Tillie jammed the screwdriver into the first screw head and began turning. Moving close to her, Elias whispered, "Do you know what…?"
She paused and held the screwdriver in front of her lips to shush him, before returning to her work. Soon, all of the screws were neatly lined up on the floor. Placing the screwdriver next to them, she gripped the sides of the front panel and lifted and pulled. With a THUNK the panel came away. Inside the box was a transformer of some sort, Elias knew. By the size and the steady hum coming from it, he guessed that it was fairly high voltage.
Ignoring the gear inside, Tillie turned the front panel around and leaned it against the wall. Fastened to the inside of the panel was a vertical metal tray, open at the top. She reached inside and pulled out a several-inch-thick sheaf of large papers, bound on one end by a blue wrapper. Elias recognized the papers as a set of plans.
Cautiously, she laid the plans out on the floor and rolled them up, whispering to Elias to reattach the transformer panel. As he did, she found three rubber bands and gently slid all of them onto the roll, careful not to catch the edge of the top sheet and tear it. This task completed, Tillie hefted the bulky roll, grabbed some supplies and, with a final glance around, exited the area which she had made her home for the past several years.
Boehn, hoping his face did not betray the fact that he felt like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar, attempted a casual grin. "Good evening, Doctor Kreitzmann. I must be developing a case of OCD. I was certain that I had neglected to file my report. I couldn't sleep until I checked."
Kreitzmann's smile was wary as he responded, "I see. Everything's in order, I trust."
"Quite so. Now I can get some sleep."
"Excellent. I'll see you in the morning, then."
"Yes! Bright and early."
Boehn walked off in the direction of his quarters. Kreitzmann stood at the door to the lab, staring at his associate's retreating back. After the man had turned the corner, Kreitzmann opened the lab door and entered, walking directly to the terminal Boehn had used minutes before, placing his hand on the back of the flat-screen monitor, and feeling the residual warmth from it.
To himself, he muttered, "He did tell me that he was using it."
Switching the system on, Kreitzmann waited for the login sequence to complete before he entered his personal password. Triggered by his top-level access, the monitor displayed a much different interface from what Boehn had seen minutes earlier. He selected the icon labeled "security admin" and waited a moment for the new screen. He then clicked on "tracking." Defining the parameters, he chose "search." In the blink of an eye, the monitor was displaying, in raw form, all of the activity which had occurred on this station beginning at 6:00 p.m. this evening and ending a minute ago.
The last entry showed that the terminal had been used to access Doctor Bonillas' most recent reports and lab notes, and that they had been moved to the USB port, an action which would normally delete them from the system. He was glad that the system was configured to delete nothing. Doctor Bonillas' work was safely archived onto a separate file system simultaneous to her upload.
While he stared at the screen, Kreitzmann's eyes narrowed and the muscles in his jaw clenched, as anger began to slowly build within him. The task had been executed under Dr. Bonillas' password, not Boehn's, and the timestamp on the activity showed that the file transfer had taken place minutes ago, obviously at the time Boehn was in the lab and Bonillas was not.
He keyed the internal phone system, and a voice answered instantly.
"This is Doctor Kreitzmann. Please meet me in Lab 1C immediately."
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Kenneth Mortenson parked as close as he possibly could to the entrance. The intensity of the wind was beyond anything he had ever seen in his entire life, despite having grown up in El Paso. Now that he had parked, his Camry bounced and shook as if it were positioned atop a fun house platform instead of solid pavement. Making a point of parking his car so that the driver's door was on the leeward side, he grabbed his backpack from the passenger seat, slid one arm through the canvas loops, and opened the door.
Despite the car's orientation, the door was instantly jerked from his grip and pivoted violently, disintegrating the steel stops on the hinges. Mentally preparing himself, Kenneth climbed out and was almost knocked to the ground. Using the side of the gyrating car for support, he circled around it, turning directly into the face of the wind.
As he trudged on, leaning far forward, he was barely able to see the turnstile due to the dust stinging his eyes, his route cluttered with the shattered and twisted remnants of the solar panels which had ripped from the roof of Aegis. He had to dodge chunks of debris from this wreckage as the incessant winds caught pieces and rocketed them through the air. Taking fifteen minutes to traverse a distance which, in normal conditions, would have taken one or two, he discovered that as he reached the final twenty yards before the entrance, the wind lessened and he was able to walk in a somewhat more upright position. As this was his first trip to Aegis, he had no idea that he was standing where the plywood tunnel had been constructed, an earlier casualty of the gale. He stopped at the turnstile and looked back in the direction of the parking lot and the surrounding desert, surprised to see several more vehicles, headlights on, braving the tempest.
Marilyn stared out the window, looking at the tailings from the open-pit mining operations south of Tucson. Her plane was minutes away from landing, and her mind wandered back to the lie she had told to Faulk this morning. Knowing that her boss controlled the communications to Elias, she could think of no other way to get a message to him other than personally. Knowing Faulk's propensity for checking out what people told him, as it had been a task assigned to her many times since he had taken over the position formerly held by Elias, she kept her story vague about needing to visit an old friend who was ill.
Uncharacteristically, he had not inquired as to the name of the fictitious old friend, and she neglected to supply it. In fact, he seemed vaguely distracted as she talked to him, almost as if he did not care whether she left or not.
Elias, Wilson, and Tillie were huddled around a scarred dining room table in one of the apartments in ZooCity. They had agreed that this was not to be their new base, but should give them some privacy for a time while they figured out their next move. The blueprints were spread out on the table before them.
"When I was preparing to come in, I had a few pages showing the overall layout and the raceways, but nowhere near what you've got here. How did you get these?" Elias asked.
Tillie told them about her first day at Aegis and the chance meeting and chat with the contractor who had built it.
"Just as he was leaving, and after the main door had been set, he remembered that he had left his inspection set of plans inside. At that point the door had been closed, and it was impossible for him to go back in and retrieve them; it was too late. So, he told me where they were and that I could have them if I wanted."
"You knew how to read plans?"
"I learned," she told Elias, a hint of pride in her voice. "I must have spent about a thousand hours staring at them, flipping between the pages, walking the areas they corresponded to. Eventually, they started to make sense. I never did decipher the gobbledygook on the electrical pages, or the mechanical stuff. Most of the plumbing was fairly obvious. But the real gold mine was on the ‘A' pages and the civil engineering pages. That's where I found the layouts and accesses for all of the secret passageways and the storm system. It's all there."
She sat back in the dinette chair with a look of pride and satisfaction. "There was one thing I never could figure out, though."
"What's that?" Wilson inquired, amused.
"He told me where his blueprints were. These aren't blue."
Chuckling, Wilson explained, "It's a throwback to the old method for reproducing plans. A French chemist discovered that ferro-gallate in gum is
light sensitive. Light turns it blue. Basically, if you drew a sketch on a translucent material, then overlaid the sketch onto a sheet coated with the ferro-gallate and exposed it to light, the paper would turn blue, except for where the lines had been drawn. Later on, they began to use ammonium ferric citrate and potassium ferricyanide, but the process was essentially the same. The next generation were actually called whiteprints or bluelines because the paper was white and the lines were blue. In recent years, the industry switched to very large photocopy machines, which can print a copy on regular bond paper. That is what you are looking at now. But the original name remains."
Tillie had stared at Wilson throughout the lecture, wide-eyed. "Cool, thanks!" she exclaimed at the end.
"Back to our issue," Elias broke in. "We need to find a good hiding spot. Tillie set up housekeeping in the mechanical system. I used the electrical raceways and junctions. We took Eric through the storm system. So they are all compromised."
"Do you think so?" Wilson pondered out loud. "Looking at these plans, it is clear that all three of those systems are elaborate. Couldn't we just pick another spot in one of them? A place well removed from our previous locations?"
Elias responded thoughtfully, "Although we only occupied or traveled a small portion of each, if Eric communicated with his handler, they will all be checked. That's what I would do. And with the Zippers doing the looking, they should be able to cover quite a bit of territory."
"Why don't we break up the ‘A' pages and the ‘Civil' pages and divvy them up instead of all three of us staring at the same sheet?"
"Excellent idea, Tillie," Wilson agreed. "As proprietary as you are about them, I was afraid to suggest it."
She made a rude sound with her lips. "C'mon guys, I'm not that bad. Am I?"
"Oh, no!"
"No! Not at all."
She looked at them both and grinned. "Okay, maybe I've been a little testy. But we do have to work together, so let's split them up."
She carefully peeled back the blue binding paper on the stapled edge, and pried up the staples, one by one, with a fingernail. Removing all of them without tearing a sheet or cutting herself, she created three stacks. Elias took his pages and moved to a coffee table. Tillie, being the youngest and most limber of the three, sat cross-legged on the floor with her set, and Wilson stayed at the dinette.
The three worked quietly, the silence only broken with the occasional sound of a sheet being set aside. Nearly twenty minutes passed before Elias thumped the blueprint with his finger. "This may work."
The two came to the coffee table and looked at the portion of the page where he pointed.
"There appears to be a primary water reservoir which is filled by the pumps. That one, I'm sure, is full right now. But, look, there are four reserve tanks. They only take on water if the primary is filled, and they take on the water sequentially."
"In other words," Wilson interjected, "the first reserve tank only has water in it if the primary tank is full. Then the second reserve only gets water if the first reserve fills to capacity."
"And so on," Elias completed the thought for him. "I think it might be worth a try to check out the last tank in the series. It is probably dry as a bone."
"How do we get in the tank?" Tillie stopped herself. "Oh, never mind, I see it. There's an access door."
"Exactly. It's actually called a hatch."
"I think it's worth a shot," she decided.
The journey from ZooCity to the water tank took three-quarters of an hour, due to the loads all three carried, compounded by the circuitous route taken to avoid others.
"This thing looks like a vault," Tillie observed, breathing as easily as if she had just finished a leisurely stroll.
Elias and Wilson, panting heavily, dropped their packs, duffel bags, and weapons, approaching her side as she examined the oval steel hatch set into a retaining ring.
"This is the clean-out access at the bottom of the tank. There is also another access hatch at the top that can be used when the reservoir is holding water. You'll notice that this hatch swings inward. That wheel on it releases the dogs gripping the retaining ring, but if water is present on the other side, the pressure from the water pushes against the door, keeping it closed."
Listening to Elias' explanation, Tillie concluded, "So if we spin the wheel and try to open it, nothing will happen if the tank is full?"
"Right."
"You're sure?"
He grinned. "I am."
"Then let's do it."
She stepped forward, gripped the wheel with both hands, and turned it. It moved easily, quickly accelerating to a blurred spin. When it slammed noisily to a stop and they could see that the hinged dogs were retracted from the retaining ring, she glanced once at Elias, said, "Here goes," and put her shoulder to the hatch, which almost flew open, pulling her inside where she tumbled to the concrete floor.
"Ouch!" she shouted, her voice followed by a multitude of overlaid echoes from the inside walls of the dry tank.
"I think it's dry," Wilson proclaimed with a smirk, and high-stepped through the hatchway behind her. Elias followed, chuckling.
Within a few minutes they had quickly checked out the interior of the tank with their flashlights. Determining that it was clear, they brought in their packs and supplies, and closed the hatch behind themselves. The hatch had a matching wheel on the interior, and as the others toted the gear to the middle of the tank, Elias spun the wheel shut, putting his weight behind it to make it tight.
Returning to Wilson and Tillie, he told them, "After I catch my breath, I'll go back out and find a long bar or something we can use to jam the wheel. That might cut down on unwanted visitors."
"Just a sec." Tillie motioned at him and pulled open her duffel bag, extracting a short pole with what appeared to be a wide bicycle seat at one end. She pressed a button and the seat came off. Then, pressing another, the pole extended and locked into position with a click. She tossed it to Elias.
"Will this work?"
Elias examined the device. "I think it will. It looks fairly sturdy. What is it?"
She grinned. "Something goofy one of the newbies brought in. It's a pole seat that you can carry with you on camping trips. It's uncomfortable as all get-out. I don't even know why I brought it."
Elias took the pole and walked back to the hatch. He jammed it through an opening between the spokes on the wheel at an angle so that if someone tried to open it from the outside, it would stop. Satisfied, he returned to the group to see that Tillie had unpacked collapsible chairs, which converted into sleeping cots, and had set them up next to the steel ladder that ascended to the hatch at the top of the storage tank. She had also unpacked a lantern, creating an island of light in the center of the cavernous tank. She was now assembling a small portable stove.
"Did you bring the s'mores?" Elias teased.
With a sly grin, Tillie pulled out packages of marshmallows and graham crackers. "Need to find the chocolate. I know it's in here."
"Mathilda, you amaze me," Wilson said sincerely.
"That's my goal in life. To amaze people wherever I may go."
Within twenty minutes they were sitting in a circle around the stove, sipping hot tea and munching on the drippy, chocolate concoctions.
Tillie, between bites, asked, "Were you able to make any sense out of what Eric said to you at the end?"
Elias swallowed the last bite of his snack and took a long sip before answering. "Not as much as I would have liked."
Tillie wiped her mouth with her sleeve. "How long have you known Eric?"
"A long time. About twenty years."
"Were you friends?"
"I used to think so. Eric and I had worked in the field at the same time. Went through quite a bit together. Saved each other's butts more than once. I was even his son's godfather. And Leah was the godmother."
"What happened?"
"There are basically three kinds of spooks in the business. The first group would be
the patriots. For them, it's all about what's best for the country. The second group would be the mercenaries. They do it because they crave the adrenaline rush. They have no allegiance to any country. The third group would be what I call the pragmatists and some of the think-tank experts refer to as survivalists. They pick the side which is in their best self-interest. They are, by far, the easiest to turn since they have no loyalty at all. If they are busted, if their cover is blown, then they talk, and they cooperate.
"The pragmatists will switch sides in a minute if they perceive that the other side is winning. As for the mercenaries, a lot of people think that they will always work for the highest bidder. In my experience, that isn't the case. They tend to gravitate toward the entity offering the most cutting-edge hardware and the highest risks. The patriots are the toughest to go against; you can't turn them, and they will charge the machine gun nest, if that's what it takes."
Leaning forward on his canvas chair, Wilson asked, "Which one was Eric?"
"I used to think that Eric was a patriot, years ago. Maybe he was at one time. He never exhibited the adrenaline-junkie tendencies to tell me he was a mercenary."
"So that leaves survivalist."
"That's right. Something happened in Eric's world. Something changed, which caused him to come to the conclusion that the side I was on was no longer the winning side."
"But you have no idea what that might be?"
"No, Wilson, I don't. And I didn't have a chance to find out from him."
"Sorry about that," Tillie apologized. "I should have waited longer before I pulled the trigger."
Chuckling, Elias assured her, "Tillie, that's not what I meant. If I had confronted him with a weapon that functioned, I might have learned something."
"Before you blew him away."
"Before I blew him away."
Wilson continued his questioning. "From what you and Tillie told me, I believe there is little doubt but that you and your wife were getting too close for their comfort. Did she communicate anything to you before she…while she still had a chance? Anything which might give you a clue as to what they are planning?"
The Aegis Solution Page 28