I was lying on concrete. It was cold but soothing to my burning skin. My legs and arms kept twitching, as if I were a frog someone was running an electric current through. Tased, my groggy mind thought. The men in black had tased me. I could feel the pulsing where the darts had struck. My arm muscles were still hard to control, but my fingers found the wires trailing from the barbs. Five of them. Three people must have fired at me.
I smelled something familiar, acrid, musty—couldn’t remember what I knew it from. Light glowed dimly behind me, showing that the ladder I’d been carted down ended in a concrete anteroom. I was facing a closed door. With an effort I turned my head. The lights were coming from behind a partly open door about ten feet away.
I shut my eyes and felt a wave of nausea sweep through me. I needed to sit up. I tried for deep breaths that would feed my quivering arms and legs, but deep breaths pushed the points of the darts against my skin.
When I exhaled, the darts released. I was wearing a windbreaker over my sweater; my clothes had protected me from the fullest force of the tase. I worked an arm out of the sweater. Bare arm and breast on freezing concrete: an ice bath. It roused me into a frenzy of action—namely, I forced myself to sit up. Shrugged myself free of the jacket. Pulled off the sweater.
Good job, Vic. You’re ready for the Olympics. I still had my flashlight and my phone. I shone the flash on the jacket. Five darts. I pulled them out, dropped them on the floor, and worked my arms back into the sweater. I tried my phone, but the concrete bunker blocked any hope of a signal.
I grabbed the bottom rung of the ladder and pulled myself to standing. Walked on unsteady feet toward the lighted doorway, supporting myself by leaning on the rough concrete wall.
The musty, tangy smell grew stronger. When I pushed the door open all the way, I saw why: I’d found a lab, which looked and smelled like Dr. Kiel’s. I’d smelled it the first time I came to the silo but hadn’t connected the scent to Kiel. Another demerit on the detective’s performance review.
A countertop held a dozen canisters—fermenters, like Kiel’s—with hoses that snaked into a hood where an exhaust fan ran. A cylindrical machine against the facing wall was rotating slowly, making a clacking sound as an external set of rods moved up and down.
Three computers stood on the countertop near the door. Two seemed to be logging what the fermenters and the clacking machine were doing. The third monitor showed what was happening in the world aboveground. The room where I’d been talking to Baggetto and Roswell appeared in one quadrant, empty now except for one of the men in black, who was playing with his phone. The other quadrants showed the entrance to the silo grounds, the exterior of the launch-control support building, and a view of the Sea-2-Sea fields. I’d never had a chance of getting out of the building unscathed.
Since I could see the control room upstairs, the man in black could probably see me, if he looked up from his device. I craned my neck and saw two cameras in the corners, tracing an arc across the room.
A twittering and squeaking came from the far end of the room. When I shone my flash, red eyes reflected back at me. Cages full of rats. This time I couldn’t fight the wave of nausea; I threw up the yogurt I’d eaten earlier.
It was then, bent over and panting, that I saw Cady Perec curled on the floor near the canisters. I shuffled to her, quickly, like a snail. Knelt down. She was alive, her breath coming in shallow puffs.
I shone my flash over her and saw the trailing wires to the darts in her body, one in the back, one in the shoulder, two in the hips. I pulled them out, and she whimpered, her eyes fluttering open. She looked at me in terror and tried to move away.
“Cady, it’s V.I. Warshawski. We’re inside the missile silo. We need to find a way out.”
“V.I.? Vic?” She seized my arms in a fierce, convulsive grasp and burst into tears. “You found me. Thank God!”
“I was tased. Just like you. Where’s Bernie?”
“I don’t know.” Her teeth were chattering. “We tried to sneak into the field, but I was wrong. The place I used to use—everything was like you said, covered in alarms. Soldiers showed up, it was like they were waiting for us. Bernie, when I screamed, she lay flat in a furrow. I don’t know where she is now.”
I had to hope Bernie had run to safety. She was small enough that she could have slipped away while men in black were torturing Cady. I hoped. I begged.
Even if Bernie summoned help, we couldn’t count on its arriving—Baggetto would block any military response. Sheriff Gisborne would keep the local cops at bay. Cady and I had to save ourselves.
Bram Roswell and his band of patriots thought we would die in here, in the lab where they were growing pneumonic plague. They thought we would contract the disease. They imagined us choking to death. Then they could bury us in the experimental field.
“We have to find a way out of here.” I pulled Cady upright and propped her against a cabinet door. “We cannot sit around feeling sorry for ourselves while we wait to die.”
“I should have listened to you,” Cady whispered. “When they brought me down here, they kept asking me insane questions about a movie the colonel wants to watch. It didn’t make any sense. All the chemicals down here have made them crazy.
“They wanted to know where you were and where was your dog—they shot me again when I said I didn’t know. Where was August Veriden, where was Emerald Ferring? If I’d known, I would have said. I told them you would be here if you weren’t at the B and B—don’t hate me, but they hurt me too much.”
She started to weep, wrenching sobs like those that had racked her grandmother earlier in the day. I slapped her roughly.
“Listen, Cady, it’s not like the action-hero movies. In real life, no one stands up to torture. You’ve done nothing that could possibly make me hate you. You’ve done nothing for which you need to feel ashamed. You’re resourceful, you’re a problem solver. And we have a major problem to solve. We need every skill set we possess to get out of this hellhole.”
She stopped crying but looked at me apathetically. She needed more than a pep talk from me to summon the energy to save herself. I felt panic rising in me and swallowed it down, bile leaving a raw, bitter place in my throat.
Think for two, think for two, how do you do, I’m feeling blue, because now I must think for two. I needed someone to slap me.
“I’m going to go up the ladder,” I said loudly. “You have to hold my flashlight so I can see what I’m doing.”
She didn’t respond. My own arms and legs were still quivering, but they were going to have to go to work. I hoisted Cady to her feet. Draped her right arm around my neck, put my own hand on her waist, and pushed her across the room. There was a sink by the door; I took a chance on the water and washed my face and rinsed my mouth, wet a paper towel and wiped Cady’s face.
When I put my arm around her again, she was steadier. She gave a last gulping sob but stayed with me to the ladder, which was actually just steel rungs bolted into the wall. I thrust my flashlight into Cady’s hands and ordered her to keep shining it on the ladder. I wrapped my clammy, twitching hands in my jacket sleeves and grabbed the rung above my head, pulled myself up, feet on the bottom rung.
Cady’s arms were wobbly, and the light jiggled around, but she didn’t drop the flash, and I could make out the rungs as I slowly climbed up. A hatch was almost directly overhead.
“Get me light right on the top here. I need to see this thing.”
Cady tried, but she couldn’t manage it. When she started to cry in frustration, I leaned against the wall, took my phone out, used the flashlight to inspect the hatch cover.
Reinforced steel from the days when a nuclear warhead sat nearby. A thick rubber seal fitted the hatch tightly into place. I turned the latch and pushed upward. It was clamped from the outside.
I climbed back down. Not a hard climb if I hadn’t just been electrocuted and wasn’t terrified in the bargain. Instead I was as winded as if I’d finished an Iron Woman. I squatted, panting, the pill bottle digging into my thigh.
“We’re trapped, aren’t we? We’re going to die here.”
Cady’s dull, helpless tone so echoed my own mood that I became angry.
“These men are not going to manage our fate in the way that they did Doris McKinnon’s or Dr. Roque’s. We will survive and thrive,” I said fiercely.
I pulled out the pill bottle and stared at it. I’d taken two tablets last night and three today. That left twenty-five, fifteen for Cady, ten for me. Three days’ protection, maybe more if the pills took hold before the infection began, but I was damned if I’d sit down here checking my breathing and temperature every half hour.
I explained the situation to Cady. “I need you to take two of these right now to counteract what you’ve been breathing in here. They’ll make you feel sick on an empty stomach, but that’s better than what could happen to you without them.”
“We could get a soda out of there.” She pointed to the far wall, at a vending machine I hadn’t noticed. “If you have any money. I left my purse in the trunk of my car.”
I found a hammer in a drawer in the lab, which I gave to Cady, telling her to hit the lock as hard as she could. She gave it a few tentative blows and then swung her arm back and started whacking the machine. The lock broke, glass splintered from the front of the case, and cans rolled out around us, but she kept pounding until I grabbed her arm.
“That felt good!” She picked up a can of Sprite, handed me a Coke, and started a little victory dance in front of the vending machine. I high-fived her and handed her two of the antibiotic tablets to swallow.
I gave a hysterical laugh, thinking we were like Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove, shooting out the Coke machine to get coins for a phone call: now we had to answer to the Coca-Cola Company.
Faded black paint on a closed door by the machine announced it as the launch-control center. I switched on the lights and saw that Roswell had fixed it up as a kind of common room for his research team. There were couches, a couple of small tables where people could eat or talk or inject themselves with germs. A door in the corner opened onto a bathroom with a decontamination shower.
A kitchenette in the back included a fridge, bare except for a chunk of cheese and a pot of mustard; we found crackers in a cupboard and nervously helped ourselves to cheese and crackers, wondering if we were swallowing plague germs. An industrial clock hung near the refrigerator. One-thirty in the morning. How much time did we have?
Roswell had left the old launch-control console against one wall, its keys turned to begin the launch beneath buttons labeled target 1, target 2, target 3. A framed poster captioned “America Held Hostage” hung above it, showing a beleaguered America attacked by hordes of Muslims, Chinese, Koreans, and Mexicans. Text in red letters over a mushroom cloud screamed, “IT’S 1 MINUTE TO MIDNIGHT, AMERICA. ALMOST TOO LATE TO FIGHT BACK. JOIN PATRIOTS CARE-NOW TO REPEL THE ENEMIES AT OUR GATES.”
Another hatch was in the floor behind one of the couches, its cover locked into place with two arms. After some trial and error, we figured out that they had to be turned in opposite directions at the same time to undo the locks. When we lifted the cover, I lay flat and looked down, shining my flash around into a vast empty pit. I shuddered: this was where the missile had stood, a fat, sleek snake, never sleeping, ready for launch every second of the day.
I got back to my feet. “We’ll climb down there as a last resort,” I said to Cady. “Let’s see what we can find in the lab.”
Back in the lab, what we looked for first was protective gear. Cady and I both put on face masks, bonnets such as surgeons wear, latex gloves.
I went over to the ventilation hood above the fermenters. If they were culturing live pestis, the residue couldn’t be going straight into the atmosphere, or people in the county would be dropping like medieval plague victims. Presumably they were sterilizing the steam or smoke that the fermenters were pouring into the air. At least I hoped they were.
We were roughly forty-five feet below ground, about the depth of a three- or four-story building. I tried to picture the grounds, but what came to mind were the snakes curling up on a hexagonal roof. The giant snake underground calling its young to its side. No, Warshawski: snakes seek out warmth. They had found a warm spot. Above the ventilation hood.
“Our way out,” I said to Cady. “We’re going to dismantle this little science experiment.”