He stopped, staring at the screen.
GOOD EVENING, GUY CARSON.
YOU HAVE 1 UNREAD MESSAGE
Quickly, Carson brought up the waiting electronic mail.
Ciao, Guy.
I couldn’t help but notice the hellacious CPU time you soaked up, running that modeling program early this morning. It warms my heart to see you burning the midnight oil, but it wasn’t clear, from the on-line logs, exactly what you were doing
I’m sure you wouldn’t be wasting your time, or mine, without good reason. Does this mean you’ve made a breakthrough? I hope so for both our sakes. I don’t need pretty pictures, I need results. Time is growing cruelly short.
Oh, yes. I almost forgot. Why this sudden interest in PurBlood?
I await your reply.
Brent
“Jesus, look at that,” de Vaca said. “I can almost feel his breath on the back of my neck.”
“Time is cruelly short, all right,” Carson muttered. “If only he knew.” He slid one of the CDs into the terminal’s drive bay and copied the cerebrospinal-fluid results onto it. Then he initiated the network’s chat mode.
“Are you crazy?” de Vaca hissed. “Who the hell are you going to page?”
“Shut up and watch,” Carson said, as he continued to type.
Chat target: Guy
[email protected]
“Now I know you’re crazy,” de Vaca said. “Requesting to chat with yourself.”
“Levine told me that, if I ever needed to reach him, I should send a chat request across the network, using myself as the recipient as well as the sender,” Carson said. “That would initiate a communications agent he’d planted, to connect with his computer.”
“You’re going to send him the data on PurBlood,” de Vaca said.
“Yes. He’s the only person that can help us.”
Carson waited, fighting to keep calm. He imagined the small communications daemon burrowing secretly through the GeneDyne net, out into a public-access service, and then to Levine’s computer. Somewhere, Levine’s laptop would be flashing a message now. Assuming it was connected to the network, and Levine was around to hear it. Come on. Come on.
Suddenly the screen went blank.
Hello. I’ve been expecting your call.
Carson typed frantically.
Dr. Levine, pay careful attention. There ¡s a crisis here at Mount Dragon. You were right about the virus. But it’s more than that, much more. We can’t do anything about it here, and we need your help. It is of the utmost importance that you act quickly. I am going to transmit to you a document I’ve prepared that explains the situation, along with files of supporting information. There is one other thing I must add: Please do what you can to get us out of here as soon as possible. I believe we are in real danger. And do whatever you must to get the stocks of X-FLU safely out of the hands of the Mount Dragon staff. As you will learn from the data I’m transmitting, they all need immediate medical attention. I’m commencing data transmission now, using standard net—work protocols.
He initiated the upload with a few keystrokes, and an access light on the terminal’s faceplate lit up. Carson sat back gingerly, watching the data feed. Even with maximum compression and at the widest bandwidth the network would allow, it would take almost forty minutes to transmit the data. It was all too likely that the next time Scopes came nosing around, he’d notice the heavy use of resources. Or one of his network lackeys would point it out to him. And how the hell was he going to reply to Scopes’s e-mail?
Suddenly the datastream was interrupted.
Guy? Are you there?
We’re here. What’s wrong?
Who is this ‘we’? Is someone else there with you?
My lab assistant is also aware of the situation.
Very good. Now, listen to me. Is there anyone else on site who can help you?
No. We’re on our own. Dr. Levine, let me continue the upload.
There’s no time for that. I’ve received enough already to see what the problem is, and what I don’t have I can get from the GeneDyne net. Thank you for trusting me with this. I’ll see that the proper authorities are immediately called in to handle the situation.
Listen, Dr. Levine, we need to get out of here. We believe the OSHA investigator who came here may have been killed.
Of course. Getting you out will be my highest priority. You and de Vaca keep on as you have been and don’t make any attempts to escape. Just stay calm. Okay?
Okay.
Guy, your work has been brilliant. Tell me how you stumbled across this.
As Carson prepared to type his response, a sudden chill shot through him.
You and de Vaca stay calm. But he had never spoken of de Vaca to Levine.
Who is this? he typed.
Suddenly the pixels on the screen began to dissolve into a snowstorm of white and black. The speaker next to the terminal came to life with a squeal of static. De Vaca gasped in surprise. Carson, rooted to his chair, watched the screen in disbelief, despair turning his limbs to lead. Was that the sound of raucous laughter, blending with the squeal of static in an infernal fugue? Was that a face, forming slowly out of the chaos on the screen: a face with jug ears, thick glasses, and impertinent cowlick?
Suddenly, the screen went blank, and the hiss of static abruptly cut off. The room was plunged in silent darkness! And then Carson heard the lonesome wail of the Mount Dragon alarm, rising in intensity across the desert sands.
PART THREE
Carson met de Vaca’s eyes.
“Let’s go,” he hissed, powering down the terminal with a stab of his finger.
They eased out of the radiology lab, closing the door quietly behind them. Quickly, Carson scanned the immediate area. Quartz emergency beacons had come up along the perimeter fence. As he watched, Carson saw klieg lights snap into ivory brilliance, first in the front guard tower, then in the rear. The twin beams began slowly scanning the compound. There was no moon, and large sections of the facility were sunken in pools of impenetrable darkness. He urged de Vaca forward into the shadow of the machine shop. They crept along the base of the building and around a corner, then scurried across a walkway to a dark area behind the incinerator building.
They heard a shout and the distant running of feet.
“It’ll take them a few minutes to get organized,” Carson said. “This is our chance to get the hell out.” He patted his pocket, ensuring that the CDs and the evidence they contained were still safe. “Looks like you’ll get a chance to test your hot-wiring skills, after all. Let’s grab a Hummer while we still can.”
De Vaca hesitated.
“Let’s move!” he urged.
“We can’t,” she whispered fiercely in his ear. “Not without destroying the stocks of X-FLU first.”
“Are you crazy?” Carson snapped.
“If we leave X-FLU in the hands of these nuts, we won’t survive even if we do escape. You saw what happened to Vanderwagon, what was happening to Harper. All it takes is one person to walk out with a vial of X-FLU, and you can kiss your ass good-bye.”
“We sure as hell can’t take them with us.”
“No, but listen. I know how we can destroy X-FLU and escape at the same time.”
Carson saw dark figures running across the compound, guards holding ugly-looking assault weapons. He pulled de Vaca farther into the shadows.
“We have to enter the Fever Tank to do it,” de Vaca continued.
“The hell with that. We’ll be trapped like rats.”
“Listen, Carson, that’s the last place they’ll be looking for us.”
Carson thought for a moment. “You’re probably right,” he said. “Even a madman wouldn’t go back in there right now.”
“Trust me.” De Vaca grabbed his hand and pulled him around the far side of the incinerator.
“Wait, Susana—”
“Move your ass, cabrón.”
Carson followed her across a dark courtya
rd to the inner perimeter. They dropped into the shadows of the operations building, breathing heavily.
Suddenly a shot rang out, cracking across the desert night. Several others followed in rapid succession.
“They’re shooting at shadows,” Carson said.
“Or perhaps each other,” came the reply. “Who knows how far gone some of them are?”
A klieg light was making a slow arc toward them, and they ducked into the darkened operations building. After a hurried reconnoiter, they ran down the deserted hall and into the elevator that led to the BSL-5 entrance.
“I think you’d better tell me your plan,” said Carson as they descended.
She. looked at him, violet eyes wild. “Listen carefully. Remember old Pavel, who fixed my CD player? I’ve been meeting him in the canteen for backgammon. He likes to talk, probably more than he should. He told me that, back when the military funded this site, they insisted on the installation of a fail-safe device. Something to safeguard against a catastrophic release of a hot agent within the Fever Tank. It was taken off-line after Mount Dragon went private, but the mechanisms were never actually dismantled. Pavel even explained how easily it could be reactivated.”
“Susana, how could—”
“Shut up and listen. We’re gonna blow this whole chingadera up. The fail-safe device was called a stage-zero alert. It reversed the laminar airflow of the air incinerator, flooding the Fever Tank with thousand-degree air, sterilizing everything. Only a few of the old-timers, like Singer and Nye, know about it.” She smirked in the dim light of the elevator. “When that superheated air hits all the combustibles in there, it should make a nice explosion.”
“Yeah, right. And fry us, too.”
“No. It’ll take several minutes for the airflow to reverse. All we have to do is set the alert, get out, and wait for the explosion. Then we can snag a Hummer in the uproar.”
The elevator door whispered open on a shadowy corridor. They moved quickly to the gray metal door leading into the Fever Tank. Carson spoke his name into the voice-recognition box and the door clicked open.
“You know, they could be watching us right now,” he said as he struggled into his bluesuit.
“They could,” de Vaca said. “But considering all the hell that’s breaking loose up there, I think they have more important cameras to monitor.”
They checked each other’s suits for safety, then stepped into decontam. As Carson stood in the sheets of poisonous liquid, staring at the dim alien figure of de Vaca standing beside him, a sense of unreality began to creep over him. There are people looking for us. Shooting at us. And we’re walking into the Fever Tank. He felt the creeping claustrophobic fear settling around his chest once again, squeezing him like a vise. They’ll find us. We’ll be trapped like rats, and ... He sucked at his air hose, filling his lungs with panicked gasps.
“You all right, Carson?” The calm voice of de Vaca over the private intercom channel shamed him into rationality. He nodded, stepping into the antechamber that housed the drying mechanism.
Two minutes later, they entered the Fever Tank. The global alarm droned quietly in the empty corridors, and the distant drumming of the chimps sounded like a muffled riot. Carson looked up at the white walls, searching for a clock: almost twelve-thirty. The corridor lights were on low, and would stay that way until the decontamination crew entered at 2 A.M. Only this time—with a little luck—there wouldn’t be anything left to decontaminate.
“We have to access the security substation,” came de Vaca’s voice. “You know where it is, right?”
“Yeah.” Carson knew only too well. The Level-5 security substation was located on the lowest level of the Fever Tank. Directly below the quarantine area.
They moved quickly through the corridors to the central core. Carson let de Vaca descend first, then grabbed the handrails and went down the tube himself. Above his head he could see the huge uptake manifold that, in a few minutes, might be spewing superheated air throughout the facility.
The substation was a cramped circular room with several swivel chairs and a low ceiling. Five-inch terminal screens marched in orderly rows around the curve of the walls, showing a hundred views of the empty Fever Tank. Beneath them, a command console jutted into the room.
De Vaca took a seat in front of the console and began typing, slowly at first, then more rapidly.
“Now what the hell do we do?” Carson asked, thrusting a fresh air hose into the valve of his suit.
“Hold your water, cabrón,” de Vaca said, lifting one gloved hand to press her communications button. “It’s just like Pavel said it would be. All the safeguards here are to prevent a breach from occurring. They never thought to install safeguards against someone deliberately triggering a false alarm. Why should they? I’m going to bring the stage-zero crisis parameters back on-line, and then initiate the alert!”
“And then we’ll have how long to get out?”
“Plenty of time, believe me.”
“How long is that, exactly?”
“Stop bothering me, Carson. Can’t you see I’m busy? Just a few more commands, and we’re in business.”
Carson watched her type. Then he spoke again, more quietly. “Susana, let’s think about this a moment. Is this really what we want to do? Destroy the entire Level-5 facility? The chimps? Everything we’ve worked for?”
De Vaca stopped typing and turned to face him. “What other choice do we have? The chimps are goners anyway, they’re all exposed to X-FLU. We’ll be doing them a favor.”
“I know that. But a lot of good has come out of this facility. It would take years to reproduce the work that’s been done in here. We know what’s wrong with X-FLU now, we can correct the process.”
“If we get our asses shot off, who’s going to fix X-FLU?” came de Vaca’s angry voice in his headset. “And if some nut gets his hands on the stuff, who’s going to care about the damage we do to GeneDyne’s bottom line? I’m going to—”
“Carson,” came the severe tone of Nye. “De Vaca. Listen to me carefully. Effective immediately, your employment at GeneDyne is terminated. You are now trespassers on GeneDyne property, and your presence in the Level-5 facility must be assumed a hostile act. If you decide to surrender, I can guarantee your safety. If not, you will be hunted down and dealt with. There is no possibility of escape.”
“So much for the video cameras,” de Vaca muttered.
“He might be monitoring the private channel,” Carson replied. “Say as little as possible.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m there.” De Vaca’s typing slowed. Then she reached over and, lifting a hinged security grille protecting a bank of black switches, flipped the topmost switch.
Immediately, a loud tone sounded above the wail of the emergency siren, and an array of warning lights in the ceiling began to blink.
Attention, came a calm feminine voice in his headset that Carson had not heard before. A stage-zero alert will initiate in sixty seconds.
De Vaca threw a second switch, then stood back, kicking over the console with one gloved foot for good measure. A shower of sparks leapt across her suit.
Fail-safe activated, the feminine voice said. Alert commit sequence bypassed.
“Now you’ve done it,” Carson said.
De Vaca punched the emergency global button on the communications panel of her bluesuit, broadcasting her words across the Mount Dragon PA system. “Nye? I want you to listen to me very carefully.”
“There’s nothing for you to say except yes or no,” Nye replied coolly.
“Listen up, canalla! We’re in the security substation. We’ve initiated a stage-zero alert. Total, unprejudiced sterilization.”
“De Vaca, if you—”
“You can’t back it down, I’ve already initiated the commit. Do you understand? In a few minutes Level-5 will be flooded with thousand-degree air. The whole damn place will go up like a Viking funeral. Anyone within a three-hundred-yard radius will turn into beef jerky.�
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As if in punctuation, the calm voice returned on the global channel: Stage-zero alert initiated. You have ten minutes to evacuate the area.
“Ten minutes?” Carson said. “Jesus.”
“De Vaca, you’re more insane than I thought,” came the voice of Nye. “You can’t succeed. Do you hear me?”
De Vaca barked a laugh. “You’re calling me insane?” she said. “I’m not the one out there every day in the desert, in pith helmet and ponytail, bobbing up and down like a goddamn dragoon.”
“Susana, shut up!” Carson barked.
There was dead silence over the intercom.
De Vaca turned toward him, brows knitted in anger. Then her expression quickly changed.
“Guy, look at that,” she said on the private channel, pointing over his shoulder.
Turning, Carson faced the wall of video monitors. He scanned the countless small black-and-white images, uncertain of what had caught de Vaca’s attention. The laboratories, passages, and storage areas were still and deserted.
Except one. In the main corridor just beyond the entrance port, a single figure was moving. There was a stealth and deliberation to the figure’s movements that chilled Carson’s blood. He moved closer to the monitor, staring intently. The figure was wearing the kind of bulky biosuit with extended internal oxygen used exclusively by the security staff. In one hand was a long black object that looked like a policeman’s nightstick. As the bulky biosuit moved closer, walking directly beneath the camera, Carson could see that the object was a double-barreled pistol-grip shotgun.
Then he noticed the figure’s gait. Every now and then there was an odd hitch in the walk, as if a leg joint had momentarily come loose.
“Mike Marr,” de Vaca murmured.
Carson moved his glove to his sleeve to reply, then stopped. His instincts told him that something else was wrong; terribly wrong. He stood motionless, trying to figure out what had triggered his subconscious alarm.
Then the realization hit him like a hammer.
Throughout the countless hours he’d spent in the Fever Tank—through all the many communications beeps, tones, and voices that had sounded in his headset—there had run one steady, continuous sound: the reassuring hiss of the air hose connected to his suit.
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