by Cliff Ryder
The floor was made of removable deck plates that allowed access to the cabling below. He heard the doors burst open and knew he had only seconds.
There were detachable suction-cup-tipped handles used to lift the deck plates, and he grabbed one, attaching it to the nearest plate. The plate lifted from its rails easily and, with a quick snakelike slide, Alex dropped into the cable trench beneath it. As he went, he released the suction on the handle so it would fall off to the side. He lowered the plate gently in place over his head and lay very still.
From beneath the deck plate, voices sounded muffled. He heard barked orders, and he heard booted feet moving slowly past the servers.
“You might as well come out,” an amplified voice rose to a volume he could make out over the machinery. “Switch all internal cameras to thermal imaging.”
Alex took stock of his position. The cable trench was wide. He could move relatively quickly. He grabbed one of the explosive packs from his belt and affixed it to the cable closest to him. He worked quickly, and then started crawling forward.
The trenches followed the course of the passageway between servers. When he heard someone above him, he remained very still, and when they moved on, he followed. The same noise that muffled the voices of the team searching for him helped to conceal his movements. He worked his way back toward the door, and along the way he managed to get two more explosive devices placed.
At the door, he found that there was a narrow, oval opening that led through the wall and into the access beneath the floor beyond the door. The hallway flooring was solid, if he got beneath it; he might not have a way out. As he lay just inside the doorway deciding whether to chance the crawl space or make his break, the lights grew dim. The sound of the machines around him groaned as fans slowed, winding down to a deathly, echoing silence. He hadn’t thought they could get the systems shut down so quickly, and he silently cursed himself for moving too slowly.
“You will never escape,” a voice called to him.
“You might as well come out now and save us all a lot of trouble.” The voice was heavily accented with an Eastern European inflection. “You will not be hurt if you turn yourself in now.”
Another voice crackled over a radio and Alex picked up the message clearly.
“Explosive devices detected on levels five and three.”
“Find them,” the first voice snapped. There was a squawk of static.
Alex crawled into the oval wall spacer and glanced up and down the outer hallway. There was no light at all, except a small square down the hall and across several runs of cables. It had to be another way out. He slid onto the snaking lengths of cable and crawled across. Pulling himself along with his hands, his fingers screamed in pain.
Halfway across his left hand locked, but Alex ignored it, using it like a claw and pushing with his booted toes, while simultaneously trying not to make any sound. It was less critical beneath the hall, but as soon as they figured out how he’d disappeared in the computer room, and where he’d gone, they’d be on him.
After what seemed far too long, he reached the gray-lit area on the far side of the hall. It was another oval passage between walls, and Alex slid through without hesitation. He immediately felt an increase in temperature. His mind flipped through floor plans, and he realized he was directly above the furnace area. It had to be a maintenance room, possibly leading to laboratories with access to the main passages.
Lifting the first deck plate he came to, Alex peered around the room. He saw duct work immediately ahead. He pulled himself up and out, lowering the plate back into place as quietly as possible. The space he stood in was a small, shadowed area. The room beyond consisted of several racks of operator panels, a long workbench that held equipment open for repair and a door that led out. He tried to think, but he couldn’t seem to get his mind to focus. Between the pain in his body and the stress, it was as if someone had stirred his brains with a giant spoon. Sweat dripped into his eyes, and a sudden sharp stab of pain shot through his right thigh. He felt the trembling in his hand and willed it to stop.
“Not now,” he whispered. “God, not now.”
He heard footsteps again. In the distance he heard the amplified voice calling to him again.
“Give yourself up. You are surrounded, and there is no way out of this building.”
He had nothing to lose by responding at this point. It would be only moments before they located him. All he could hope to do was to lead them on a slightly longer chase and delay the discovery of the explosives.
“Maybe I’ll just kill you all and walk out,” he called.
As soon as he spoke, he moved. He knew it would be difficult to pinpoint where sound originated, but they were going to know the general area. He wanted to get out of the maintenance room if possible and into one of the labs again. If technicians were present, he might use that to his advantage. If he moved quickly enough he might be able to assume a new disguise. There were possibilities, but none of them existed unless he got moving.
As he stepped through the doorway, he heard a shout from his right. He’d been spotted. Ahead to his left was the entrance to one of the main laboratories. He caught sight of frightened faces within.
He lunged for the door, but this time the effort proved too much. His left leg suddenly gave out beneath him, and he tumbled to the side with a cry of pain. A shot rang out and something struck him hard in the shoulder, spinning him out of control.
Alex managed to get his Glock out of the holster. He turned and pulled the trigger. He heard cursing and shouts, but for some reason the words wouldn’t register. He crashed into the wall by the door frame of the lab and pain shot through his shoulder, already soaked in blood from the gunshot. He gritted his teeth and tried to stand, but his legs would not support him. He turned and raised his gun, watching for movement.
Two men appeared, crouching low and moving down opposite sides of the passageway toward him. He took aim at the man on the left and fired, saw the Glaser round strike him midchest and blow him off his feet, leaving a splatter of blood on the wall next to him.
Alex tried to roll to his right, but somewhere between his brain and his legs, the signal went haywire. What was supposed to be a smooth roll turned into a flop, and he landed heavily on the floor as another searing lance of pain brushed his temple. He’d felt the bullet before he heard, as if from far away, the report of the gun.
Then everything went black.
The more Brin thought about Alex shutting her out of his world, the more it hurt. She wondered where he was, what he was doing—and if he was okay.
She wondered if he’d found an alternate source of the medication he’d been prescribed, or if he’d just determined to “tough it out” and “work through the pain,” as she’d heard him boast on so many other occasions. This was not a sore muscle or a bad cold.
There was no way to “push through the pain” on this one. She needed to talk to him, to know how far it had progressed. The not knowing was the worst. That and the stupid, secret chat room where people knew things about her husband that she didn’t.
The only thing keeping her sane was her work.
What Rand had brought her was so miraculous that working with it took her away. She and Alex had always joked that when she was lost in an idea, the world didn’t exist at all. To a point it was true. She took her research very seriously. It was important to her to make progress, to help people. With Alex itching at her thoughts, though, she considered calling Rand and asking for some time off. If the new project hadn’t been on such a tight timeline, she probably would have—it wasn’t fair to be distracted when she was working on something so important.
When he was on an assignment, Alex was usually completely out of touch. It had always bothered her, but when he told her it was important to his work, she’d never complained. Now she saw it for what it really was—a lie. He didn’t tell her where he was because he had already built a lie that he couldn’t dig his way out of, telling
her he worked for a security company. No normal security company would be totally unable to reach one of its employees under these circumstances.
She wondered if he had ever really been where he had told her he would be, or doing anything even remotely resembling what he told her he’d be doing. She wondered what else he’d lied about.
They had an emergency communication plan.
She’d only used it twice, and Alex had only responded one of those times. They’d set up anonymous e-mail accounts on a Web server. The accounts were not associated with them by name, address, phone number or any account they shared.
If they really needed to be in contact, they used the Web site to leave messages. Brin had logged into that site dozens of times in the past few hours.
Each time she’d left him a note. Each time she’d checked her own inbox and found it empty. It grew compulsive, over time. She couldn’t stop herself from opening the page, refreshing the inbox and sending messages.
Then it occurred to her that if the man in the Room 59 chat room had known what she was wearing, sitting in front of a computer in her own home, he would have a way to trace where she went on the Internet. She cursed and shut down the screen, aching to open it again. It was a portal to Alex, even if the other end of the portal appeared to be closed. If he showed up or contacted her, she wanted to know it the minute it happened. She felt helpless and it was terrible sensation.
To fill the hours when she should have been sleeping, once Savannah had been put down for the night, she turned to research. She had been to every major Web site on MS, and combed them all for useful information. She’d familiarized herself with symptoms, medications, treatments, and when those sources had been depleted, she’d moved on to the cellular level, her mind racing as she perused current research and development on cures, radical treatments, unapproved processes and theories on combating the disease. While MRIS hadn’t spent a significant amount of time on this particular disease, there were applications within their research that might be relevant to MS.
At the least, it was something familiar, something she knew she was good at. She knew she wasn’t going to suddenly stumble into a cure, but the scientist in her saw the implied challenge and she accepted compulsively.
Her calls to Dr. Britton had remained unanswered. She’d gone as far as to check with other businesses with offices in the same building where he was listed. There was a door there, it seemed, and his name was tacked onto a sign above it, but no one had seen him—not recently, maybe not ever. Brin called three separate businesses in the same building and all of them gave a similar answer.
No, they did not know if Dr. Britton was open.
No, they did not know if he had been open recently.
No, they’d never been in his office, and for that matter, only one person she spoke to could even remember seeing him.
The whole experience reminded Brin of the Room 59 chat room, and it made her angry all over again. Was Dr. Britton just another part of the lie? Did he exist at all or had he been arrested or taken away somewhere? Were they really asking what she knew about Alex’s condition, or were they sending her on wild-goose chases after non-existent doctors and dead-end research to distract her from where Alex was and what he was doing?
If Dr. Britton worked for them, why had they needed a second source to confirm Alex’s condition?
She needed information, and all she had for the time being was her anger and a lot of bad guesswork. It was an infuriating situation.
She glanced at the clock. It was very late—or actually—very early. She glanced at the computer monitor, decided it didn’t matter and logged in to the e-mail account one last time. There was nothing from Alex, and she shut the machine down. She needed at least a couple of hours of rest, even if she couldn’t sleep. She’d be alone soon in a laboratory with only a laptop, valuable research and Mr. Coffee for companions. There was no room for error in that environment, and she couldn’t go in with her mind buzzing from lack of sleep. She rose and made her way to the bed she’d shared with Alex for so many years and slipped in between the sheets without un-dressing. She laid her head on his pillow, breathing in his scent, and closed her eyes, but she didn’t sleep.
THE DARKNESS RECEDED slowly. Alex heard what seemed to be voices, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. He could barely differen-tiate one from another, and then he wasn’t certain what he heard were voices at all. It might have been the hum of high-intensity lighting or the fans on the computer servers he’d crawled beneath—
when? Days before? Hours? Minutes? His thoughts began to focused, but he didn’t open his eyes immediately.
A quick assessment revealed that he was bound to some sort of straight-backed chair. He felt heat on his face and as his mind cleared, he knew it was bright light shining on his closed eyelids. His mouth was so dry that he wasn’t certain he could pry his lips apart, and the pain in his arms and legs was excruciating. It was much more intense than it should have been, even though the bindings were tight. He heard shuffling footsteps and an occasional muttered comment, but there was no real conversation, so there was nothing to learn. At last, taking a long slow breath to calm himself, he opened his eyes.
The light was so bright it was painful. He blinked, furiously, trying to clear away the sudden tears so that he could make out his surroundings.
There was a flurry of motion and sound, and he heard a voice call out in Chinese.
“He’s waking up.”
Alex’s shoulder was throbbing. His shirt had dried and stick to the gunshot wound. When he was able to see a little, he glanced down and saw that there was a rough bandage wrapped around his clothing, but that the wound hadn’t been treated.
He was almost grateful for it. The throbbing muscle pain from the MS stabbed through his arms and legs, and he felt his left hand fluttering again, as if it might cramp. His head pounded, and he felt a numbness in his left temple. He wished there was a mirror. It felt as if his head might be loosely bandaged, but he couldn’t be sure. The wound on his shoulder was an intense, more familiar pain, and he thought that maybe if he could concentrate on it he might find a way to release the tension in his afflicted limbs. He didn’t expect to have an opportunity for escape, but he also didn’t intend to blow it if one presented itself.
The man who had spoken wore a white lab coat.
He stared down at Alex through the thick lenses of heavy, black-framed glasses. A stethoscope dangled from his neck. He held a clipboard in one hand. The man reached out and lifted Alex’s eyelids one after the other. He reached out and poked the makeshift bandage on Alex’s wounded shoulder. When Alex grimaced and let loose a short gasp of pain, the man smiled.
Footsteps sounded, and Alex heard voices approaching. A moment later there was the creak of a door opening. He turned, but could not quite see where the sound came from, or who had entered.
The doctor—at least he assumed the man was a doctor of some sort—left him and stepped out of sight.
“Is he coherent?” a voice demanded.
“He is in pain, and he has not spoken, but I believe he is awake, and he will not die soon. There is something wrong with his hand—I had no time to diagnose—but it does not matter. He can talk.”
There was a grunt of assent or satisfaction. He heard footsteps, and then someone stepped past the blinding light, blocking it from Alex for a moment, and then allowing it to stream back into his face suddenly as the figure passed. Alex cursed under his breath and closed his eyes, turning away again and waiting for his sight to adjust.
When he was able to see again, he turned his gaze forward. Standing before him was a lean, dark-skinned man with dark, penetrating eyes. He wore fatigues with some sort of collar device. On his waist he wore a belt very similar to the one Alex had taken from Boswell. A black holster hung from one hip, the butt of a nasty-looking gun protruding from the rear. Behind this, Alex caught sight of a long, thin scabbard. He wasn’t sure what kind of blade such a sheath wo
uld house, but it wasn’t any kind of standard-issue military blade.
The man’s expression was unreadable. His eyes gave away nothing, and his face might as well have been chiseled from stone. Alex glared back at him.
He wasn’t about to be intimidated, and even if he had been his training would have kicked in. He wasn’t exactly frightened, but adrenaline pumped through his system and his senses were heightened. This sent waves of pain through his hands, and his legs felt as if they were collapsing in on themselves. There was so much pain he had to wrap it into one huge ball and set his will against it to hold his gaze steady.
“I am Captain Dayne,” the man said at last. “It is my duty to oversee the security of this facility.”
That answered at least one question. However long he’d been out, and whatever they had planned for him, they hadn’t removed him from the MRIS
complex. Alex met the man’s gaze, but said nothing.
“You have caused me quite a bit of difficulty,”
Dayne continued. “Not only am I now short a good man, but my superiors are not happy with me.
They count on me to provide absolute security. As you can imagine, they were not pleased to find you inside their complex. They were even less pleased by the explosives you managed to plant.”
Alex’s mind whirled. Had they found all of the charges? How long had he been out? Would they hear an explosion any moment, or were all the packages safely detached and disarmed? There was no way to know, and he could think of no taunt or question that might lead Dayne to tell him that would not, in the asking, give away too much. He held his silence.
“What am I going to do with you?” Dayne asked. “I wonder who sent you? I wonder why? I wonder what it is you know about our work that would make you risk your life to destroy it?”
“You’ll never know,” Alex spoke through dry, chapping lips.
Dayne’s expression changed for the first time.
The man raised a single eyebrow and something sparkled in his eyes. Then it was gone, the eyebrow settled and Dayne broke eye contact. He brought his hand up and began examining his fingernails, pointedly avoiding looking at his prisoner. He turned to a short bench behind him and, as though seeing it for the first time, stepped over to examine its contents.