She stood, dejected for both the brilliance that had been lost and Cassie’s loss of a father. She climbed up the slope to the fence, arms wrapped around herself, eager to leave this alien place as desolate as the heart of space. She clambered gracelessly over the fence, managed to swipe down the tattered remains of her coat.
She turned the key in the pickup’s engine. To her dismay, it failed to turn over. It seemed the silent vacuum had claimed it, as well. She tried again, willing it to start, but the key only clicked in the ignition, creating no spark to warm the cold metal.
Slinging her purse and Cassie’s backpack over her good shoulder, she opened the creaking door of the pickup into the frigid night once more. Putting one foot in front of the other, she walked down the moonlit dirt road. The moon above drew her on, exercising its magnetism over her. She could feel its cold, soft light settling over her, settling into her frozen skin.
A coyote crept out of the sage on the road before her, its shadow cast long over the frost-hardened dirt. It disappeared as quickly as it had appeared, sauntering into the shadows. Tara’s eyes followed its path, glimpsing a dead scorpion lying in the dirt, its glossy black claws raised up to the moon.
Symbols from the Moon Tarot card. She could feel their power mingling with her unconscious mind, shaking awake her intuition, even as the cold splintered her thoughts. She nearly walked past a tiny path branching to the left of the road, and she thought about the white and black pillars depicted in the card: a choice. The right-hand road stretched out broadly, smeared with the impressions of tire marks. The tracks were broadly spaced; Tara guessed military jeeps or trucks. There had been traffic, here. The left-hand path was narrow, a footpath dropping away over a slope. Anyone driving through here in a vehicle would easily miss it. She took the left-hand path, the way the coyote had come. The coyote was alive, and she accepted that as a good omen.
The narrow path pitched down into a shallow ravine. Brittle sagebrush raked against her clothes as she walked. Once or twice, she glimpsed the wash of headlights on the horizon. . . The destination of the other path, she guessed. The path Tara had taken circled around, avoiding that light. Tara guessed it might have been made by deer or other animals wanting to avoid human activity.
The path dissolved before a wall of rock and earth. An opening roughly the size of a man pierced the jagged stone surface. Old timbers supported and bracketed the uneven doorway. This doorway had been made by men.
Tara pulled a small flashlight from her bag and switched it on. Deep inside, she could see traces of guano, broken wood debris, and ropes. It was an old mineshaft. She guessed miners would have been searching for silver in this part of the country. Judging by the litter, this place was long abandoned.
Tara sat back on her heels. There was no way of knowing how big the mine was, or where it led. She dared to hope the traffic she’d seen on the main road had been leading to another arm of the mine—one modified for current covert use—and that she could find her way to it through this passage. Her intuition pulled her to this place, and she strongly felt Harry was somewhere near.
But fear trickled through her. The last time she’d been underground, she’d been imprisoned by the Gardener. Since that time, she’d even avoided subways and tunnels. The thought of entering the mine made sweat trickle down the back of her neck, as she felt the stirring of claustrophobia uncoiling in her gut. What if the passage narrowed, and she were trapped? What if she couldn’t find her way out? What if—?
She took a deep breath, steadying the shaking flashlight, and approached the crevasse in the rock. Harry was in danger and needed help, whether he wanted her at his side, or not. Her feelings, and his, were beside the point.
The shadow of the earth fell over her, and she immediately missed the illuminating light of the moon in that sudden eclipse. She supposed some fragments of it still existed in the traces of silver in the mine, and she tried to imagine that some bit of silvery moonlight remained hidden just beyond her reach, embedded in this total darkness. It wasn’t hard to imagine how the ancients believed that the moon’s rays created silver. But she could detect none of that comforting light now. Gravel crunched underfoot, and her flashlight beam wavered, casting angular shadows against the debris: discarded, bent metal tools; splintered wood beams; an abandoned shoe.
Her breath scraped the inside of her lungs, and her pulse thudded too quickly in her throat. She could feel it hammering against the shoulder strap of the backpack. The passage narrowed, and she took deep gulps of air to steady herself. She was alone, she reminded herself. The Gardener was long dead. Her flesh was whole, and she was perfectly capable of running back into the lighter darkness of night. She was in control.
Breathe, she told herself.
The ceiling of the shaft scraped her head, and she shivered. It smelled too much like earth here. Not the Gardener’s fresh, upturned loam fortified with humus, but stale, forgotten dirt broken into pieces and cast aside.
She forced herself to move forward for what seemed like hours, the flashlight slick in her hand. The beam flickered and yellowed, and the fear of being alone in the darkness nearly turned her around. Sweat slid into the wound on her arm, stinging, reminding her of the smell and taste of blood.
Just a little farther, she told herself. Just another hundred steps. . .
She played the game, over and over again. Another hundred steps. That was a manageable goal. Another hundred. Another. One, two, three, four, five. . .
Breathe.
She could hear voices ahead. Clutching her dying flashlight in her hand, she nearly broke into a run. The distant sounds seemed to emanate from her right, down the narrowest part of the shaft. It had fallen in on itself, leaving only a space the size of a child between the roof and the ceiling.
Tara clambered over the debris, rattling stones into the dark. She shoved her bag and backpack ahead of her and wormed her way through the opening. Her breath quickened in her throat, and a panic attack washed over her. She clawed through with her hands, earth pressed against her cheek. She dragged herself forward on her hands and knees, sharp stone tearing against her skin. Her flashlight quivered and died, leaving her stranded in the makeshift grave.
Furious panic charged through her, as it had years before. She dug, she fought, she kicked and dragged her way through. Her fingernails ripped and bled. She tasted dirt and sweat in her mouth, and she struggled against it, against the earth and the rock and the feel of suffocation pressing down on her ribs. She kept focusing on the voices, on what must be ahead. . . She thought she glimpsed light. . .
She burst through the blockage in a shower of gravel, spilling her out into a larger cavern in a sprawl of light. Blinking, she tumbled onto her hands and knees, backpack and purse slamming to the ground.
She’d fallen into some kind of storage room. Electrical wires were strung overhead, dangling utility lights like lanterns at a festival. A massive stainless steel box dominated one wall of the room, spreading sheet-metal tentacles above and over the sheetrock walls. It was warm, at least. Her ears and fingers began to ache in the presence of warmth. She guessed it was an incinerator, by the orange labels warning not to touch the feed panel without proper safety gear, and by the traumatized look of the stick figure who fell in. Voices echoed from beyond the walls, from what could have been a hallway or another room.
Boxes were stacked neatly along the walls, and she ran her fingers over the labels. The original delivery addresses were to Major Gabriel. This place must be one of the facilities under his jurisdiction, as well. . . but one not on any map. Many were studded with bright radiation warning stickers. Lifting the lid of a banker’s box, she saw they were full of paper. . . e-mail, mostly benign correspondence and scientific chitchat. Some open boxes contained deflated radiation suits, limp gloves grasping at air.
She lifted the unsecured flap of the nearest large box, the one closest to the incinerator. It was marked for destruction. She peered inside, and recoiled in horror.
The door to the incinerator room opened, and Tara scrambled back, crablike, on her hands to safety behind a tower of boxes that smelled better than the one she’d opened. She hoped the spew of dirt and gravel from the far wall would remain unnoticed.
Two men, one dressed in combat fatigues and the other in a white radiation suit, clomped into the room. One of them donned a set of welder’s gloves and opened the mouth of the incinerator, while carrying on a conversation with the other about weekend plans.
“Did you pick up some OT this weekend?”
“Nah. Going to go visit my mother for her birthday.”
“I don’t see how you could turn down double-time. . . Special teams have been busy.”
“It’s Mom. What am I gonna do?”
“Tell her you’d rather be chasing down the bad guys in a canyon than eating quiche at brunch.”
“Whatever.”
Tara leaned forward. Harry had been set to meet DiRosa at Bandelier National Monument. There were canyons there. Her heart felt sick, wondering if one of these other boxes held Harry’s discarded remains. If this room was where her intuition had led her, it could be the end of her search.
The box scraped forward on the stone floor, and then there was a soft thump as it hit the incinerator. Tara wondered if the men had even looked inside it to see what had happened to one of the “bad guys.” The men heaved two more boxes of something that rattled like paper into the incinerator, and she could hear the snap and crackle of the papers as they turned to ash. The lid on the incinerator door squeaked shut.
“Seriously. There’s overtime to be had in the detention block.”
“What? Now that they’ve got an actual prisoner to work over?”
“They’re going to get that guy to talk, sooner or later. . .”
The door to the incinerator room slammed shut, disturbing the utility lights enough to cause them to swing slightly overhead, shaking the shadows. Tara crept out from behind the wall of boxes. Hope flared within her. Perhaps that prisoner was Harry.
Tara looked down at her filthy street clothes. She’d be spotted in an instant. Backtracking to one of the boxes she’d opened earlier, she pulled out a crumpled radiation suit and zipped it on over her clothes. Better. She pulled the hood up over her hair, finding it didn’t bother her nearly as much as it had before. She smiled grimly. Perhaps her time in the mine had overcome lesser forms of claustrophobia. It sure beat cognitive-behavioral therapy for results.
Slinging her bags over her good shoulder, she opened the door and stepped into the buzzing white light of Gabriel’s den.
Chapter Seventeen
TARA FORCED herself not to stop and gawk, tried to shuffle along as if she knew where she was going. Gabriel’s den was vaster than she had anticipated: the hollowed-out mine housed computer servers buzzing along in a honeycomb of glassed-in rooms, connected by arterial hallways leading to vast work spaces the size of aircraft hangers. She glanced in the door windows, seeing figures in suits like hers, standing over shining white vats that hummed like refrigerators, insulated with layers of shiny foil. Copper tubing and wires extended from control panels, lights blinking softly.
She thought about the purpose of this place. . . Why an old silver mine? She remembered what Cassie had said about scientists trying to trap dark matter in an old gold mine in Minnesota. . . That made sense, but the extreme secrecy of this place still bothered her. What else could be going on here that was hidden from view?
She slipped down labyrinthine corridor after corridor, passing an occasional soldier or white-suited researcher. At this hour, there were few. She suspected she’d crossed back on her tracks more than once, and fear of discovery and frustration sucked at her. The corridors, bleached in fluorescent white light with drop ceilings, were identical to each other, designated only with cryptic numbers.
She paused before the eighth corridor. She’d been running into the number eight over and over, in her readings, in Magnusson’s cryptic symbolism, in the infinity loop of the accelerator. She turned down this way, listening for footsteps.
This hallway was different. These doors were solid steel, pierced by a window embedded with wire mesh, each one locked as she brushed her hands over them. Absent the smell of bleach and urine, this looked identical to the secure wing of every mental facility Tara had interrogated prisoners in. All the windows were dark and opaque, except one at the far end. She could hear voices on the other side. What they said was indistinguishable, but she could hear the angry swell and fall of speech.
The door burst open, and Tara involuntarily took a step back. A cart littered with syringes, an IV bag deflated like a beached jellyfish, and blood-speckled pieces of gauze barreled through. The technician pushing it stopped before her, startled, and gestured at her bags with his chin.
“Did you bring the liquid nitrogen he asked for?”
Tara nodded, voice stuck in her throat. The technician jabbed a thumb over his shoulder to indicate the room, rattling away. “He’s waiting.”
Tara pulled her hood closer over her face and strode purposefully past the room. In her peripheral vision, she glanced through the door swinging shut, and her breath jammed in her throat.
A man Tara guessed was Gabriel presented his back to the door, kneeling over a figure prone on the tiled floor. She couldn’t see the figure clearly, but she recognized Harry’s spit-polished shoes.
She swallowed, her hand reaching reflexively in her bag for her gun. She could pass by, wait for Gabriel to finish what he was doing and leave, then rescue Harry. But Harry might not have that much time. . .
Her heart won out over stealth. She jammed her foot in the door as it swung shut, and she invaded the room. She drew her gun in a fluid motion, aiming it at the back of Gabriel’s head.
“Put your hands behind your head.” Her voice rang with quiet authority in the tiny room.
Gabriel laced his hands behind his head. “Thank you for joining us, Dr. Sheridan.” His voice was smooth, entirely unruffled. “You’re about to make my life much simpler.”
Tara swallowed. “Get on your knees.” She circled around to check on Harry, heart hammering. Please be alive, she thought.
Harry lay crumpled on the floor, his face a swollen mass of bruises. One sleeve was rolled up, and she could see the wounds made by needle marks. Mercifully, she could see the rise and fall of his chest.
“Tara?” he mumbled. “Hi, babe. Did you meet the purple dragon on the cheese wagon, yet?”
“What did you do to him?” Tara demanded.
Gabriel shrugged. “We interrogated him. He’s proving rather obstinate, so we resorted to a sodium thiopental cocktail with a zolpidem chaser.”
Tara tried to haul Harry upright. He was limp as a fish, stumbling on his feet.
“Hey, are we gonna go nick some tubers? I like cheese.”
“Yeah, Harry. We’re gonna go get some cheese.” Supporting Harry’s weight as much as she could, she kept her gun trained on Gabriel, who looked upon her with the serene patience of a Buddha.
“Nachos. Nacho blaster with tinfoil.”
“Open the door.” Tara gestured at Gabriel with the gun.
“No.” Gabriel smiled beatifically at her. “Get bent, ma’am.”
Tara cocked the hammer on the revolver. “It would be a lot easier for me to shoot you and then search you for your access card. Open the damn door.”
“You’re not going to shoot a man on his knees.”
Tara wavered for only a moment. She was enraged beyond all reason by what he’d done to Harry. Gabriel deserved some retribution, and she was more than happy to give it to him.
She stepped to his side, took aim, and pulled the trigger. Gabriel tumbled back, howling.“You bitch!”
He clutched his foot. Blood seeped through his fingers, staining the shiny leather of his boot. He stared at her in amazement. “You shot me!”
Tara cocked the hammer. She’d given him only a glancing blow, but she wanted him to know that she wouldn’t play by the good-guy rules. “I’ll do it again. I’ll take out your left knee and work my way up. Now, unlock that damn door.”
Gabriel reached in his jacket pocket, tossed his ID badge on the floor. It skittered to a stop by her toe. “Do it yourself. And you won’t get far. Every soldier in this place will be on you.”
This was a classic trick: distract your enemy long enough to get her to stoop down, then attack when her center of gravity is at its weakest. Keeping Gabriel in her sight, she told Harry, “Harry, pick up the badge.”
Obligingly, Harry reached down for the badge. It took him three tries to grasp it. “Fish sticks.”
“Hand it to me.” Harry did as he was told.
She told Gabriel, “Give me your radio.”
He lashed it across the floor, bouncing it against the wall. Tara crushed the radio’s faceplate with a well-aimed strike of her heel. As drop-proof as walkies were, none of them could withstand broken keys. She just hoped it wasn’t one of the models with a man-down alert that would summon help when an internal mercury switch detected that the radio had gone horizontal.
Tara kept Gabriel in front of her, moved with Harry toward the door. She didn’t take her eyes off him, swiping the card behind her back. It took a few tries, but she succeeded in getting it through the slot. The door opened with a metallic clang of bolts being reeled back, and she backed out of the door. She kicked it shut on Gabriel’s glowering face.
“Harry, I need you to walk with me, as fast as you can.”
Harry valiantly tried to shuffle along, but he was too slow. Tara tried to take as much of his weight as she could, wounded shoulder screaming, and she felt a stitch or two pop. His limbs were simply too floppy to move the way he wanted them to. They were going to draw too much attention. She looked up and down the hallway, fervently hoping the technician had left his cart here, somewhere. . .
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