breaker box was a metal handle.

Lana stepped through and gestured for the men to follow. They did, emerging into a dark area the size of any of the thousands of elevators now standing unused all over the world. On the opposite side, dimly visible in the light spilling through the hole in the wall, was a dark door.

Lana pulled and tugged the circuit box closed. It came to rest with a distinct click. “I’m going to open the other door,” she said. “I don’t need light on the other side, at least not until we get to where there is some, but you probably will.”

Sato switched on his flashlight. In its harsh, unflattering glow, Lana looked uncomfortable and scared.

“Then, when we get to where there is light, do exactly what I do,” she continued. “Okay?”

Sato nodded. “Okay.”

Lana twisted deadbolt knobs on the other door, three of them, one above the other. Then she pulled the other door open. From the slowness with which it moved, Sato guessed that it was metal rather than wood.

Beyond was another small room that, when Sato entered it, turned out to be a shaft rather than a chamber. It had four concrete walls and was thirty or forty feet high. Stapled into one wall was a metal ladder. The paint on it, mostly red-brown, was blotchy, and some of it was comparatively fresh.

Lana led the way, with J. L. second and Sato trailing.

At the room’s summit, Lana pushed on a circular section of ceiling and it rose away as a hatch. Sato switched off his flashlight and they emerged into a lit room.

It wasn’t bright, and it wasn’t a chamber designed for human occupation. It was long, perhaps sixty yards by twenty, with leaves and rubbish on the floor. The ceiling was cracked plaster, with many dark wooden beams supporting it; the windows, all along one wall, were broader than they were tall, barely tall enough for a human torso to fit through, and flush with the ceiling. There were what looked like wrought-iron bars on the outside of the windows, and the light coming in through them was sunlight. Sato could see hazy blue sky and clouds.

Sato felt the hair rise at the nape of his neck. This is his house, the basement of Mears’s old house.

There was a wooden staircase near one end of the room. Lana led them up it. The door at the top opened into a dark, wood-paneled hallway. There were doors all along the hallway, some closed, others open and admitting more light.

Lana led them to the nearest one. It opened into a stairway, one with far more stylishly carved wooden banisters and supports than the basement stairs. Carefully, she walked up the stairs immediately adjacent to the wall. In spite of her precautions, her steps made the occasional step creak, but Sato recognized that tromping up the middle would cause far more creaking.

The men followed her up one flight, emerging into a hallway that was even better lit; there were windows, the glass in them mostly shattered and gone, along the left side, while the doors on the right side were all closed. Leaves and dried grasses decorated the wooden floor in places, and a little breeze stirred them.

Keeping just beside the left wall, Lana led them down the hall. She ducked and crawled past each open window, and the men duplicated her action. Once they were past the fourth window, with two more to go, she crossed the hall to the doorway there, opened it, and beckoned for the two men to join her within. They entered the chamber beyond and she shut the door behind them.

This was a grand chamber, two stories high, twenty yards by ten, a classic gentleman’s library. Bookshelves stretched from the floor to nearly the ceiling, and a well-braced wooden ladder with wheels at its base permitted access to the higher shelves. At one end, a circular metal staircase gave access to a small platform one floor up; the platform was located directly beneath a skylight, though that aperture, like the room’s two other skylights, appeared to have been covered over by wood at some point in the past. At floor level were several pieces of furniture, including a large wooden desk, two easy chairs, a sofa, and—probably not original equipment—a bed.

In spite of the fact that the skylights were blocked, the room was well illuminated. This chamber had three windows along one wall and two along another; all were about five feet high and two and a half feet wide, placed close to the ceiling. And the glass in all four was intact, though not entirely transparent. Sato didn’t know whether it had been frosted when manufactured or had been scoured by dust and debris in the decades since the house was built, but the glass was all cloudy and whitish, like cataracts.

Lana opened her mouth to say something, but Sato raised a finger to his lips.

Sato moved out into the center of the room and looked around. Immediately he knew Raymond Mears just a little bit better.

This was the heart of the house. His personal library. Sato could see thousands of volumes, most of them hardbound. Sato had learned a phrase from his mother, a phrase she had used to describe the occasional well-preserved site that had once been occupied by powerful people: The place stank of money.

Mears doesn’t give up anything he wants or loves. The library had been meticulously maintained in the decades since J-Day. Though weather had penetrated into other corners of the old house, Mears had taken steps to keep this chamber and its contents intact.

And Mears is a selfish bastard. In spite of the fact that most human habitats, excluding only the ones that had managed to perform repeated raids on public libraries, were short on reading material, Mears had kept this horde of books to himself.

Sato could almost hear the old man’s words. “To hell with what the great John Connor says. I’ve kept my home, on the outside, right under Skynet’s nose, all these years. My home, my books, my woman. No one can have them.”

The windows had to be reinforced or armored glass of some sort, but that made sense; the high winds of this place would otherwise have shattered the difficult-to-reach panes on a regular basis.

Sato moved to the desk. In one drawer he found a sheaf of yellowing paper and a well-maintained fountain pen. He began writing. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Lana wince. Obviously it was against the rules for anyone but Mears to use any of the precious paper stock. My paper.

He wrote:

Why were the skylights covered? Were they made out of regular glass?

That didn’t make any sense to him. He crooked a finger to summon Lana over.

Reluctantly, she took the pen from him and responded:

he didnt want skynet satlites to see through them

He boarded them over?

he and his first mistress

Doesn’t he worry about security? About the possibility of listening devices?

the only way to get here without trigering warning devices is the way we took, but he does look for microfones sometimes there never was one

It was true, the old engineer would be able to put together some sophisticated, clever security measures to warn him if a Terminator or assault robot entered his home. Sato could see dust on most exposed surfaces in the library; entering this chamber and planting a listening device would be very problematic, even for Skynet.

There was something about the windows that bothered Sato. No, not just the windows here, any windows. He’d been suspicious of intact windows ever since he’d attended a security lecture John Connor had given many years ago. From one of the pouches on his belt he pulled out a compass and took his bearings. The long wall with the three windows faced west, the short wall with the two windows north.

Those windows—do they look down over the Navajo Mountain Strategic Region?

yes but its hard to see because the glass is so scratched

Sato scowled over her response. That was probably it: the clue to how Skynet had penetrated the security of this place. It had somehow detected activity in this chamber and then had—

He began writing again.

I’m going to write out some words for you to say. You’ll say them as we’re leaving. I want you to pretend that you’re saying them to Mears. Okay?

She nodded.

From his shirt pocket, he withdrew another photograph of the fictitious Gwendolyn Drew. He set it on the desktop and began writing again.

*   *   *

“Honey?” Lana said. There was strain in her voice, and as she continued reading, she sounded as though she were reading. “You left that picture of the Drew girl on the desk. Do you want it?”

She waited, staring at Sato. He held up a finger, then a second, counting up to five, and then gestured for her to continue. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll just pick it up next time.”

Sato and J. L. accompanied her out into the hall and they retraced their steps back into the basement, the access shaft, the airflow room.

*   *   *

It was the height of the breakfast meal, and the mess hall was crowded. The Scalpers had their own table; it had once been a picnic table for a state park, and after innumerable years weathering the outdoors it had spent innumerable years in this mine. It was designed to accommodate six people; all five Scalpers and a nervous-looking Lana sat at it now.

Sato kept a close eye on the crowd. All the other tables were full, and several of the Clover Compound residents were watching the Scalpers and their guest.

Sato stirred the oatmeal in the main compartment of his sectioned metal plate, then swallowed another mouthful. There was actually a hint of some sweetening in it, and the other plate compartments held some sort of fried potatoes and a compact little mound of chicken scraps. “Not bad,” he admitted.

“We eat pretty well,” Lana said. She wouldn’t look around at the other tables. She sounded miserable.

“Remember what I told you,” Sato said. “If everyone acts smart—”

“Everyone goes home happy,” she finished.

J. L. reached over and gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. Sato didn’t know whether it was just an act to comfort her or whether J. L. recognized that the action would be seen, would inevitably be reported to Mears. Probably both. Sato decided that the boy was proving to have good people instincts, to have wisdom beyond his years.

That wasn’t as rare as it had been before Judgment Day. People needed to get wise fast. Someone who, even as an adolescent, couldn’t behave beyond the urges of his hormonal storms was much more likely to make a fatal error than one who could.

Nix, opposite Sato, spoke up, his voice oddly melodramatic: “It begins.”

Sato followed the man’s gaze. Just entering the mess chamber from one of the main tunnels were Mears and Murphy. The compound leaders nodded and chatted to people as they moved among the tables, but there was little doubt that their eventual destination was the Scalpers’ table.

Sato caught Smart’s eye. “We could use a couple of extra chairs.”

Smart nodded and rose. Moving quickly but unobtrusively, he approached two tables with unoccupied seats, spoke a few words to the people there, and absconded with two chairs. He placed one at either end of the Scalpers’ table and was seated again before Mears and Murphy reached them.

“Good evening,” Mears said. He spoke to Sato, but his glance flicked momentarily to Lana, who sat between Sato and J. L. Lana didn’t look up at him.

Sato kept his tone cordial. “Good evening. I hope you’ll forgive us from stealing your attendant this morning. We had some questions, and she’s been most helpful with the answers.”

“Not a problem,” Mears said. “I didn’t realize you were breakfasting out here, though, Lana. You might have let me know.”

Before she could answer, Sato gestured at the two empty chairs. “Please. Join us.”

Murphy moved around to the far end of the table. He hadn’t said anything, and there was a faint tinge of curiosity to his expression. He obviously knew something was up, knew that whenever someone in Sato’s position defied custom there had to be a reason.

Mears settled in at the end next to Sato and Nix. “What sort of questions?”

“Well, pertaining to security issues.” Sato gave Mears his serious “Be prepared for bad news” face and lowered his voice. “There’s a serious security problem, a leak, here at Clover, and it’s getting people killed.”

Mears leaned in close and put his elbows down on the table end. His tone was low, too, and Murphy had to lean in closer to hear him at all. “What problem?”

“Well, it starts with Steve Earle and Joel Benson.”

More than three months ago, the most aggressive Resistance cell in this region, headed by former Air Force colonel Steve Earle, had found what promised to be an unguarded back door access into Navajo Mountain. With his mobile special forces cell, carrying a briefcase nuke provided by the Resistance through Clover Compound, Earle had traveled a second time to the vicinity of that back door … and disappeared.

A month later, Lt. Joel Benson, leader of the 1st Resistance Rangers, Special Incursion Unit Red 1, and four operatives had tried to replicate the mission. They, too, had failed. Their deaths had been heard by John Connor and his chief advisers; Benson’s team had been in direct radio contact with Home Plate when they’d been assaulted and destroyed by Skynet forces.

And they, too, had naturally staged through Clover Compound.

Mears nodded. “A damned shame. Not just because a successful mission would have destroyed Skynet. Those were good men and women. Are you saying that a security breach here had something to do with their deaths?”

“Yes.”

“Odds are long, Sato. They walked right up to Skynet’s back door. There can’t be any more sophisticated a security setup anywhere in the world, except maybe at Home Plate. They were caught because they were detected.”

“They were caught because someone here told Skynet they were coming.”

Mears’s eyes widened. He turned to look around the mess hall. His movement was slow and smooth, an attempt to be surreptitious, but many people still noted the compound leader’s attention and offered him respectful nods.

He returned his attention to Sato. “Who?”

“The same person who informed Skynet of the location of Clover Compound in the first place.”

Now Mears, already pallid from his years belowground, paled to an even whiter shade, making the liver spots on his face stand out in greater relief. “We’d all be dead.”

“Eventually, you will be. The instant Skynet realizes that information from Clover Compound has dried up. At that point, the robots will come in and everybody in this compound will be slaughtered.”

Murphy finally broke in. “You’re saying Clover is doomed. We’ll have to evacuate.” There was disbelief in his voice, disbelief and pain.

Sato nodded. “That’s right.”

“No, no, no.” Mears shook his head. “This is a theory on your part, nothing but a theory, and it’s contradicted by all available facts. I am not going to lead all these people, who rely on me, in some terrified, half-assed exodus just because you theorize that we have an information leak.”

Sato kept his full attention on Mears. He didn’t let himself blink. Under the table, he slowly, silently snapped open the holster flap that kept his Glock handgun secure. “You’re right … in that you’re not going to lead. Colonel Mears, tonight you’re stepping down as leader of Clover Compound.”

Mears leaned back as if Sato had just transformed into a poisonous reptile. “Now I know you’re crazy.”

“Whether I’m crazy or not, at this moment I have a nine-millimeter semiauto pointed at your gut, and if you do anything to interrupt what I have to tell you, I’m going to put about six rounds into you and keep the rest in reserve to keep this crowd under control. You have my word on it.”

At the other end of the table, Murphy started to rise, but Jenna the Greek caught his eye and gave him a slow shake of the head. Her right hand, too, was out of sight beneath the table. Pointedly, her spoon in her left hand, she scooped some oatmeal into her mouth and gestured for Murphy to retake his seat. He did, his expression neutral.

“In direct contravention of Resistance security protocols, you’ve been maintaining and regularly visiting an insecure aboveground site,” Sato said. “Your old home. Specifically, the library of your old home.”

Mears shot Lana a betrayed look. “It is not insecure.”

“It has five intact windows facing territory controlled by Skynet.”

Mears looked at Sato as though the man were an idiot. “Five intact windows. Nothing comes in. Nothing goes out. No security breach.”

“Even assuming that a sufficiently sophisticated Terminator couldn’t get close enough to plant a microphone on the exterior of one of those windows—”

“I have passive sensors all along the outside of the house. Standard pressure sensors. Nothing could get up to those windows.”

“What do you bet, Mears?”

“How about your life, Lieutenant?”

“Against your job? I’ll take that bet. Have you ever heard of a technique by which a laser can be directed against a glass surface to measure infinitesimal vibrations in the glass? And those measurements processed to re-create the sounds, including human voices, that caused them?”

Mears was silent. But his eyes, widening slightly, told the entire story to Sato. No, I hadn’t.

“Several times a week, you’ve taken Lana up to your hideaway, read your books, spent time with her, talked to her. You talked to her about Earle’s expedition—and Benson’s. About the back door and the briefcase nukes. The day before yesterday you told her about Gwendolyn Drew, the woman we’re looking for. And you told Skynet. All without meaning to.”

Mears shook his head. “I don’t believe you.”

Sato continued as if the old man hadn’t spoken. “Yesterday I had Lana speak, as if she were talking to you, and indicate that you’d left something behind in your library—a clue Skynet can’t afford not to have. Then we left. If I’m right, and I am, Skynet will have dispatched a mechanism to take a direct look at that clue, since it’s not something Skynet could acquire by bouncing a laser off a window. Just how good are your passive sensors upstairs?”

“Very, very good.”

“And very well hidden, too, I take it.”

“Yes.”

“While you were up there, have you ever discussed the locations of those sensors with Lana? Or any of your other attendants over the years? Offered any information that would allow Skynet units to bypass them?”

Mears thought about it for several long moments. Finally he shook his head. The gesture lacked energy; it was obvious that the old man was seriously considering the possibility that he had betrayed everything he had built over the years. “No. Only in my office. That’s where I keep the plans and diagrams.”

“Then let’s go look at whatever you use to record the sensor output.”

*   *   *

In the high airflow chamber, Mears looked at all the faces gathered around him: the Scalpers, Murphy, Lana. Then he pulled open the circuit box that provided access to the house far above.

Instead of throwing the three false breakers in the pattern that unlocked the box, he threw them in a different order. There was the faint whine of a servo and from behind a mass of wiring and circuitry descended an ancient liquid crystal display screen.

It came to life, displaying the word TEST in the upper left-hand corner. Then that word faded and characters Sato couldn’t interpret came up:

Mears seemed to deflate. He leaned against the circuit box and held on to it as though if he let go he would fall.

“What’s it mean?” Murphy asked.

“Sensors nine, fourteen, fifteen, and eighteen were tripped last night, each one twice, going in and going out,” Mears said. His voice was hoarse. “Side walkway, side service door, front servants’ stairwell, hallway leading south from the library. And the X designation is a rough indication of the weight of whatever tripped the sensors. It was something in excess of two hundred kilograms.”

Nix whispered, “The boss goes on a shooting spree.”

“Okay, you’ve seen the bad news,” Sato said. “And the last of the bad news is that you’re retiring, as of this morning, and appointing Murphy your successor. Here’s the good news. The Resistance needs your skills. You can’t be in charge here, but you can come back to Home Plate and teach engineers from all over the continent to do some of the things you do. You can save lives and more than make up for the lives this screwup has cost. Or you can relocate with your compound and live the life of a retiree. As little as any compound can afford to support someone who isn’t working, John Connor is pushing to have it happen here and there … so that people understand that if they live long enough, they can live out the rest of their lives without working themselves to death. But you have to decide what it’s going to be.”

“I’m not giving up my house.”

“Understand me, those were the only two choices where you get to live.” Sato’s tone was hard. “Any choice where you try to keep charge of things, even what’s about to be an empty shell of a compound, is a choice where the Resistance can’t afford for you to survive. You would be captured and you might be induced to talk. Not just little bits and pieces, but years’ worth of information might fall to Skynet that way. So, again, you have to decide between the choices I just gave you.”

Mears finally turned his attention to Lana. “Where do you want to go?”

She kept her eyes down. “I think … I think…”

“Speak up, girl.”

“Home Plate, I think.”

Mears looked back to Sato. Putting on an expression of false cheer, he said, “I guess we’re going to Home Plate.”

“Then I’ll stay with Clover,” Lana said.

Mears stared at her. “Now you’re being insolent.”

“She’s not going with you,” J. L. said. He didn’t put an arm around her, didn’t make any sort of “She’s with me” gesture. Another point in his favor, Sato thought. “You’re going to have to do without her.”

“Did I ask you to speak?” Mears’s words came out in a bellow, the loudest Sato had ever heard him speak, and Lana flinched away from the fury in his tone. “You little grabby handed, greasy-haired piece of crap, did I appoint you to speak for this girl?”

J. L. didn’t lean away, didn’t respond with a punch, didn’t react at all. He crossed his arms and stood there.

“I quit,” Lana said.

“What?” Mears’s tone returned to its normal volume.

Finally Lana met his eyes. “Raymond, I’m not mad at you. You’ve been very nice to me and I’ve been very nice to you, and I don’t blame you for anything. But I quit.”

“I won’t let you.”

An expression crossed Lana’s features, a realization that she was trying to impart knowledge to someone incapable of accepting it. “I’m sorry. You’re not in charge anymore.”