“Andre,” said Sarah. Bending her knees, she dropped down next to the hole in the wall. “Hpw are we progressing?”
“Right on schedule,” replied the URSA agent “I should say exactly on schedule. We just broke through the wall into the tunnels under the consulate.”
Sarah looked back at him, then peered again up the dark tunnel. “You haven’t gone through, have you?” ‘No. Waiting on your orders.”
‘All right,” she said, looking once at her watch. ‘Get everyone together.”
Far above them and a half-block away from the land on which Zithers’s parking garage sat, a new guard sat down at the security desk in the Russian Consulate, relieving the prior shift. The first thing David Selznick did, after saying good-bye to the leaving security guard, was to bring up all remote cameras and survey each of them, as per usual. Camera Thirty-Five showed a comer of one of the access tunnels on the east side. Something metallic was poking through the wall. Selznick took a couple of minutes resetting the cameras so that numbers Thirty through Forty, the east side, duplicated Twenty through Thirty, the west side. Satisfied tnat the east side underground was now safely dark, Selznick got up and went to get some coffee.
Sarah surveyed her team, consulting her watch once more. “Now, gentlemen,” she said, as Andre and Stefan struggled to remove the gopher from the tunnel. The machine that had chewed its way through nearly a quarter mile of concrete finally emerged, and the two men handled it, especially the jewel-embedded teeth, with great respect. Once the gopher was on the ground Sarah said, “Our man upstairs should have killed the cameras on the delivery/ maintenance tunnels. Andre, let’s see it.”
Andre nodded to her and wiped the sweat off his brow, then turned around to regard a unit that stood next to the wall, covered in a blanket. It seemed to be shaped like a large globe, of the type one would find in a museum store. Andre pulled the blanket away and Sarah practically gasped at the beauty of the green glow beneath.
It was a gamma device of a kind the world had never seen. The circular shiny top glowed green and opaque, the metal frame shiny and dark and tractor-mounted for easy transportation. It was a stunning piece of work. | ‘The gamma bomb developed by Bruce Banner for the American government was the beginning of an era,” she whispered. “But only the beginning. This device is the culmination of that work. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
Andre regarded the bomb with a shrug. “It’s dangerous, I’ll give you that.
Sarah grinned. “I’m not a cartoon character. Andre. I’m not writhing in ecstasy over a bomb and failing to respect its awesome destructive power, I assure you. Oh, you’re absolutely right This device is dangerous. But it’s perfect poetry, chiseled down and refined, so different from that fifteen-foot-tall monstrosity that Banner built in the desert- She ran her hands over the opaque green metal that topped the device. “And if I were to take it apart, and lay the pieces out, every piece would proclaim it to be an American creation.” She gestured to two agents, who lifted the bomb up and shoved it into the crawl space. The two men began to clamber in, followed by Andre and Sarah.
“What do you mean?v Andre said.
Sarah chuckled, crawling by the light of the lamps on her head. Andre, it wouldn’t do any good to just blow up the consulate, now would it? This bomb is a calling card. Our person inside SAFE has provided me with everything the designers needed to riddle every part of that device with identifying serial numbers—SAFE serial numbers. To all intents and purposes, the materials are SAFE. And whatever is removed after it goes off will reveal that.”
“Commander, we’re about there,” a voice crackled in Sarah’s ear.
“Fine,” she said, “let me handle the entrance to the tunnel.”
The two men pressed against the sides of the crawl-space as Sarah pushed through and between them, finally moving in front of them, passing the gamma device as she did. It smiled green and softly humming as she passed it. Sarah blew a few strands of hair out of her face and reached the end of the crawl space
There was a hole made of Sheetrock in the end of the crawlspace, through which poured a steady stream of white light. She could make out white-painted concrete walls on the other side. She breathed a few times and closed her eyes, holding up a hand behind her, telling everyone to wait. Sarah did everything on her own time.
Pebbles chewed at her elbows. She blinked and that pain went away. She had scuffed the top of her head while crawling past her two agents. That pain too went away. She was lying on her belly in a hole, a bomb at her ankles and a silencer coming out of her vest and into her hand. Sarah breathed again, felt her body become like a wave of energy moving as one thing instead of a pile of interconnected bone and muscles and flesh. She was one thing, a fluid, corded wave of energy. She flipped over on her back and brought her knees up to her chest, and let her boots fly back, then forward.
A chunk of sheetrock burst out into the tunnel. Sarah did not hesitate in following through; she shimmied through the hole in the wall. The hole was about three feet off the ground, and she dropped out and crouched in the bits of sheetrock, looking around. Sarah wound her arm several times at the entrance of the tunnel and heard her team coming out, just as the sound of running footsteps in the delivery tunnel echoed around the comer.
Sarah slowly walked towards the comer. Around the comer, there would be two guards next to the delivery elevator, spending most of their time signing invoices and allowing brie and vodka to go up to the consulate. They would be out of practice. Right now, she thought as she stopped next to the comer, they have heard a strange crashing noise from where I have just kicked through the wall of the tunnel, and now they are running this way. They have their guns in front of them, their arms pumping in sync with their feet. They are scared.
Sarah looked back at her man Andre and Andre nodded. As the footsteps got closer to the comer, Sarah dove.
She hit the ground as the two men turned the comer. The first one gasped loudly, looking down, dancing awkwardly to keep from getting his legs caught up in Sarah’s limbs.
Sarah’s silenced gun flared once and bore a hole through the underside of one guard’s chin, and she rose and slunk to the side as his body struck the ground and she fired again, taking out the second man. Sarah hol-stered her sidearm and stepped over them, motioning to her team, moving on to the elevator.
Two plastic chairs sat by the elevator entrance, the forty-hour-per-week home of the dead sentries. Sarah bent down by one of the plastic chairs, lifting a styrofoam cup. She raised an eyebrow. “Coffee.” Within moments the maintenance elevator was opened. “Andre,” she asked, “how long until you can have the timer set?”
. “No time at all,” he said, as the agents rolled the device onto the elevator.
Sarah drank down the dead man’s coffee and winced. It was bitter. “It’s your show, Andre,” she said. “But I trust you.” Sarah looked at her watch. “Stick to the schedule, you guys get out of here, get Andre on the roof across the street, and make URSA proud.”
Sarah patted the Trotsky-bearded man on the shoulder and slunk away, back to the crawlspace. She had an appointment to keep. “Hell,” she said as she turned back briefly, “make me proud and everything will be fine. ’
Betty stepped out of the ladies' room and into the hallway. Behind her, the glass doors out to the garden patio shrank. The hallway took on the curious yellow hue that indoor lights have just as the sun begins to go down and the eye becomes aware of the dueling light sources. She trusted that SAFE had heard her conversation with Nadia. Of course, not much would come of it, she suspected. Nadia was too far removed from Emil now for any involvement on her part to be of much use, short of ruining the woman’s life.
Don’t kid yourself. They’re not above that. This is the government we’re talking about. Betty shrugged inwardly as she approached the security desk at the entrance. Part of her wanted to believe that SAFE was on the side of the angels. They were, after all, instrumental in rescuing Betty from a rogue
secret agent who had kidnapped her to keep Bruce in line. But most of her, the Army brat in her knew all too well that government agencies were not above using people for what they jokingly thought of as “the greater good.” Right now, she wanted nothing more than to go home and peel the white tape and microphone off of her chest.
The security guard sitting behind the large, semicircular desk was a different one from the man who had let her pass on the way in. Of course. The shifts had changed. She’d better hurry if she were going to make her six-thirty class. She nodded at the dark-haired Russian behind the desk and stepped towards the exit, which stood adjacent to the metal-detector entrance.
“Excuse me,” came the voice of the guard. “Ma’am?”
Betty looked back. “Yes?”
“I’m afraid I can’t let you leave just yet.”
Sean Morgan walked along the carpeted halls of the Helicarrier to Tom Hampton’s GammaTrac station and stuck his head in the door. “Tom?”
The back of Tom’s head was silhouetted against the green GammaTrac screen. Tom typed away as another screen next to him lit up with the increased noise level in the room from Morgan’s call. Tom looked over his shoulder and Morgan entered, signing. “What’s the story with the Abomination?”
Tom indicated a swiveling stool next to his and Morgan lowered his nattily attired self onto it, crossing his arms. “I think he’s under again, ’ Tom signed.
The technician went to plug in his voice modulator but Morgan waved at him, saying, “No, that’s fine, I prefer your real voice. Under, you said?”
Tom nodded. “The Abomination is lying low. His marker hasn’t shown since the thing at the airport.” Morgan frowned. “Great.” He looked at a stapled sheet of papers on Tom’s console. “What’s that?”
Tom picked up the report and handed it to him. “Jo dropped this off earlier. I think you have a copy on your desk as we speak,” Tom shrugged, signing. “It’s Gamma Team’s analysis based on what Banner told us about the last part of the proverb—the sower of discord among brethren.”
“Blonsky’s next move. What did they decide?”
Tom grimaced. His long fingers flew, speaking. “You ought to ask Jo. But between you and me, I don’t think they’ve discovered a great deal. I mean, the funny thing is, Blonsky keeps switching between being and punishing Abominations. So the next Abomination is sowing discord among brethren. So what?”
“Right,” nodded Morgan, signing. “Is he the sower,
or the punisher of the sower? Or both? And who are the brethren to suffer the discord?’ ’
“There’s a lot of ideas in there,” Tom signed, tilting his head toward the report. “Could be anything. Congress. The UN. Even the Soviet Union, that’s Blonsky’s brethren, But it’s all guesswork.”
Morgan sighed, stood up. “I’ll read my own. Let me know if anything happens. And Tom, run a diagnostic on the equipment. I don’t want the Abomination suddenly appearing where we couldn’t see him, okay?”
“Right, Colonel,” Tom said. The screen next to him danced with light, reporting Sean Morgan’s fast-falling footsteps as the SAFE director exited the officelike station.
Tom shrugged and sat back, regarding the monitor. The green hand swept around the screen, the green blip of the Hulk wavering in Westchester, no other gamma readings inside. He pursed his lips and whistled idly, or thought he did. Whatever sound he produced, he had no idea. He reached out and tapped on the screen. Magic words, why not? Hello? Blonsky? Appear; please. Open sezzme.
The green arm moved over the screen. Tom focused on the sweep, slowed down the vision in his brain, watched the tiny pixels of green. Westchester, the Hulk blipped. The island, nothing. The Hudson River, nothing.
The arm jumped. Nothing. The arm swept around again and Tom raised an eyebrow as he saw it again, a tiny nonblip, a variation, a blankout when the arm passed over the Hudson. A ghost-blip. What the—?
Tom turned to the darkened monitor to his left and brought it to life, a sinking feeling coming over him. Someone inside, someone... He logged onto the screen and entered his password. Another second and lines of green code swept up from the bottom of the screen, flying past him. Let’s say you come to rely on a machine to tell you where the monsters are, he thought to himself. And let’s say you’re an idiot. It took another minute to find the subroutine that allowed for identification of large concentrations of gamma radiation, a minute past that to find the sets of received “names” for those concentrations. It was impossible, though, to see if anything had been changed. Tom looked back at the sweeping hand. It was clearer, now, now that he was looking for it. Each time the arm swept around, there was a shadow of a blip, a bare fade of the green, like a deliberate cloak
Tom called up the modification dates for the various routines. Let’s see, March 2nd, we were putting the last touches, I typed in the names the other day that was March 4th.... So far, so good. The dates on the labelling subroutine read March 4th, as expected. Tom frowned. Not there. He brought up the main routine.
March 8th. Tom felt a buzzing in his brain, alarms going off. He could spend forever picking through this to see what was added or changed or he could simply switch to primary backup. Tom waited another two minutes as the GammaTrac screen went offline and dark. Then, after a moment, it came up again. And read exactly the same.
Tom sat back and brought up the modification dates on the left screen* already knowing what he was going to see. The changes of March 8th were there, too. Whoever had done their work had not been stupid. And something tells me checking the secondary backup will yield the same results.
Tom pushed away from his console and stepped quickly to the door, moving fast down the hall. He thought about calling Morgan as he got on the lift down to his locker, but he wanted to have another look at this before blowing the whistle. This was his project, how stupid did he want to look? No. He would fix it first.
Tom keyed the combination into his locker, swaying a bit. He blinked. He was feeling a bit woozy. As usual, the world swayed in silence, steam rising out of the showers adjacent to the lockers. He saw a few agents with boxing gloves over their shoulders coming into the locker room as his locker door swung open and he rummaged in his duffel bag. He drew out a rolled-up sweat sock, turned it inside out. The magnetic tape inside fell into his hand and he slammed the locker shut, turning to race back to the lift. The fact was he wasn’t sure why he kept a backup of the routines in his locker, for his own purposes. Perhaps because it was, ultimately, his own neck on the line.
The buzzing in Tom’s brain continued. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand as the lift opened up and he stepped back into the corridor, headed for his station. The walls blurred past him as he moved, only making his headache worse. Tom turned into the doorway and sat down at the station, flipping a switch and causing the whole station to go dark, slamming the tape into a shiny black maw underneath the screen.
Another two minutes and the screen was dancing again. The green arm swept majestically across the screen. Westchester: the Hulk. The Hudson River: the Abomination. There you are. Someone’s been hiding you. Tom shook his head and flipped on his voice modulator and then the intercom, keying in Morgan’s extension. “Colonel Morgan, you should....”
He looked back at the screen, his head pounding as the room swum like putty and he focused on the green blip. It was growing. It was moving fast, towards the center of the screen. The blip was getting larger. “You better ... have a...”
He choked, feeling the bile in his throat, his eyelids heavy. The blotch of green grew larger, closing in, moving straight up, very fast He felt a tug and looked over to see a pair of wire -cutters, severing the wires of his voice modulator.
He’s coming... he’s coming ...
Tom spun around in his chair, his head swimming. He saw the silencer on the gun as it spat once, flaring in the phosphorescent light.
Sean Morgan shot out of his office, jogging down the hall. Tom had started to say someth
ing and had been cut off. He stopped jogging and threw a hand to his forehead as the first wave of nausea hit. He shook his head, looking up at the vents. He had been in the business long enough to know when he was being gassed. Hell. He kept moving, taking short breaths. He slapped a panic button as he turned the comer and got on the lift to Tom’s level. As the lift doors closed, he heard the alarm bells begin to ring.
Morgan spat into the mike on his throat. ‘Bridge? What’s going on?” No answer. The lift whined to a stop, opened up, and Morgan felt himself spilling into the hall. Morgan thought about racing up the bridge immediately but had to check on Tom first. He turned a comer and stepped over a uniformed SAFE agent slumped against the wall. Morgan continued his short bursts of breath and dropped, running a pair of fingers over the agent’s neck. He felt a pulse. In Morgan’s mind, an animal growled in the distance, the a mai sleep, waiting to devour him, a fog lowering for a moment over his brain. H shook it off. Keep moving,
Morgan slammed against the wall as the whole of the Helicarrier rocked with an impact like a missile hitting the underbelly. He felt one of the lights along the edge of the wall bust, sparks flying, as the toe of his right shoe crushed it. He pushed off. “Bridge,” he growled, the red carpet moving fast under his jogging feet, ‘ ‘anyone ...
masks ... something hit us; we’re under attack___”
Tom’s GammaTrac station was up ahead on the left. He reached the door and propped himself against it, head swimming as he turned into the room and saw that the lights were out.
Morgan’s eyes adjusted, his head pounding with the sound of the alarm, the animal sleep beckoning. The dark room was aglow with the green of the GammaTrac, and the first thing Morgan saw was the sweeping green arm on the GammaTrac screen, moving at a turgid clip, keeping time with the blaring alarms that now reverberated throughout the Helicarrier. Tom was staling at him, twisted backward, shoulders againsl the console, a bole in his head where his right eye should be, and each time the green arm swept it lit up, from underneath, the red glop on the screen.
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