He got the Judge out of its hole, checked the loads, and put it on the bed beside him. He thought about getting a quick shower, but decided to turn out the lights and then lie down on the bed, still dressed, for just a moment or so. He hadn’t been exaggerating about the mental pressure of the Extrusion Room. Maybe a little in the case of Mei Ling, because once he’d realized he couldn’t read her—that she was blocking—he knew she was what she was. After that, all he had to do was raise the physical threat to the point where she folded or became a whole-body organ donor, but he could distinctly remember a couple of subjects whose mental strength had actually caused him pain.
And now here was Melanie Sloan beginning to circle him, Melanie of the new face but the same banked-coals sexuality. He tried to recall what she’d looked like when he’d forced her to stand naked in front of his desk. He couldn’t quite do it, which, in itself, told him something about himself, that the man in him wanted the chance to paint that picture in his own imagination. Why? Because he wanted her. He opened his eyes at that thought. Was it possible she wanted him as well? If so, she’d be the first woman who’d managed to get past his scary eyes and semi-electric head. What had she said—she liked to ride the edge once in a while. Then he laughed at his capacity for self-delusion and drifted off to sleep.
TWENTY-FIVE
He awoke to the sound of urgent knocking on his door, and then Melanie was in his room. The night-light in the hall framed her in complete silhouette, and she was telling him to wake up right now. He sat up, scrambling to focus on where he was and who she was.
“What’s the matter?” he mumbled, looking at his watch. It was five minutes past eleven.
“They’re gone,” she said in a low voice. “The Secret Service guys. They’re all gone, front and back.”
“You sure?”
“Yes; there’s no one out there. We’re wide open.”
He swung his legs onto the floor. She was dressed in the same pantsuit outfit she’d been wearing downstairs, which meant she’d done the same thing he had: lain down for a minute and promptly gone to sleep. He instinctively reached for the Judge and then stood up.
“I’m going to go make sure,” he said. “Wallace promised protection.”
Together they made the rounds of the upstairs windows, front and back, his room, her room. There was no one out there except the occasional car going past as the traffic finally died out.
“Shit!” Melanie hissed. “So: What do we do? Fort up here or get out of town?”
“Can’t get out of town—our cars are still down at the Farm. But I’m leaning to getting out of this house. One firebomb, the old girl will go like dry straw. I know—let’s get to the Metro.”
“At this hour?”
“It runs until midnight. We can make one of the last trains if we hustle.”
“And go where?”
“Away?” he said in exasperation. He dropped the Judge, and then he and Melanie grabbed their cell phones and weapons, went out the back garden gate, and started trotting down the alley, guns ready. They paused at the alley entrance to the first side street. The night was clear but moonless. The streetlights along Connecticut Avenue glowed orange, but the side street was relatively dark. Both sides of the street were chockablock with closely parked cars, but, otherwise, there didn’t seem to be anyone afoot.
“The alleys go two more blocks,” he said. “Then we can cut over to Dupont Circle and the Metro. I’m not sensing eyes just now.”
“Me neither, but any one of these cars could have someone watching. Let’s boogie.”
They got to the Metro station at 11:25 and hurried down the broken escalator. Neither of them had a wallet, but Melanie kept a Metro card in her cell-phone case. She went through the turnstile, then handed the card back to Allender so he could get through. At this hour, thirty minutes before the system shut down for the night, there was no one else on the platform. The air smelled faintly of ozone and old grease. The day’s litter was still lurking in the corners of the platform.
“Which direction? Melanie asked.
“Doesn’t matter. Any train will be headed out to the end of the Red Line for the night. We can regroup out there.”
“You think Wallace is tracking our phones?”
“I sure as hell hope so,” he said. “I think.”
He looked anxiously down the tunnel and then back at the down escalator. There were security cameras everywhere, of course, but they wouldn’t deter a professional grab team once they figured out where their rabbits had gone to ground. And somehow he knew they would figure it out. He didn’t want to mention to Melanie that the Agency’s phone-tracking devices might not be working sixty feet underground. Or, worse, the possibility that Wallace might not be their friend.
She’d shoved her weapon into her waistband and covered the butt with her jacket. His weapon was in his trouser pocket. The dark material should hide the fairly prominent bulge from security cameras. He fervently hoped. He felt truly exposed out there on the empty platform, with its circular lights embedded on the concrete floor. Then those lights began to blink. The air in the station began to pressurize as the final train of the night approached, stirring a faint breeze and then showing a rising glow of headlights. The litter at the back of the platform danced around in a circle of welcome. The four-car train squeezed its brakes hard and came to a stop right in front of them. The doors slid open, and two people got out. Allender and Melanie stepped into the third car from the end, which was now empty. The chimes rang, and then the doors slid closed. The electric motors ramped up, propelling the train out of the brightly lit station in a hum of power before rushing into the gloom of the next track segment.
Allender looked into the two adjacent cars, visible through the door windows of the intercar connection. No one else in either car. Wait. There was a single Metro cop sitting all the way forward in the second car, just ahead of them. He was leaning back into his seat in a serenely grateful, finally-off-my-aching-feet, end-of-shift pose. Outside, the car’s overhead lights illuminated flashes of concrete tunnel panels on either side like empty frames in a black-and-white movie.
“Did we make it?” Melanie asked.
“Metro Center will tell the tale,” he said. “Three lines converge there. If they’re on to us, that’s where they’ll board. Listen, we may have to bail out in a hurry. Split up or stay together—what d’you think?”
Melanie gave him an amused look. “I don’t even know who ‘they’ are. Call me Velcro.”
The train began to decelerate for the next station. It was now 11:40, so this would definitely be the last train running the Red Line and the last station before the Metro Center complex, where it was possible to access three of the system’s lines in a maze of bridges, platforms, and stairwells.
The outside lit up as the train rushed into the station and shuddered to a stop. The doors hissed open. The Metro cop looked up for a moment, then resumed his downtime. The gongs chimed for the door’s closing announcement. Then, to their alarm, two teams of three Chinese men each rushed the doors into the cars on either side of their car. They timed it so close that the doors had to rebound, provoking an angry response about standing clear of the doors from the train’s announcing-system robot.
The doors closed again, and then the train lurched forward toward Metro Center. The Chinese men were all dressed in dark suits, of all things, complete with ties. They dropped into seats from which both teams could stare into the car between them through the connecting door windows.
“Now what,” Melanie growled, unconsciously clearing her weapon from her waistband.
“Lots more people at the next stop, even now,” Allender said. “We get off and look for Metro security.”
“Like that guy?” Melanie asked, pointing to the dozing guard in the next car ahead. The Chinese weren’t even looking at him. The train had reached max speed now and was screeching through the big dogleg turn that led into Metro Center.
“You got a bett
er idea?”
“Yeah. Let’s wait for the train to stop and then start shooting into the cars on either side. Then run for it. That ought to get the Metro security system energized.”
“We can’t do that,” he said. “Too many civilians might be getting on. Besides, right now those guys’re just some Chinese businessmen riding the train.”
“Sure they are,” she muttered between clenched teeth. “Six businessmen on the Metro at midnight? Mei Ling said McGill was going to kill people. She’s a Chinese operative. Makes sense that’s who he’d use.”
The train’s speed had leveled off. They’d start slowing in a minute. Melanie had racked her weapon and was concealing it in her lap. The Chinese appeared to be staring blankly into space.
“Okay,” Allender said. “Train stops, we get up, get off, and head for the station security office. It’ll be near the fare-card machines and the turnstiles. See what those guys do. If weapons come out, then we’ll have to wing it.”
“There’s six of them,” she pointed out.
“Well, hell,” he said. “You’re the trained operator. You figure something out.”
Melanie checked her phone and made a face. The train began to decelerate, accompanied by a lot of clacking and sparking as the wheels crossed multiple tracks and switch points, each one generating a blue-white flash beneath the car. Finally the train entered Metro Center and came to a stop. Allender looked at the Chinese teams, who remained motionless. The doors chimed and then opened.
“Let’s go,” he said. They got up and stepped out of the car. Perhaps a dozen people stood on the platform, most of whom looked like they’d been out on the town. Allender spotted the station security office and started in that direction, but Melanie grabbed his elbow. The doors on the train behind them chimed and then slid shut. All six Chinese “businessmen” remained seated. None of them paid the least bit of attention to Allender or Melanie, who was now trying to conceal her weapon in the crook of her arm. The train’s brakes exhaled and the cars jolted into motion and then hummed out of the station, accelerating into the dark tunnel beyond. Now they were alone on the platform.
“WTF?” Melanie murmured, looking around the station to see what she’d missed. Then Allender thought he’d spotted movement up on the escalators.
“Let’s go,” he ordered urgently. “Go down, to the next platform.”
“Wha-at?” she asked as she joined him in a quick trot toward the short escalator leading down to the next platform. He didn’t answer, but took the sliding steel stairs two at a time. She nearly fell trying to keep up with him and he had to grab her at the bottom. This platform was also empty, but Allender realized that it was just a transfer platform: no turnstiles, no station office, no Metro personnel.
Then he heard excited voices up above.
Excited Chinese voices. “Shit!” he cursed, and then headed toward the end of the platform.
“What are we doing?” she called as she chased after him.
“Into the tunnel. Now!”
“Are you crazy?” she said. “We can’t do that.”
He got to the end of the platform, sat down on the concrete lip, and jumped down to the track bed. He turned around and helped her do the same. Then, still holding her hand, he lunged into the tunnel.
“What if a train comes?” she shouted at him. “There’s nowhere to go!”
“That was the last train,” he said over his shoulder. “Now keep quiet. We need to listen.”
They ran another hundred feet and then stopped. There were two tracks in this tunnel, glinting softly in the light from the dirt-covered fire-tight light fixtures mounted every fifty feet. Four rails for the trains, two center strips for the six-hundred-volt power running down between the rails. They could still see a white glow from Metro Center, but the tunnel was strangely quiet.
“What are we listening for?” she whispered. Then they both heard voices coming from the direction of the station. They started trotting farther into the tunnel, their feet crunching softly in all the dirt and trash on the floor. By this point the only light was coming from the wall fixtures, and some of them weren’t working. They kept going, trying to maintain distance from their pursuers without making any noise. The breeze in their faces felt good, until they both realized what that breeze meant.
Allender scanned the darkness ahead, looking for an alcove or any other kind of space notched into the tunnel wall that would get them back away from an oncoming train. The distance between the outer rails and the wall was no more than five feet.
“There,” Melanie cried out. “On the other side.”
Allender saw it, too. A firefighting station, with hose racks, a valve bank, a man-sized CO2 bottle mounted on a dolly, and a refrigerator-sized locker labeled BREATHING APPARATUS. The fire station was set back into a notch in the tunnel wall. It would be tight, but better than being so close to the tracks that the suction would be strong enough to pull them under the cars. But first, they had to get across the four tracks and their power strips.
The breeze was stronger now, and a distinct humming filled the air. They could no longer hear any voices behind them. They looked at each other for an instant and then stepped carefully across the tracks and their six-hundred-volt “third rails.” This was no time to trip over one of the concrete crossties. Allender flattened himself between the locker and the valve bank, while Melanie stood next to the CO2 bottle, facing the wall. A white glow began to fill the tunnel as the train approached. The bow wave of air being compressed by the speeding train was strong enough to force both of them to hold on tight as the train’s twin headlights, on high beam as it approached the station, lit up each crack and crevice in the concrete walls. Then with a roar it was right there, and then in the next instant gone, a whirlwind of trash and dust spinning angrily in its wake as its twin taillights vanished around the wide curve leading into Metro Center Station.
Allender touched her shoulder and they took off again, still trying to make as little noise as possible.
“Thought you said that ours was the last train,” she said, puffing a little.
“We went down a level, remember?” he said over his shoulder. “This isn’t the Red Line anymore.”
“Which line is it?”
“Don’t remember,” Allender replied. After another minute it was obvious that Melanie was running out of steam, so he slowed it to a fast walk. This part of the tunnel looked like all the rest of it, with the only illumination coming from the wall lights. Allender looked for a call box, but the walls were covered in bundles of large aluminum conduit, encased in decades of grime. He checked his cell phone. If it could have laughed at him it would have. The tunnel continued to bend around to the left. It was gradual, but definitely curving. Then suddenly they saw what looked like lights in the distance. Allender stopped to see if they were moving.
“What?” Melanie asked, obviously grateful for the stop.
He pointed ahead. “Lights.”
They stared into the distance, but the lights appeared to be stationary and all on the left side. It was hard to tell, because the tunnel curved to their left.
“Maybe there’s a call box there,” he said. “We have to get out of these tunnels before they start repositioning trains for the morning commute. You okay?”
“Gotta cut back on the gin,” she said, bravely.
He nodded, then cupped his hands to his ears and faced back the way they’d come, listening for voices. If their pursuers hadn’t found an alcove, they would have much bigger problems than two laowai to chase. He heard nothing except the ticking of the rails relaxing after the train’s passage.
“Good,” he said. “Let’s go see what those lights are all about. Maybe there’s even a fire escape.”
They went another three hundred yards and then stopped again. The lights, which were all dim blue, seemed to frame a gate of some sort. Fifty feet ahead of the gate they could see a set of rails curving off the main line and heading under those gates. In the
far distance shone a penumbra of more lights up on overhead signal towers but facing away from them. There were several equipment panels mounted on the walls nearby, and Allender thought he could see security cameras above the gates.
“See those cameras?” he said. “Let’s get down into their field of view, maybe trip some alarms and get some help.”
“Right,” she said, and they resumed their jog down the track toward the junction. Allender felt a breeze begin to build on the back of his neck, but it died down after thirty seconds. When they reached the gates they slowed to a walk, both of them looking up at the security cameras to see if any of them were turning to have a look. Then a bank of much larger white lights framing the gates snapped on, blinding both of them. For a horrible instant Allender thought a train was coming right at them.
“HALT!” boomed a loud male voice. “You are not authorized to be here. Turn around right now.”
Allender put an arm up in front of his eyes and held his credentials case out in front of his face. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Melanie do the same thing. “Federal officers,” he shouted. “We need—”
“You must turn around and go back the way you came. Do it now. Deadly force authorized. You have fifteen seconds.”
Allender could now make out human shapes behind those intense lights. They appeared to be taking stations behind the gates. He could see rifle barrels sticking up above their heads, and then, suddenly he couldn’t.
“Five seconds. Deadly force authorized. We will shoot you. Move. Now!”
Allender dropped his arms and turned back into the tunnel. The lights stayed on, intense enough that he thought he could feel the heat from those blue-white bulbs on his neck. Melanie trudged along beside him and cursed softly.
What the hell did we stumble onto, he wondered. He closed his eyes for a second and saw two bright red circles burned into his retina. They walked back up the tracks for another hundred yards before the white glow behind them finally subsided.
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