by Blake Banner
I pulled out the headband camera Gibbons had given me, switched it on, fit it to my forehead and inserted the earpiece. Immediately I heard Gibbons’ voice.
“Where are you?”
“Basement. Don’t talk.”
“What is your status? Why are you delayed fitting the camera? Give me an update!”
I removed the earpiece and moved down the passage at the rear of the elevator, doing three steps backward and three forward. I was pretty sure I had taken out all the guards, but it pays to take nothing for granted. There were four doors, two on either side of the corridor, and they were all locked. So I left them and made my way to the other corridor. Here there were also only four doors, two on either side, widely spaced. They too were locked. I chose the far door on the left and blew out the latch with the Maxim 9.
I eased it open and flipped on the switch. There were no guards. There was a lot of electronic equipment. I wasn’t familiar with any of it, except one long, metallic tube that looked to me like a CAT scanner. There were also screens that looked like computer terminals. I put the earpiece back in and spoke quietly. “Gibbons, when I say don’t speak, don’t speak.”
“Will you kindly just try to follow instructions! Where are you now?”
“One of the labs in the basement.”
I took the camera from my pocket and started filming, taking close ups of all the digital displays. I scanned the whole room. He asked me to close in on a couple of details, which I did.
Finally, I said, “You got everything you need here?”
“Yes. But Lacklan, I asked you to leave no trace. Couldn’t you have picked the lock, for God’s sake?”
“That ship sailed, Gibbons. There were guards outside, on the first floor and down here.”
He sighed. “I suppose you killed them.”
“No, I sang them lullabies and they went to sleep. Of course I killed them.”
I crossed to the door opposite and gave the lock the same treatment. This room surprised me. There were four rows of eight desks all facing the far, right hand wall. It looked like a classroom, but instead of a blackboard, there was a gigantic TV screen, ten or twelve feet high, twenty feet across. Each desk had a screen incorporated, and a set of earphones.
“What the hell is this place, Gibbons?”
“It’s a laboratory for manipulation of neurotransmitters via audiovisual stimulation. The probably also use it for the development of neural pathways.”
I scanned the place and filmed it. Then I moved on to the next door. Here, there were thirty-two gurneys made up like beds. Each one was fixed up with a kind of rubber cap dotted with what looked to me, at a glance, like four or five hundred electrodes, each connected by a slim wire to a column set into the floor at the head of the gurney. Each column appeared then to be connected to a bank of computers that lined the far wall. I filmed the whole thing, and then Gibbons had me go over each of the computer terminals in minute detail.
I made my way finally to the fourth room. I blew the lock and pushed open the door, but when I flipped on the switch my stomach lurched. Here there were six gurneys, but they were not made up like beds. They were cold, bare steel. Four of them were against the wall on my right. The other two were at the center of the floor. The floor was tiled in white, and between the two gurneys there was a plug hole, like you might see in a shower, only bigger: more like an abattoir. On the gurneys there were two naked human bodies, one male, one female. The tops of their skulls had been taken off to expose their brains, one of which had had a slice removed.
There was an abundance of electronic equipment. Some of it was mounted on mobile trolleys, the rest was on benches. I asked Gibbons, “What is this stuff?”
I walked over to it and examined it closely. I heard his voice, “Mainly electronic microscopes by the look of it. The bench-mounted equipment is for examining slices of the brains post mortem. The mobile stuff must be for examining it pre-mortem or perimortem. I would love to get my hands on those hard drives.”
“What the hell for?” I snarled.
“There is no way you could even begin to understand. Move on to the next room.”
I left the lab and made my way to the other passage. I had a nasty feeling about what I was going to find there. I took out the first lock and found what I expected to find. It gave access to one, long room with a second door at the far end. It was a dormitory. There were sixteen bunks, occupied by sixteen people, eight men and eight women of mixed races. They were all asleep, lying unnaturally flat on their backs. They mostly seemed to be aged between eighteen and twenty-five, though there were a couple who seemed older and a few who looked younger. They all seemed impervious to any noise that I made.
I filmed them and examined each one of them in detail. They had all been shaved, and many of them had scars on their heads from recent surgery. Several seemed to have had the top of their skulls removed. Gibbons sounded excited.
“There we have it! As I thought! There will be records relating to each of these subjects in the office upstairs. I am certain of it! You must find them, Lacklan. You understand?”
“I understand, Gibbons.”
The door across the passage held no surprises either. It was another dormitory, but this one held young adolescents and children. I examined each one in turn, and each one had the same scars as the adults across the way. I could feel a hot, smoldering rage swelling in my gut.
I said, “Have you seen enough, Gibbons?”
“Yes, we’ve seen enough. Go up to the study now.” He paused, then added, “Lacklan, given that you have killed the guards and shot out all the locks, it is now of the utmost importance that you find documentary evidence to support what you have shown us here.”
“Yeah, that was what was worrying me, too, Gibbons.”
I made no effort to hide the sarcasm, but he either didn’t hear it or didn’t care. At the elevator I stopped. “Gibbons, you have a judge, a Fed and a DA there. You have seen enough. Why don’t you just send in the cavalry and seize all this stuff?”
He sighed. “Just trust that I have good reasons, Lacklan, and get me the documents.”
I was about to step inside and go to the second floor, when a sixth sense made me stop and look back. There was a woman. She was standing in the middle of the passage in a white nightgown, staring at me, frowning.
After a moment she said, “Do you know where I am?”
I took a few steps closer to her. “What’s your name?”
She blinked a couple of times. “I don’t know where I am. I don’t know…” She didn’t seem able to finish the sentence. “Do you know?”
I took hold of her arm and led her back into the dorm. “You go back to bed. Get some sleep, and I’ll be back for you, OK?”
I heard Gibbons’ voice in my ear. “You will not. You get out of there when you’re done and you leave things as they are, do you understand?”
She climbed back into the bed, lay down and closed her eyes. I made my way back to the elevators. The hot rage in my belly was turning wild. I smiled to myself. “Don’t worry, Gibbons, I know exactly what you want. That’s why you picked me for the job, right? Because you knew I was obedient and subtle. And above all, restrained.”
“Lacklan…!”
I didn’t hear the rest of it, because I had removed the earpiece again.
SIXTEEN
I stepped out of the car on the first floor, because an enclosed place, like an elevator, is a bad place when people are trying to kill you. I stepped into the lobby and ran up the steps, keeping my back to the wall and the HK trained on the stairs and the landings ahead of me. There was no one there.
The layout on the second floor was identical to the first and the basement. It was carpeted in beige, the walls and ceiling were cream and there were occasional steel-framed seats upholstered in blue. I found Ogden’s office where his predecessor’s office had been before, only one floor down. I blew out the lock and stepped inside.
There was a l
arge, antique oak desk with a big, black leather chair behind it. Against the wall by the window there was a bank of filing cabinets. The top left drawer in the desk yielded to my knife and inside it I found the keys to the filing cabinets. I spent the next hour working methodically through the documents contained in them. Practically everything was useful, and the more I worked through the records of experiments, and correspondence relating to them, the more convinced I became that this was a stupid exercise. I had here several thousand documents that would prove, over and over again, what this institute was and what it was being used for, and there was no way in hell I was going to be able to photograph all of them. This stuff needed to be shipped out in bulk and examined by the County sheriff, the FBI and the world press. It was the only way.
Besides, there was one piece of information that was missing; and the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was the only one I was really interested in. I looked at my watch. It was just before four in the morning. I said, “I have a situation here. You’d better get a search warrant and storm this place. Do it now.”
Gibbons sounded alarmed. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m getting some interference, Gibbons. Get that warrant. Do it.”
I heard him say, “Wha…?”
I switched off the camera and put it and the earpiece in my rucksack. Then I took a couple of fistfuls of the most relevant documents and put them in too, along with the camera. I slung the backpack over my shoulder and went up to the top floor.
The layout here was, once again, similar to the lower floors, except that the corridor ahead of me was shorter, and ended in a door. Odds were good that that was Ogden’s suite of rooms. The rest of it would be dorms for the scientists and students, and bathrooms.
I stood for a moment listening. There was absolute silence. I thought about the best way to breach the door. I approached it and felt it. It was wood, not metal. There were only two other doors in the shortened passage. They were, as I had suspected, bathrooms. I pulled the Maxim from its holster and blew out the lock. It made a noise, but I was pretty sure it was not enough to rouse the dorms. It might rouse Ogden, but that was OK. I wanted him roused.
I pushed through and closed the door behind me. I was in a short corridor. It was dark. At the end I came out into a broad living room with a dining table set by a large window on the right, and a comfortable sitting area on the left, by some plate glass French doors onto a broad terrace. There was a sofa and a couple of armchairs set around a coffee table, some bookcases and a sideboard. Beside the sideboard there was a small workstation with a laptop and a printer. On the far wall there was three doors, one was open and I could see it was a small kitchen. The next I figured was a bathroom, and odds were that the one on the far left was the bedroom.
I took two steps toward it and the door opened. There was a man of about fifty in pajamas and a silk dressing gown. He looked confused, alarmed, scared.
“Who the hell are you? How did you get in here? What do you want?”
I showed him the gun and put my finger to my lips. Then I approached him, keeping the weapon trained on his chest. When I was six feet away I said, quietly, “Move or make a noise and I will shoot you in the belly. I know from experience that it is one of the most painful ways to die.”
He raised his hands. “OK, just take it easy. I won’t do anything. Just tell me, who are you? What do you want?”
“Get in the bedroom.”
He hesitated, looked at the gun, turned and went into the room. The light was off. I switched it on and said, “Lie face down on the floor.”
“Are you going to kill me?”
“Not if I don’t have to. I want information. If you don’t give it to me I will hurt you a lot. Lie down.”
He lay on his belly and I took his shoe laces and tied his wrists behind his back. I pulled him to his feet and propelled him back out into the living room. There I pushed him into one of the armchairs, with his back to the entrance. I sat with my back to the French doors, where I could see him, and the entrance behind him.
I said, “You’re Gamma.”
He looked genuinely astonished. “What?”
“You replaced my father. The position was offered to me, I refused it. They kept it open till I blew the operation at the UN and killed Dr. Banks, your predecessor at this institute.” I pulled the ski mask off. “I’m Lacklan Walker.”
He stared at me for a long moment. “Jesus Christ.”
I shook my head. “No, Lacklan Walker. He and I are very different. I don’t turn the other cheek, and I sure as hell don’t love mine enemy. I want just one thing from you, Ogden, and you and I both know that there is no point in your refusing to give it to me.”
He was frowning, like he didn’t know whether to be in awe or terror. “What?
“The list.”
“List? What list?”
“The list of names, Ogden. Who is Alpha, who Beta… Who are the rest?”
He smiled, then laughed. “You have got to be joking. No way, never.”
I frowned back, genuinely surprised at his response. “You do know who I am, Ogden? You know what I will do to you?”
He nodded. “I’ve heard about you. Alpha really likes and admires you. I thought—we thought—that you had pulled out after the UN disaster. He even discussed letting you live.”
I nodded. “I plan to. This is my last job. If you don’t die tonight, you can tell Alpha that. Now, Ogden, give me the list.”
“No, I’m sorry, I can’t do that.”
I stared at him for a moment, nonplussed. I thought about the people in the dorm in the basement. I thought about the woman asking me if I knew where she was. I thought about the second dorm, with the children. I picked up a cushion from the sofa.
He started to say, “No, wait, what are you…?” but I smothered his face with the cushion before he could finish the sentence, and I blew off his left kneecap.
He screamed into the cushion, thrashing and jerking helplessly. I put away the Maxim and pulled my Sig. His scream ended in a sob and then he started to suffocate. I removed the cushion and, as he gasped for air, I shoved the muzzle of the Sig into his mouth. I said, “Shut up.”
He was croaking as he struggled to breathe, and trembling badly. It was easy to see that he was not a man accustomed to pain or violence. I put my finger to my lips. He nodded. I said, “Have you got a better understanding of the situation now?”
I removed the Sig from his mouth so he could answer. He was still gasping for breath, holding his thigh and staring, goggling at the shattered bloody mess that, only a few seconds earlier, had been his knee.
“Ogden, look at me. Look at me and listen to me. You can still come out of this with just an attractive, interesting limp. But the next time you say no, or make any kind of negative statement, you lose both your legs from the knee down. That won’t be attractive or interesting. It will be pathetic. I want you to think about that for a moment.” I paused.
He stared into my face. He looked yellow and he was sweating profusely. He nodded.
I said, “You are going to give me the complete list of twenty-four names.”
His face crumbled and he began to sob. I stood, took hold of the laptop on the workstation and carried it over to the coffee table. I opened it and switched it on. I said, “Password.”
He stared at me, sobbing, hesitated and I pointed the Sig at his right knee. “No! No, wait, please, capital ‘G’ gamma, oh, eight, oh one, nineteen sixty eight.”
I tapped it in and got through to the desktop. I opened Word and put it in front of him. “Write the list.”
He stared at me. “How do you know I’m not going to lie?”
“I don’t. But I already have one list, Ogden. The one my father gave me just before he died. If I compare them, and they are different, I will take you downstairs to your lab, extract your brain from your skull and shove it up your ass.”
He was half-crying, shaking his head. “If you alr
eady have a list, what the hell do you want another one for?”
“Because I can’t be sure that he was telling the truth, can I? But when I compare his list to yours, then I can be sure. Start writing, Ogden, I am running out of patience.”
“For God’s sake, Lacklan. The pain. I can’t…”
I took aim at his right knee and he started typing, sobbing and grunting as he did so. When he had reached the end, I said, “Don’t save it. Print and delete.”
A moment later the printer hummed and spewed a sheet of A4. I got up, took it and examined it. I went cold from head to foot. It was so obvious: so obvious that I had missed it all this time. I heard myself whisper, “Holy shit…”
Ogden’s head had flopped back. He had lost a lot of blood from his knee. It had saturated the chair and the rug under his feet. He looked feverish. I took the laptop from him, switched it off and stuffed it in the backpack. Then I shot him in the head, scratched his name off the list, folded the piece of paper and put it in my back pocket.
I pulled back the French doors and stepped out onto the terrace. The first traces of dawn were turning the eastern horizon gray, but the sky overhead was still a deep blue-black. I thought long and hard about what to do next. Then I saw the lights. There was a line of them. Three vehicles moving fast, maybe half a mile away or a little more, coming down the driveway toward the house.
I pulled the headband camera back out of the backpack, switched it on, fitted it in place again and inserted the earpiece. I went and looked down at Ogden. I heard Gibbons say, “Jesus Christ, Lacklan! What have you done?”
I said, “We can discuss that later, Gibbons, right now we have a situation. There are three cars approaching down the driveway. They will be here in a matter of seconds. I am going to call the Sheriff’s Department. I suggest you and your friend from the Bureau get off your asses and get here on the double, with a search warrant, because I have information you do not want our visitors to retrieve. Get here. Over and out.”
I switched off the camera, put it back in the backpack and went out to the terrace again, to look over the parapet. Below there was a fringe of garden, with shrubs and bushes. They looked like bougainvillea. I swung the backpack over and dropped it into the nearest bush. Then I went back inside, made two quick phone calls, one to the sheriff, and put something in Ogden’s pocket. After that I sat and waited for them to arrive.