“Maya, you said this thing will take us back down to the lobby?” I asked as I pushed the hidden panel open all the way and dragged her inside. We pushed the panel shut behind us with a faint click.
“It should,” she replied a little uncertainly, panting a bit from the sudden exertion. We continued down the dimly-lit hallway, which quickly started spiraling down a ramp toward the ground floor. Maya tapped a button on her wrist computer controller, and a small vid window popped up with the map displayed. We examined it for a moment, but there appeared to be just the single hallway leading back down to the main lobby of the bank.
“What’s going to happen to Bodewell?” Maya asked. I sighed inwardly. How do you tell a small child the family pet died, or their grandfather? How do you explain to a computer expert who has no experience with the death and violence of this sort of life that the man she was talking to just a few minutes ago was probably already dead?
“He’ll…um…he’ll be fine,” I lied. “He’s an old guy, sure, but he’s got lots of experience with things like this. We’ll just meet back at my office.” I hated myself for the untruth, but I needed Maya to continue to function, and a breakdown over a dead companion wasn’t something that would help us at that moment.
After a few minutes of jogging down the ramp, we reached a short hallway with a blank wall at the end. Maya stepped up to the wall and touched a spot about halfway up. There was a soft click, and a faint crack appeared along the wall. When I pressed against it, a panel swung outward. We could see the lobby through the opening, looking just as it had when we’d been there…how long had it been? Half an hour? An hour, at most? I’d lost track of time. I stepped through the secret doorway first, the popgun drawn and at the ready. Maya followed behind me, closing the panel after herself. I scanned the lobby for more guards, but didn’t see any. They must’ve thought we’d be stopped up in the office.
Then I noticed the one guy by the front door.
Now, most competent security personnel know that you never post a single person by themselves at a door, especially one facing the wrong direction; i.e., away from the interior of the building.
Y’know, where the people you’re trying to catch are.
I signaled silently for Maya to stay put and crept across the empty lobby toward the guard. The room was large and, as previously noted, mostly marble and wood. Sound bounced around, echoing each click of my shoes into a small troupe of tap dancers. I stopped and slipped my shoes off and snuck across the room on stockinged feet, the popgun held at the ready. When I was about ten feet away, I cleared my throat in an obvious sort of way. The guard whirled around, and I pulled the trigger of the popgun. It fired, and the guard was suddenly trapped in a transparent bubble of nigh-impenetrable polymer.
“Amateur,” I said as I motioned for Maya to come over to the door. “Bring my shoes, would you?” I called to her as she slipped across the polished floor.
I slid my shoes back on and we stepped through the sliding glass door at the entrance. Looking up and down the street, I made sure we were clear before walking quickly to my car, almost dragging Maya behind me. The young computer expert had to trot to keep up with me as I reached the car, climbed in, and started up the ignition. The engine coughed to life like a smoker after that first drag of the day as Maya took the passenger seat next to me.
“What now?” she asked, settling in and buckling her seatbelt.
“Now, we go back to the office and barricade the door” I said, putting the car into gear and easing out of the parking spot, “and hope we got something useful from this whole business.”
X.
We took our time getting back to the office. I threw a few weird and unnecessary twists and turns into my route, hoping to confuse any potential tails and ensure our privacy. Not that I thought it would matter much, since I’d already been attacked in the office once by Calthus’s goons. But I was driving on mental autopilot while I mulled over the events of the evening, and a private detective who doesn’t juke and jive while behind the wheel gets followed and put down pretty early in their career.
“What now?” Maya asked, again, quietly from the passenger seat. I’d forgotten the shy computer expert was even in the car with me.
“Now,” I replied, griping the wheel firmly, “we figure out what puzzle pieces we’ve managed to pick up.”
I pulled up in front of the office half an hour later. There were a few other cars on the street, and a quick thermal scan using Maya’s fancy wrist computer disclosed that all of them had cool engines and had thus been there awhile. If someone was waiting in ambush for me, they’d have pretty stiff legs from crouching behind the potted plants by now.
I still went into the office cautiously, unlocking the door and swinging it open with my foot while I stayed off to the side of the door in a low crouch. When no bullets were forthcoming, I straightened up and quickly entered the room, scanning for signs of anything out of the ordinary.
All I saw was a bruised and bloodied John Bodewell leaning against my secretary’s desk, nearly unconscious.
“Bodewell,” I called to him, crossing the distance between the door and his slumped body without ever actually seeming to occupy the space. Maya let out a little gasp behind me as she saw him.
“Close the door behind you,” I said without turning to her. I started checking Bodewell for any signs of obvious damage. There was a long gash in his left forearm, and his coat sleeve was soaked in his own blood. I ripped the sleeve off his left arm and tied it around the wound, hoping to staunch the tremendous flow of blood from the gash. I checked his other limbs but found no other major wounds. I didn’t think there were any broken bones. I was no doctor, though.
“I don’t suppose you’ve got a body scanner program in that fancy device of yours?” I asked Maya, trying to maintain calm.
“Um, I do, actually,” she said, stepping forward and pulling up a vid window. She ran her wrist over his body slowly, checking everything on the vid window as she did. There were no broken bones and no internal bleeding, so Bodewell was pretty lucky. The only serious wound appeared to be the arm.
“There’s some bruising around the ribs, too, but nothing broken, I don’t think,” Maya said, shutting off the scanner and standing up.
I tapped a button on the computer box in my pocket, pulling up a vid window. “Call Typewell,” I said, and the phone tool dialed her number.
Ellen Typwell’s face popped up in the window after the third ring, a look of sleepy concern on her face. I glanced at a clock and realized it was well after midnight. “What is it, Eddie?” she asked.
“Come down to the office ASAP. We’ve got an injury here and need some first aid.”
Ellen sprang into action, leaping up and moving to her closet. “I’ll be there in ten,” she replied, closing the vid window.
“Are you going to call the police or an ambulance or anything?” asked Maya in concern.
“N…no police,” Bodewell wheezed, giving us both a start. He was conscious, but only just barely. “D…don’t wan’ ‘em t’get…inv’lved,” me muttered, his lips barely moving.
“But you’ve lost a lot of blood!” Maya said, her voice rising above a mumble for the first time all evening.
“I’ll…be fine,” Bodewell managed, coughing a bit and wincing at the pain in his midsection.
“Just don’t move,” I said, standing up again. “Miss Typewell will be here in a few minutes. She’ll be able to patch you up.” I moved around to the other side of the desk and started punching buttons on Miss Typewell’s terminal. I spared a quick glance at Miss Janovich, who was frozen in place, staring at Bodewell. “Maya,” I called to the young computer expert, who started in surprise and jumped up.
“Yes, sir?” she said.
“Come here. I need to download the data you found.”
“Yes sir.” She came around the table, pulling out her link cable and plugging in to the terminal. I know it sounded pretty heartless, what with my former
mentor bleeding to death on the floor in front of us, but I didn’t need Maya freezing up right now. Giving her a task while I took care of Bodewell was the best solution.
While she plugged in, I got under John’s unwounded arm and helped him get up off the floor and over to the anteroom couch. He sat there, woozy and probably a bit delirious, as I used a couple of throw pillows and the arm of the couch to elevate his wounded arm, and a folding chair from the closet to elevate his feet. I didn’t want the old bastard going into shock in my office. He stared out into nothing while I moved around him, getting everything situated as gently as I could.
“So, what exactly did we get on Project Sabre?” I asked Maya as I came back around the desk and stood next to her.
“Not as much as I’d hoped,” she said, pulling up a couple of vid windows to show me the files. “A few email exchanges with an undisclosed individual in the Pentagon, a couple of files describing the gun’s properties, and a file describing its potential military applications.” She shuffled vid windows around nervously. “If you gave me some time, I could probably decrypt the Pentagon contact’s email address,” she volunteered.
“That’s a start. Anything else?” I asked, opening a file labeled, “Optimal Use Parameters.”
“Well,” she replied, tapping files and opening up images for me, “they’re calling it a handheld mass accelerator device, what you might call a, um, rail gun.”
“A rail gun?” I said, confused.
“Yeah. It, uh, takes a small object, like a bullet, and accelerates it to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. Punches holes in very dense objects. The military started developing them about fifteen years ago, but most rail guns are huge. You need to mount them on, like, a tank or an aircraft carrier or something. The recoil from the kinetic energy would basically rip your arm right off.”
“Looks like they found a way to miniaturize it and reduce that recoil,” I said, remembering the hole it had punched through two walls in Calthus’s office. “Coincidentally, how big of a hole could one of these make if it was fired up close? Like, point-blank range?”
“Um,” Maya mumbled, tapping a few buttons in a vid window. “About the size of a fist? And it’d be a very clean hole, too, as fast as the projectile would be moving.”
“You don’t say,” I muttered, wheels turning in my head. I’d found a couple of corner pieces, it seemed.
“Looks like they were able to fashion a new, high-strength alloy that could handle the stresses of the mass acceleration with minimal recoil.” She pulled up more vid windows displaying the alloy in its unmolded state, a roiling pot of liquid metal. “Apparently the alloy is so strong it can withstand the stresses of virtually all known ballistic and laser-based weapons up to a nuke.” Images and short video files popped up around us, demonstrating the defensive characteristics of the metal.
“Defense doesn’t seem so bad,” I said hesitantly.
“But they can also use it in a variety of new weapons,” she continued, pulling up new windows to replace the others. “The mass accelerator weapon would make the sniper rifle obsolete in a matter of ten years.” The video that accompanied that announcement showed a marksman lining up and firing a needle-thin piece of metal about four miles into a target’s head. The entry wound was almost invisible at that distance, but decidedly lethal. “They are also working on fragmentary grenades filled with small bits of this stuff that could—” she started, but I cut her off.
“I think I can just about imagine how horrible that would be without the visuals, thank you.” I stared at the vid windows we had pulled up, my mind boggling. “The whole thing is just…this is way beyond my pay grade,” I said, slumping back in the chair. “We’ve got to inform…” I floundered. Who do you tell about something this big? “…someone of this,” I finished lamely.
“Who?” croaked Bodewell from the couch. He was trying to rise, his right hand pressing into the couch and sinking into the deep cushion.
“John, stop it, you’re already in bad enough shape as it is!” I said, rising to force him back down.
“Who could you…possibly report this to?” Bodewell asked, ignoring me as he got shakily to his feet. “The police? It’s over…their heads, too. The…military? Who do you think is sponsoring this whole business?”
“We’ve got congressmen and such, there’s gotta be political oversight…” I began. Bodewell laughed in a raspy way that devolved into a coughing fit, doubling him over in pain.
“Congress? You think…they’ve got any idea what’s going on?” he said, his face twisted into a grimace. “Or that they…want to stop it? C’mon, Eddie, they’d rather be…left in the dark, have…plausible d…deniability on the whole thing.”
He was right. And I knew he was right, but that didn’t mean I had to like it.
Miss Typewell came in about that time, gasping at Bodewell’s wound—which was now dripping blood down his arm and onto the floor despite my tourniquet—and immediately forced him into a sitting position while she yelled at me to grab bandages, needle, and thread. Years of working for me had honed Miss Typewell into not just a passable field surgeon, but an excellent field marshal, one who could issue orders to a detective and have them followed immediately on the pain of uncertain death (i.e., death where the exact nature of your doom is uncertain, but you know it will be tremendously painful and not at all quick). Miss Typewell was as formidable as any foe I’d ever faced, and far more likely to do me permanent damage if I crossed her.
Thank God she was on my side.
Soon, Miss Typewell had the hole in Bodewell’s arm exposed, cleaned, and patched with an expert’s precision and care. “It’s a pretty awful wound,” she said as she wrapped a large, clean bandage around a patch of stim mesh and administered several shots, including some basic antibiotics to prevent infection, a clotting agent, and another injection designed to increase red cell production, creating what was essentially a self-contained blood transfusion. “The thing was so open, it could take days to clot right. And as deep as the wound was, his muscle tissue may never knit together properly.” She leveled her most determined glare at him. “You should really see a doctor, Mr. Bodewell.”
“No time, and they ask way too many questions,” he replied.
“If the knife was made from the alloy, it might not heal at all,” Maya said from the desk. She was staring at another of the files we’d dug out of Calthus’s computer. “Apparently the alloy does something on a molecular level, breaking down tissue and killing it at the site of the wound.”
“Is that even possible?” I asked, rising from the floor where I’d been gathering bandages and gauze.
“It shouldn’t be,” Maya said, “but…well, there it is.”
“Wounds that never heal,” I muttered, amazed.
“Thank you anyway,” Bodewell said to Miss Typewell. Some color was returning to his face now, and he seemed to finally be in no danger of passing out.
“You are quite welcome, John,” Miss Typewell said, “I’m just sorry we can’t do more.”
“I’m sure there’s a solution to it somewhere,” I said, but I didn’t feel an ounce of the certainty I attempted to project with my voice.
“If anyone can figure this out, it’ll be you, Eddie,” Miss Typewell said. “Now, who is going to fill me in on the case?”
We took turns feeding Miss Typewell information, expanding points and elaborating where need be. I recounted Maya’s and my journey from the office, while Bodewell told the tale of his own narrow escape.
“The guy with the fancy gun was down, but the other guards were still just fine,” he said, flexing the muscles in his right hand experimentally. He seemed to have close to full range of motion, which was a good sign. It meant all of his nerves were intact. “One of the others was reaching down to grab that gun when I came up, so I kicked him in the face. I made a grab for the gun myself while trying to shoot at the other guys.”
“Didn’t they all have personal force fiel
d generators like the first guy?” I interrupted.
“Yeah, but those things don’t work so well at close-range,” Bodewell replied. “Overload the kinetic barrier with a high-enough velocity round, and they break down easy. When you’re only five feet away, a .44 packs a hell of a punch.
“Anyway, my aim wasn’t so great while I was trying to grab the gun, so one of the other goons managed to get in there and take a swing at me with a knife. I think it was made out of the same stuff as the gun, ‘cause I barely felt it until I looked down and saw my arm was drenched in blood.”
“So how’d you get out, Mr. Bodewell?” asked Maya in a hushed tone.
“Pure luck and a little preparedness,” he replied with a small smile. “I had a flashbang in my pocket. Dropped that, ducked behind a pillar, and managed to catch them totally off-guard.”
“You got real lucky, old man,” I said, nodding in appreciation of the sheer reckless daring such an effort required.
“Yeah,” he said, ducking his head a bit in embarrassment.
“Well,” said Miss Typewell, “I for one have had entirely too much excitement for this evening. Is there anything else we can really do tonight?”
“Not really,” I replied, chewing my lip. “We have to figure out who we can give this information to, but that’s not something we’re going to be able to do before morning anyway. I think the best we can do now is get some rest and let our wounds start to heal.”
“Good idea,” Bodewell said, rising—already steadier on his feet than he was ten minutes ago—and stretching. Maya and Miss Typewell started for the door, quietly chatting with one another. “Hey, Eddie, can I talk to you for a moment?” Bodewell asked me.
“Sure, John, what’s on your mind?” I replied, glancing at the door and thinking how nice it would be to slip into my own bed for the evening.
“Privately, if we could,” he said, gesturing for the inner office.
“Sure, sure,” I said, ushering him into my private office. I followed him in, shutting the door behind me and taking a seat on the corner of the desk. “What’s up, John?”
The Hidden Throne Page 14